• Announcements

    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Don Edwards

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    2,273

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    64

Posts posted by Don Edwards

  1. Posted

    Heh. In one of my stories, a weredog (Great Pyrenees) helped a woman through a PTSD attack by jumping onto her lap and snuggling her, then after he climbed down he observed that "Charles Schulz got at least one thing right." The comment went unexplained.

     

  2. Posted

    Same things happen in webcomics. In Twokinds an anonymous and unimportant female tiger among a crowd of tigers did something mildly interesting and got dubbed "Tigress #37" in the forum. She's now the daughter of the feline delegation's leader.

    And how do we know that wasn't the plan to begin with?

    Well, there's her now-canon name... Therie Sah-Van.

  3. Posted

    1 hour ago, mlooney said:

    If we had a multiparty system like most countries do we might get more rational leaders.  I said might, not would.

    Yeah, looking at Canada and Britain lately, I'm skeptical.

    And with the two-party system, I've often wondered if the two parties were competing to see which could pick the worst candidate.

    Could be worse, though - we could have a one-party system. (With two parties, one of them will pick the SECOND worst, and that candidate will sometimes win.)

  4. Posted

    On 11/13/2022 at 3:45 PM, mlooney said:

    Food Theory shows that my way of making black tea is correct. With Science!

     

    Rather disappointing.

    1) only one variety of tea tested (I'm a bit of a tea snob: my regular tea is pu'erh, currently a brick from the 2008 harvest, but for special occasions I have a brick from the 1968 harvest)

    2) their time test used only 1, 3, and 5 minutes, and then decided that 3 minutes is optimal - without testing any even or non-integer number of minutes

    3) no second-cup time tests (I expect a minimum of 3 good cups from a teaspoon of pu'erh leaves; I assure you that for the second cup, a minute of steeping is much longer than necessary)

    ----

    Here's why not to boil your water in the mug, in the microwave - which they briefly touched on but didn't explain: the inside surface of the glass, china, or glazed ceramic mug is too smooth. The water can super-heat - above boiling - because there are no microscopic irregularities for the vapor bubbles to start forming on. Then you drop in some sweetener or a teabag, or otherwise bring that water into contact with something not as smooth as glass, and it starts boiling everywhere all at once - which bears a passable resemblance to an explosion, and throws above-boiling-hot water in all directions.

  8. Posted

    1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

    So the manager of my gym asks if I had any questions.  I ask him "Heat Death or Big Rip?" He had no idea what I was talking about.

    Nothing is going to increase to infinity in a finite amount of time.

    However, it may increase to close enough to infinity that the difference doesn't matter to anyone (or, in this case, there can't be anyone for it to matter to).

    I occasionally use the term "functionally infinite" - meaning yeah, there's a finite limit to that, but you're never going to hit that finite limit because you'll hit this other finite limit much, much sooner.

  10. Posted

    1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    OTOH my ex and I both had clearances and did not discuss classified, so maybe, but then again, we are exs (I don't attribute our breakup to that).

    I certainly wouldn't. You each had work-related secrets you weren't supposed to discuss, and you each knew that the other had such secrets. Presumably you respected each other's situation enough to not share and not pry.

    While I have no data on the subject, I would be unsurprised if it turned out that such couples are a bit more stable than average.

    (On the other hand, there is no shortage of NON-work-related stuff that can eff up a marriage.)

  20. Posted

    1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

    "DU rounds are the best current solid shot rounds." - I'm not sure you couldn't design a somewhat better one, albeit much more expensive and/or hazardous to handle.

    Osmium rounds. Price negotiations for osmium (it isn't a regularly-traded commodity) currently start at US$400 per troy ounce. Osmium is the densest naturally-occurring element, at 22.59 grams per cubic centimeter. (Depleted uranium is only 19.1 g/cm3 and costs circa $26 per ounce, while lead is merely 11. 34 g/cm3 and costs roughly a dollar a pound when purchased in ton lots.) It's also one of the rarest natural and non-radioactive elements in the earth's crust.

    Aside: while looking for that info, I happened across a 2017 article giving info on the world's 25 strongest militaries.

    Russia was #2.

    Ukraine was not on the list.

    Might need an update.

  21. Posted

    6 hours ago, ijuin said:

    There are different degrees of immortality. Absolute eternal existence would likely drive a human insane, especially if that means literally outliving the heat death of the universe.

    On the other hand, the “no natural decline with aging” kind of immortality could be good—you stay healthy indefinitely, even though mundane injury could still kill you.

    I vaguely remember a story, I think it was in a comic book, where Merlin (of Arthurian legend) had been granted eternal life... but not eternal youth. Several centuries old, basically all his weight-bearing joints were shot.

    Then there's this other story, where a wannabe-immortal wannabe-world-dictator summoned one of the Fates for a consultation...

    Quote

    "I have plans to be immortal- will they succeed? I need to know if I am to live forever,"

    Thymbris went through her bolt of threads to find the one connected to he who was once supreme ruler of Kings- "... you have been busy... and destructive... my hands are soiled from touching your thread... have you no remorse for those who you destroy?"

    "There is only power and those who seek it- all else is nothing... now, will I succeed or not?"

    "I have heard that reasoning before, and never has good come of it. You think yourself wiser than the one who made you?"

    "ANSWER MY QUESTION! YOUR ARE BOUND TO DO SO!"

    "I am truly bound to help you, to turn you from your path. You seek that which is worse than death for yourself, but are too blind to understand it. Very well, on your head be it- You will indeed become immortal. You will never cross the Styx with Charon, nor know the company of those departed."

    "GOOD! Your verbal dancing may come to an end- go back from whence you came,"

    She disappeared before she could add, "You shall wish for death before the Winter Solstice, and crave it through eternity..."

    (He was later turned into a ceramic statue and, a day or two before the Solstice, dropped into the Marianas Trench.)

  23. Posted

    4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    I am having trouble seeing any scenario in which the conscript forces, large numbers notwithstanding, is headed for anything but disaster

    Well, it's reported that they did win their first big battle...

    ...that being, the regular-army troops demanded that the conscripts hand over all the personal possessions they brought with them (apparently a traditional thing in that military), and the much more numerous conscripts beat the tar out of them.

    The Old Hack reacted to this

  24. Posted

    5 hours ago, mlooney said:

    I have leg craps and I just banged the ever loving fuck out of my right knee on the desk.

    I know that feeling. Wednesday morning I was fighting with a water hose and two rocks decided to join the fray. One tripped me; the other bashed me in the thigh really hard. I might have had a few craps in the resulting expletives. (Keeping track of what I said was not on the priority list.) It hurt enough that at the supermarket yesterday, I chose to use one of their powered carts. And if we went to a similarly large store today, I might still use one. Oddly enough, the bruising and swelling were both just barely visible at all, even though it's still quite tender in an area a bit larger than the palm of my hand.

    (I still defeated the hose though.)