Don Edwards

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...
 

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...
 

Trying to reconstruct something I posted before the forum crash... the following is said somewhere in Europe, in some language possibly beginning with the letter F...
 

At one point in the Illuminatus! trilogy, a guy is on LSD and watching everyone around him change color. Not just normal human skin colors either. It occurs to him that a lot of societal problems would go away if people DID change color.
Of course, this wasn't an original concept.
And it was revisited somewhat more recently, as well.

*grabs notebook from /me*
*flips to the page for TheOldHack*
*err, make that pages*
*um...*
*Volume what?!?*
*goes to shelves, finds most recent volume*
*adds a note, an underline, and a little cat-face with cross eyebrows*

Yep, #32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

Yep, #32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

Are they at least making you work the graveyard shift? You do have a lot of practice with ancient tombs.

The thing is, Tedd is currently actually helping to keep magic as secret as is feasible.
Granted, that isn't very secret... but it's more secret than would be likely to occur with a major reset.
Now maybe Tedd will turn around and say "Arthur! Let's suggest tweaks to make our current magic system less dangerous? I'll start - give ordinary people significant resistance!"

Yep, #32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

I just looked under Canada, and there it was!

"you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave"...
Oh sorry, that's the competing hotel chain.

You see, this particular forum works in the following way. You take one or several frames from the EGS comic, possibly rearranging their order, and replace the text in the speech balloons with some sort of humorous meme or comment on life or the comic...
...why are you all looking at me like that?

And that's assuming they can't use the internet to teach globally, without any need to travel.
Khan Academy: Introduction to Magic (not really, darnit)

That is taking it somewhat too far. My belief in Murphy's Law is not in a religious sense but rather in the engineer's sense. "I need to eliminate as many ways this can conceivably go wrong as possible. If I don't, someone will someday stumble on the flaw in my design and will all too likely do so in a very painful and possibly terminal way." Admittedly I am not in a position where carelessness of mine is likely to hurt a large number of people but as a rule of thumb it still strikes me as attractive -- the more careful I am, the less likely I am to get myself or people around me into trouble.
As an aside, this was an important part of my father's work before he retired. He is a doctor specialising in clinical chemistry and one of his particular interests is to devise an international standard for such work which includes designing procedures so they are as safe and error-proofed as possible. As an example, back when I was a paramedic in the Army I was supposed to deal with pairs of blood samples from three hundred soldiers. This procedure was... not very well thought out. We had six hundred test tubes, had to fill two of them with blood samples from each soldier, and we did not get the sample labels until after we were finished drawing the blood. In other words, I sat there with six hundred labels to fit on six hundred test tubes full of blood and had to hope like Hell that the test tubes had been placed in the grids in the right order in both trays -- yes, to maximize confusion each pair of test tubes were placed in different trays in what was optimistically hoped to be the matching position on both trays. Oh yes, and if a mistake happened? Clearly it would be the fault of the paramedic doing the work.
After I had related this tale to Dad, he said that this was exactly the sort of disastrous lack of organisation he and his colleagues were striving to do away with. A proper procedure, he stated, would have all the test tubes labeled with the name and number of each soldier and before you tapped the blood into the test tubes you showed them to the donor and asked them if the label matched their identity. Both vials. And so in one fell swoop you eliminate a huge number of potential errors from the process. Very dangerous errors, too. I am sure I don't need to give examples of possible bad consequences.
That is what paying one's dues to Murphy means. It doesn't mean a nihilistic everything-will-go-wrong-anyway attitude. It means that smart designs are less likely to lead to avoidable human mistakes.

Nevertheless. If you start developing an urge to bite people, don't wait. Head straight for the nearest PetSmart outlet and buy a doggie chew toy you can safely take any unwanted masticative desires out on.
(It could have its upsides, though. If you do turn into a werewolf, CritterKeeper will finally be legally allowed to assist you. Part of the time, anyway.)

He should switch rooms each time; then he'll have a better chance of winning a car to get out.

The outer ear structure in humans is an annoying set of appendages.
They really aren't all that attractive on their own.
You still need to turn your head to locate the source of most sounds.
They can only hinder human attempts at running or swimming.
And unless you are Alfred E Newman, Barak Obama, or Prince Charles, they are useless for human powered flight.

And Hilbert's Hotel, while mathematically perfect, doesn't rate high for customer satisfaction - making all the already-checked-in guests move to another room every time a bus arrives...

Google Maps also says it's 715 miles from Naperville To Peculiar, MO.

We have a similar expression in Danish, 'myldretid', or directly translated, 'throng time' or 'crowded time.'
What is hilarious is that the Danish verb in question is an old relative of 'to mill' (as in 'milling about'), so I guess it also translates into 'Miller time.'

It is the time of the day where traffic moves the slowest and they call it rush hour. *scratches head*

And Hilbert's Hotel, while mathematically perfect, doesn't rate high for customer satisfaction - making all the already-checked-in guests move to another room every time a bus arrives...

And Hilbert's Hotel, while mathematically perfect, doesn't rate high for customer satisfaction - making all the already-checked-in guests move to another room every time a bus arrives...

World of Darkness is quite possibly the best game system for ease of inverting. My daughter was in the habit of picking a Flaw and designing a character in such a way that it was an Advantage - and she made up great backstories for them. My shtick was to twist the standard assumptions about various sorts of characters - for a while I played a pantheistic member of the Celestial Chorus, and I was designing a quantum-physics-based Dreamspeaker when for various reasons we dropped out of the LARP group.
(Interestingly, the March 2018 issue of Discover magazine has an article about the possible quantum basis of consciousness that fits perfectly with one of the two possible paradigms I came up with for a Quantum Dreamspeaker. And definitely doesn't contradict the other one.)
Not that other game systems can't be inverted. In 4E D&D, I figured out that if you want to build a really good, powerful Barbarian, the character class you should pick is Cleric... and I also built a semi-pacifist Wizard. (Semi-pacifist in that there's a geas on him against doing damage to any person with magic. But he does use a staff, and know show to thump heads with it.)