CritterKeeper

Nanase and Ellen use their magic enough everyday that being burned out after using the Guardian form might even mean they used less magic overall, taking Guardian form briefly and then using no magic after, than they would have if they'd just kept using magic normally instead. If making a corporial fairydoll with permanence is such a powerful spell, maybe Nanase could chew up a good-sized portion of the magic build-up too. And then open a doll shop to sell all the fairydolls she'd be left with. She'd just have to figure out who to manifest a fairydoll in the presence of, keep them from seeing her, and then fly each doll to the shop before deactivating it and moving on to the next target. ;-)

I've been doubting the "crazy" part for a while now. Not that she's completely sane, but really, no one is, and I'm starting to think she's no more crazy than anyone else in this world. Perhaps Immortals going insane is frequent but not inevitable when they pass 200 years. Perhaps she's held onto her sanity by holding on to the love of her family, and Immortals usually have to reset because they don't have mortal loves and children very often. Or maybe there's just a certain personality type that copes with immortality better than typical. I'll also note that Jerry didn't seem to show any sign of insanity, even though he admitted he was past 200 before his reset.

Again, Pandora said that too-frequent casting wouldn't do much to expand her power, not that it wouldn't do anything! This implied that there is some small effect. Only question is, how small?

Well, this is an area where my "building muscles" analogy may break down. Pandora said that using the spell without enough break between castings wouldn't do much, not anything, so it might be that even when the environmental magic does 98% of the work, Sarah stll gets a 2% workout. (Or 99.9% vs 0.1%, whatever you think is appropriate.) So, normally she would want to cast the spell well-spaced to exercise her full capacity. But, if Sarah were to cast the spell a hundred times, or a thousand, all those small percentages could add up to expanding her capacity. Hmm, perhaps there is a muscle analogy -- physical therapy often uses "passive range of motion" exercises to keep temporarily paralyzed or weakened muscles from deteriorating from disuse. Atrophy sets in if muscles aren't used. Perhaps Sarah's magic is like a limb that she can't use normally, but PROM exercises would stimulate her "magic muscles" just enough to help them start working more easily and effectively on their own. Not a perfect analogy, but it kinda works. :-) Either way, I suspect Pandora will promise Sarah she'll help her Awaken if at all possible once the job is done. Whether that involves power sources like the gauntlet or amulet, or helping her find pockets of magic to exploit ("puddles" left behind, if you will), or somehow directly boosting her power, I don't know. Pandora may need to provide such a boost in order to get the job done in the first place, depending on whether some small ignition spark of Sarah's innate magic is needed to start casting the spell even with the huge environmental reservoir to do the real work. I'm betting half my quatloos that Sarah ends up with magic in the end, one way or another. :-D

I love this sequence too! Forget the April Fools gang, who we've never seen again anyway, I want to see this group again. :-) I do find it slightly jarring that Tedd becomes Tess, a name we see as female, but Sarah stays Sarah. There should be some male name that's close to Sarah. Sean, perhaps? Harry sounds closer but doesn't look much like Sarah.

So if Sarah does manage to build up her personal magic capacity enough to be able to cast that spell on her own, she'll be quite powerful as magic users go! Makes me wonder what spells she might get if she Awakens. Hmm, Pandora did say that usually Sarah would get enough magic to cast the spell herself before Awakening, but that she might not do things in that order. Perhaps that was setting up the idea that, at the end of chomping up the excess magic, Sarah will have built up enough magic to Awaken, even though she won't be able to cast that particular spell until she builds up her magic further by casting whatever new spell she gets when she Awakens.

Well, obviously at some point in the recent past, Pandora gave at least one dam.... What I'm wondering is, why did Sarah initially call Elliot instead of Tedd or Grace? Tedd especially seems like the one to call about big important magic events and questions, and she's spent a lot of time with both of them in highly sensitive situations, up to and including Friday night! Was it fear of them being overheard by Tedd's dad? Or does Elliot also have some role to play in this?

What web pages have you bookmarked lately? Stuff you think will be useful later, things that made you laugh or think (or both), comics you intend to archive-trawl later, whatever! Here's one I intend to find the time to go visit: http://chicagomodelcity.org And here's one that matched up perfectly with my cat's antics (see Happy thread): http://www.gocomics.com/frazz/2009/10/11

Like, say, the Hammer Queen? ;-)

Vocabulary word fo the day: Anasyrma

The local public radio station gives thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fairly regularly. Now, I'm not so juvenile as to find that name amusing on its own, but every time I hear it, I am reminded of fond memories of the days of newsgroups, reading rec.arts.startrek. A guy who'd post there was named Brian Woodcock, and his .sig file at the end of each post declared, "Yes, splinterlips, that *is* my real name!"

Political ads. 'Nuff said.

Is it just me, or does Pandora seem a little older here than she was in Question Mark? Not quite as old as the teenager form The Emissary spoke with, but definitely older than the tantrum-thrower in the same conversation. So she's behaving in a bit more mature manner, and it shows, even though she's trying to be in the same form as Sarah saw her before.

Yeah, my impression from Jerry was that he'd set up the hammers when he was much younger, so they'd been in effect for at least a century. Which probably matches their appearance in animated works.... ;-)

Nanase had enough power from her ASMA training that Les Immortals wee able to Awaken her right away. Nanase was the best in the school, with Elliot a close second, and Justin third. It's not impossible that Justin was almost powerful enough to Awaken directly when Pandora found him, and only needed to be Marked a very short time before he built up enough additional energy for Pandora to Awaken him.

I got the food tree at PetCo, and the brand name is apparently "catit" (printed with "cat" darker like that, presumably because someone noticed the mammalian body part people might read the name as including otherwise). Silly kitty tends to look at the hand that brought the food to the tree, instead of the tree itself, for what seems like a ridiculously long time, but maybe she just wants me to pet her more than she wants food?

From what we've seen of Edward's reactions, he may honestly be afraid that being a girl so much is bad for Tedd. We're a definite minority in even knowing of the concept of gender fluidity, and a great many otherwise well-educated adults have no idea gender dysphoria is a thing. Maybe, if Grace can find a way to introduce the concepts in a way that doesn't seem like an excuse or justification to him (worried parents tend to jump to the conclusions they fear the most and then be very difficult to redirect), then he'll realize just how lucky Tedd was to have access to the TFG. Realizing how hurtful his attitudes have been to Tedd will likely take longer, and be harder to accept.

Add Tom Baker to the cast -- I had somehow managed to forget, for a moment, what a sonorous, expressive voice that man has!

Since my little girl-cat is an only child while the pup and I are gone during the day, I've been trying to find ways to entertain her and keep her from getting bored and lonely. Today I bought her a tower which is about a foot high, with a narrow slot at the top, three levels, standing on a central post attached to a round tray underneath. Each level has a series of holes around the outside, and a series of holes in the floor. The holes in the side are big enough to fit a paw, but not a head or mouth. Put kibble in the opening at the top, and kitty has to reach in and either fish out kibble one at a time, or push them around until they fall through a hole to the next level, and repeat that for two more levels until it drops into the tray below. She had a blast! Took her maybe twenty minutes to get ahold of every piece of kibble. She's the one who was diabetic and is currently in remission, so I'm very strict about only feeding her Purina's prescription diet DM so she'll stay in remission. The DM kibble are especially small and round, but the middle layer can be adjusted to have smaller holes and I set it to the smallest option. She loves her canned food, but is obsessed with dry kibble, so this is an especially wonderful treat for her. Kibble is higher carb than canned, so I think I'll still feed her canned in the evening, but this seems like a good way to entertain her when I leave for work! And like any good small child at Christmas, she spent even more time playing on and in the box it came in than with the toy itself.... :-D

That's what I tell my clients all the time. My patients are under anesthesia for their dentals, and the anesthesia is a much bigger part of the cost than a routine dental is, so if we find a problem, it's usually better to fix it right then than to have to re-anesthetize at another time, both health-wise and cost-wise.

Or, fanvids can just find interesting locations to shoot and skip the chroma key. It all depends on what sort of story you're telling. The BBC isn't the only place you can find old quarries.... I suspect an awful lot of people have gotten used to mp3 played over ear buds, and don't really notice sound quality so much unless their attention is called to it.

I saw one trailer that wasn't very funny, and one that was much more intriguing. I never saw any trailers that said you had to go see this movie in any way that was any different from every other movie trailer. And, like you, I thought it was a good movie. Having gone back and watched the original shortly beforehand, I thought if anything it fixed a lot of the flaws in the original. I wouldn't say it surpassed it, but it did it justice and updated the ideas and circumstances for the modern era. (It was really weird and jarring to see the "good guys" smoking so much everywhere, for example, and the casual mysogyny was something you couldn't do and wouldn't want to do nowadays).

Yup, but that was the *first* time they almost lost the whole movie. The second time, it was a deliberate choice to throw out almost everything they'd done, rewrite the script, create new characters (like the dog), and redo everything, when they had a hard deadline that meant they had to have it done in nine months. Kinda sad, in a way, that in the end the stuff they'd worked so hard to recover got tossed soon after, but everyone agreed it was a much better movie in the end, and they wanted to save their friends (Woody et al), the franchise, and the company. But we weren't talking about fans creating an entire Pixar-quality feature-length all-animated movie. What I said was, that if Pixar could do that much in nine months, then a dedicated group of fans should be able to put together some high-quality special effects for a fanvid in a reasonable, do-able amount of time. Whether that's a short, a fake commercial, a music video, or a fan-recast new episode, that's still going to be mostly regular filming, with a relatively small amount of F/X work added on afterwards.

Hmm, maybe the fact that Tedd's first-level default girl form is so androgynous will be a good thing for 'em. If Tedd were to switch right now, when Edward wasn't paying attention, change blindness might keep him from noticing for a while, if not miss it entirely.

I just read a fascinating article about when the people making Toy Story 2 lost about 90% of their work due to an erroneous computer command. It mentioned that all of their files for the entire movie were about 10GB. You can fit that on the cheapest USB flash drive these days! Everyone put in massive overtime to try to save the film, speaking of doing it for the sake of the characters they'd come to love. Not only that, but after they'd found a way to recover their work, and finished the movie, the powers that be watched it....and decided that it wasn't good enough, and they had to rewrite the script and basically do the entire movie over again, in about nine months. I have to think that if a professional company can do that entire movie in nine months, a group of (semi-obsessive?) dedicated fans could put together some pretty darn good effects for a fanvid within a reasonable time. And if all the files for making the entire theatrical movie were only 10 gigs, then that's well within the size system that fans could afford. Processing power is certainly a separate issue, but given how long ago that movie was made, I suspect modern desktops could match them, if not greatly exceed them, Ah, if only we'd had actual special effects when I played Peri in Illinois Smith and the TARDIS Of Doom!