CritterKeeper

I'm just waiting for the first time Sydney tries to put a gold star on Max's wrist communicator. C'mon, you know it's inevitable now. Only question is whether she'll sneak it on, or try to do it openly. And, I suppose, how many other team members will be sporting gold stars by then....

Having read the summary of the idea, I have to agree. Humans have a basic need for contact, especially as they mature. A planet where every human lived their whole life without contact with another human would be a planet of severely deranged people who would likely be very difficult for the robots to keep alive long enough for another generation, even with artificial help. My mom ends up an officer in just about every club she joins, simply because no one else is willing to step up and do the work required. Same thing happened with my townhouse association; I went to a few meetings, and then they needed to fill a vacancy and I didn't say no. The world is run by the people who bother to show up, and they're managed by the people who are willing to step up and put in the work to do so. Most of the time they're good people just trying to make things better; the trouble comes when someone with an ulterior motive decides to get involved. Most of the time, seems like the problem is, again, finding someone else who can do and is willing to do the hard work. If you impeach someone, who will take their place? If you don't like your local candidate, who else could you vote for? Do they have the needed experience, and are they willing to do the job? Most of the time, the people who would be willing to do the job and are qualified to do it, are already doing a similar job.

Hmm, gets me wondering how a time traveler could save all those civilizations. Vaccinate everyone on the east coast where the Europeans first arrived? The first European attempts at settling generally either set up trade on equal terms (or even took what was basically charity), "went native" and joined the pre-existing culture, or were wiped out if they made trouble. Keeping those civilizations strong long enough to set up relations as equals might delay things a little while, but the diseases would still be out there. Even if the entire continent were vaccinated, that would only protect that current generation. Even if they'd known the technology to make their own vaccines, they'd need raw materials to work with, which would mean risking exposure to the diseases. Teaching them epidemiology alone would, as you said, still result in a horrific death toll, especially since we're talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of independent nations and confederations, many of them mobile to one degree or another. If your hunting frounds and crops for the next season are in an area disease has been occurring, do you choose to starve instead of sicken? Perhaps the best way to save what we now call the Americas would have been to help the Europeans defeat the key diseases before ever crossing the ocean. If a time traveler had access to the sort of technology that could vaccinate an entire continent, doing so in Europe might bring the diseases to extinction before they had a chance to spread further. Of course, who knows what trouble Europeans would have caused if they'd been healthier and more numerous...

Good to see she's armed with googly-eyes full-time now, considering how well they worked in combat before!

And now we know why (from a Doyleist perspective) Sarah isn't here -- if she was, Pandora would likely be watching Sarah, and thus find Voltaire and turn it into an Immortal battle. Gotta keep the Main Eight front and center! So, a whole weekend of guessing what Voltaire has to say. Not quite a much fun as an entire summer picturing what could happen after Riker orders Worf to fire, but should be fun! How's this....Voltaire will blithely reassure them he doesn't want to kill Elliot any more, and then go on to explain at least somewhat what Pandora is up to, and the fact that she's been trying to make Magic well-known and available to everyone. He'll have reasons why this would be Bad For Everyone, which Edward will likely agree with, and try to talk them all into helping him foil Pandora's evil schemes. We may find out whether Edward knows the "creepy little girl" is Adrian's mother. Personally, I'd rather he find out with Adrian present, to see both their reactions play off each other. Voltaire's explanation of why he wanted to kill Elliot should be interesting. Either the Main Crew finally learn about Magus's existence (and are Les Immortals still watching Elliot, and will that remind them why?), or he'll invent something, likely something that casts Pandora in as bad a light as possible.

How so? "Grok" comes from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, not Trek.

Knowing, intellectually, that one or more Immortals could be watching you and listening to you at any time, is one thing, but you don't really grok it until something like this happens. Or one showing up in your bedroom....

Speak for yourself! If we don't want peers then why do we tend to gather in groups with people who are good at and enjoy the same things we do? Why would someone smart go out of their way to join Mensa to find others equally smart and to be in a Gathering where they are completely ordinary, instead of just joining a more conventional group where they could always be the smartest person in the room? Why would so many people have fought so hard, suffered and sacrificed and died, in order to free slaves and end Jim Crow, even though every Freedom Ride bus was half-filled with people who were white and thus would only lose relative status by your theory? Why would we have expressions like "A rising tide lifts all boats" and have the concept that society is not a Zero Sum Game? I'm glad I live in my world and not the one you describe, which would be a very depressing place.

But Dan said it would take extreme effort for Grace to be able to learn to use Earth magic. She can't even use the watches, which even Tedd and pre-Mark Sarah can do. For most practical purposes, Grace doesn't have any Earth magic at all, so if it's Earth magic the aberrations feed on, she's no good to them. They probably wouldn't even try, but whether they did or not, hopefully they's comment on her, the same way Vampider commented on Diane being a potential vampire hunter.

But that's exactly what I was saying -- the interactions with individuals tend to follow the rules, and sometimes the things that happen at those individual interactions seem to be quite counter to the goal of keeping the existence of magic a secret to most. It's like there's a central Will of Magic that has those goals, but the way that Magic in general interacts with individuals is almost completely separate from the Will, and they can sometimes be working at cross-purposes. Hmm, picture a big web shop like ThinkGeek. There are a few people running things, but most of what happens on the customer side is automatic, whether it's done by the computers they order through or the people packing and shipping the goods. People will order stuff that suits them, and algorithms may suggest that if you bought a TARDIS Towel then you might also like a River Song's Sonic Screwdriver. If the people in charge don't like the way things are going, there are only so many things they can do to change how their customers behave or what they buy. If all else fails, they can take down the site and redesign it.

From what I've seen and heard of the world, having at least two political parties beats the heck out of having only one....but Ithink pursuing this line of thought any further would require moving the discussion to the Politics thread.

Which could also apply to Grace. We'll have to see what happens the first time Grace meets an aberration.

Magic itself seems to be very accomodating, rather eager-to-please. Nanase is keeping secrets, so Magic gives her sneaky type spells. Elliot isn't happy with having to turn into a girl, so Magic keeps making the girl-forms cooler and cooler, all the way up to genuine superpowers, trying to make him happy. Susan was the "Hammer Queen" so when the general women-hammering-sexists spell disappears, the first spell she gets is to give her back the hammers; when she winds up using her fairydoll spell much more often, Magic expands on it for her. It's possible that Magic interacts with individuals in a more simplistic or automatic way, a sort of autopilot that may even sometimes be contrary to the interests of the overall, more intellectual Will Of Magic. A superheroine isn't exactly discreet, nor is a swarm of fairydolls.

Yup, there's growing evidence that the previous inhabitants of the Americas were far, far more numerous, sophisticated, and technological than they've been given credit for. The travelers on the Mayflower found a deserted town and carefully managed orchards waiting for them, left behind when all but one of the inhabitants dies in a plague which had swept the coast. Europeans remarked on how easily they could move through the forests, never considering that it was because they weren't wild places, but closer to orchards and parks. Even Lewis and Clark found that devastating plagues had beaten them to most of the places they explored. (The linked article is long, but worth it!)

As opposed to someone like Shatner, who failed to properly adapt his stage training to television, but eventually just made the resulting overblown, over-dramatic delivery his trademark, and let the writers tailor the roles to it.

/me waggles finger at mlooney for slacking off. /me takes the List from mlooney, adds several marks. /me gets out the gold star stickers and puts a couple on. /me puts the List back in mlooney's hands.

You guys are doing that thing where you make me feel young and old at the same time again. Duran Duran, a boy band? He's not a boy band, he's just a boy. Well, sure, the generals know that an army marches on its stomach, they have to get foods the troops will eat and be nourished by.

When did this happen? Last I heard from her, she was still making fun of the H/H shippers who'd missed/ignored her "anvil-sized hints!"

Cool! I knew about the polished cover, but didn't know there were paintings in it. Do we know *what* the paintings were?

Adrian has theorized that Noah was manipulated to be at the dojo, possibly in as attempt to get him killed. So Elliot might not have been the only target of assassination that day.

What video is it going to? It's that simple. If I can't click the link to see what video it is, then any subsequent comments on it are completely out of context and make no sense.

Could you please give some sort of identification to that link? People may be reading at work, or on a browser that can't play the clip, or (like me) on a muted device (in my case permanently due to damage near the volume button). Not everyone can or wants to play every unidentified link. Thanks!

Sign in a shop: "Unattended children will be given espresso and a free puppy"

Reminds me of when the Doctor asked Donna to join him in his travels. He said he wanted a mate, as in a friend or a buddy; she thought he'd said he wanted to mate, which was kind of the exact opposite of what he'd been saying. Took a minute to straighten out that confusion. :-) Hmm, perhaps DGB could get that clip to go viral as a Reply to any videos of Voltaire's "potential mate" line.

Oh, and by the way, please don't edit the quotes of other posters to insert links that weren't there before. If you want to add a reference, please do it in your own post.