CritterKeeper

Before I saw her chest in the full picture, I thought it was a cameo from Tai in Questionable Content! Perhaps this is just from the security guard's perspective, and she's got magic (mark or wand) which allows her to make clothes disappear?

Susan's mother and the Other Woman don't look very much alike. Either he doesn't really have a "type," or he married Susan's mother for other reasons, and got his "type" on the side. It does look like she's very well-off; it wouldn't be the first time a man married a rich heiress or smart businesswoman for her money. Or, if we want to tie everything in to magic, he could have sensed magic in her mother's bloodline -- the affinity Susan and Diane share likely came from him, but Noriko certainly seemed to think that string magic on both sides should make it almost inevitable her son would have strong magic too, so that could have been what the girls' father was looking for. Or both. Both together would be especially nice for that type of guy. Or he could have genuinely loved Susan's mother, but his need to stray was stronger.... :-(

The "lovebirds" were Elijah and Rick; Ellen and Nanase are referred to in the same word bubble as the Meddlers. (Sounds like a good name for a band!) Mentioning Rhea and Rick but not Elijah tells us she probably has a long-time (family?) relationship to Rick, and Elijah is a relatively new relationship, but I don't think it necessarily means she doesn't like him, just that second-hand relationships don't mean as much to her as her own primary ones do.

Confirms she has a sister, who presumably could have had a child the same age as her own who was put up for adoption as a baby. Busted is the idea that the Other Woman who he had over on that particular occasion was that sister. There could, of course, be another sister who wasn't mentioned, and there could have been any number of Other Women through the years.

I was up very early 12 April 1981. Made drawings of her on the launch pad from the angles they kept showing until launch. I wasn't watching 28 Jan 1986, but I remember exactly where I was when we heard.

Let's see, either a flubbed line or static eating an "a", all's quiet on the Far Eastern front, Betsy and Arlene wave goodbye to their dog-walking job, and the day before the premiere of Doctor Who.

*bats eyes* Shouldn't threatening to neuter punsters get me *off* the list, or at least remove a couple of checkmarks?

TOSTASTNGDS9VOYENT

I didn't turn 21 until more than halfway through my first semester of vet school, and I was definitely not the only one. I was a year younger than typical, so that would mean going straight through from high school to college and doing a four year program, the typical student would be 21 when they graduate. Mrs. Dunkel may well have had to drop out in her senior year.

Huh. Shouldn't finding out something is older than I am make me feel young, not old?

I'm betting that the batting average of those fics is still better than that of an amateur writing and posting a completely original story. Some fans do like fanfic that plays in others' sandboxes, whether the original main characters are there to play with or not.

(Wow, this many stray cats running around the forums, I may have to start a Trap-Neuter-Release program....)

From the linked comic, maybe she got up, ate pancakes, and then headed back to bed for a nap.... pan...cakes....

When Nanase and Sarah had their talk about Elliot, Nanase pointed out that Elliot is 18 and his mom is not yet forty, meaning she had him when she was 20 or 21. This was considered to be very young to be a mother (she had to drop out of college). From this alone, I would put the rest of the parents at mid-forties at the youngest.

TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)

I would assume he came to the party watching Nanase. Whether he already knew about Diane or met her at the party is unknown,

Fare thee well, Willie Wonka! "So much time, so little to do! ....Strike that, reverse it."

I took classes on this at the university level, so while not an expert, I do know what I'm talking about. If your goal is to increase strength, that is, increase the amount of weight you can lift, then the best way to do it is to do a set of 8-10 repetitions for men, 10-12 for women, with weights that are heavy enough that you can just barely complete the set. Do three sets for each exercise. It's also most effective if you give your muscles time to recover in between workouts, exercising an area no more frequently than every other day. That's why serious muscle-builders talk about doing a "leg day" or "upper body day." Mind you, this is for increasing strength. If your goal is to improve your heart and circulation, your endurance, etc. or to lose weight, then you want longer workouts with more sustainable intensity, such as swimming and running. If for some reason you were to do such a workout using weights, you would then do lower weights and more repetitions, but that wouldn't increase your strength very efficiently. Since Sarah is trying to increase the strength of her magical muscles, my mind naturally goes to strength-building types of exercise. What Pandora said about using the spell a few times a day, far enough apart that her own magic had built back up again, seems like working to the point of exhaustion to me. :-)

We know Rhoda already has her Mark, since the boar episode was months ago. We don't know whether Catalina has hers yet or not. This may be a case where asking the right questions could affect what spells Pandora can give. Right now Catalina's mind is likely on her date, and her desires would turn in that direction. If Pandora approaches her correctly, she might be able to get Catalina thinking about cat transformations and how cool they'd be. For some reason, I really want to see Pandora shrink herself down to Rhoda's size before going over to talk to them....

Hmm, I don't think I've ever even heard a story about a dragon encounter which properly gave them the effects of a high Charisma, let alone experienced one myself. I'd expect a DM to start out describing how beautiful the dragon is, how irridescent her scales, how sleek and muscular her body, how melodious her voice....then the dragon would be charming and erudite and have eyes you just want to fall into and get lost in.... I hadn't even realized dragons were supposed to have inhumanly high charisma!

In this world, my next question would be whether IVF was involved in Susan's conception. If so, it would be possible that either an embryo was deliberately split, or that one had divided naturally, and someone else was implanted with Susan's twin, with or without her mother's knowledge. In the EGS world, there is at least one magical means of creating an (almost) exact duplicate of a person, and there is at least one way for someone to move between parallel worlds, perhaps including someone who is a duplicate of a person here. It seems like it would be unusual for such "duplicates" to be so exact a copy, though, given the many versions of Elliot we've seen (or suspected) so far. It seems likely that there are even more means of achieving either one of these besides the ways we've already seen.

I suspect that her frequent summoning of Nase had at least as much effect on her magic capacity as the hammers did, if not considerably more. The hammers, until she awoke, ran off of Jerry's energy, not the caster's energy. There's likely a little use of your own innate energy, but so small that it won't do much as far as strength training. Like doing arm curls with no weights in your hand. Nase, on the other hand, was all her own spell doing the work. From what Pandora told Sarah, the way it seems to work is that Sarah has a small enough personal pool of magical energy that every time she casts her spell, she uses it all up, plus a big bite out of the ambient energy. If she casts it again before her own energy has recharged, then she uses only the ambient energy, and that has no effect on her own powers. If she waits until her own energy has recharged and then casts her spell, it counts as a workout and moves her a little closer to having a big enough pool to Awaken. Each time she casts the spell, she uses up as much of her personal energy as it's possible to do, so there is no better workout for building magic strength than casting her own spell. If she put some of that energy toward ASMA classes instead, she'd either improve at the same speed, or even slow herself down. One thing we don't know for certain is the effect of using her spell when she's not yet at full power. Let's say that her pool is ten points. Is there any difference between Sarah casting her spell, then waiting until she's built back all ten points, then casting it again (using up all ten); and Sarah casting her spell, then casting it again as soon as she has a single point built up, ten times? I suspect that if she's trying to increase the size of her magic pool, then it would be more effective to use up the entire pool of points at once, but I can't think of any evidence to confirm it. I suspect I'm seeing it as an analogy to muscles, where you'll increase mass and strength faster if you train to exhaustion than if you lift half the weight twice as many times. Has anyone put together an EGS RPG yet?

I take it you haven't seen any of the commercials for the new Pete's Dragon yet?

I remember accidentally hitting the REC button instead of just PLAY and erasing a few seconds in the middle of a favorite song. It was something recorded live, by an obscure performer, and thus kinda difficult to replace. :-(

I'm highly suspicious that Dan didn't give us his favorite "Oh, snap!" graphic here.... Thanks to Nick at Night, you don't have to be that old to know the old black and white shows. And now we've got Antenna and all these other channels doing the same thing. No show will ever be off the air again, unless the music rights are snarled enough....