"You'll never guess who'se dead."

If there's one thing few people realise about Ireland, it's that you're never too far from death. Death lives in the national consciousness in a way it does in few other parts of the world - and it's not even something most Irish people notice.

And while you might have the Obituaries page for the rich and famous in other parts of the world, the Death notices here are as much a part of life as any other notice. From a page for the deaths in the back of the  newspaper, to the announcements of the recently deceased on the local radio, or website like RIP.ie that broadcast the deaths worldwide. A short memorial line, a remembrance from the family, and the details of the funeral for those who want to go.

I don't know if anything like that exists anywhere else. Maybe it does. It's a wonderful thing.

Me Granny passed Sunday evening at about 9pm. She was 91. In truth she might've been gone for years - dementia had already gotten her and she didn't even know herself anymore. But she stopped taking her food last week and that was that. She passed surrounded by everyone who could make it -- I'd been asked to wait to see if someone needed a pickup but by the time I got word they didn't it was too late.

By chance I drove past her nursing home for work twice, just about 2 weeks ago. I had the thought to sneak in for a quick visit - but I wasn't sure how to explain that and, well, Covid and dementia and all that - she wouldn't have recognised me on my own. Can't do that now anyway.

I'm doing alright, so long as I don't see people's response to the photos I put up on facebook - and so long as I keep going to work for the next few days. We'll all do it soon enough anyway.

Behold, mothafuckas!

Oh. Wait. He ain’t serving prison time for this shit, just having to pay a hundred thousand at most, he already’s a multimillionaire profiting off of the destruction of this nation. And he lost the case by default, refusing to turn over relevant documents, Bannon-style.

Well, uh, hopefully Bannon goes to prison for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena? Hopefully one or the other can be removed from the field. And hopefully that doesn’t make them a martyr to the RevoQtion.

Previous thread is previous

Biden's administration is being just as protectionist and just as dismissive of the concerns of the neighbour to the north as Trump was.

No tl;dr - read it all, please.

I need some input.

The story that I increasingly-laughingly refer to as "my current story" has Sailor Mercury by necessity and almost accidentally learning some magic that has nothing to do with the Silver Millennium. No, I'm not going to say what that magic is - yet - because it doesn't matter for this discussion. What does matter is that it isn't Sailor Mercury's canon magic.

It's specifically Sailor Mercury who's learning it, not Ami Mizuno.

Does Ami get the benefit of Sailor Mercury's knowledge of this new-to-her magic?

The answer to that requires an examination of how magic works in the Metacontinuity... and that requires all of the writers to offer some input.

Is magic something that anybody can learn? (Well, anybody other than the espers of Academy City, who can learn it but would literally kill themselves if they tried to use it.) Or does magic rely on an inborn something (a star seed / linker core / seventh sense / whatever)? If it relies on an inborn something, can that something be implanted? (Guru Clef would say "yes", Doug Sangnoir might say "no".)

Does magic work the same way for everybody, or is it something unique unto one's self?

And if somebody has more than one form, is the magic part of the person or the form that the person is in? (Sailor Mars with her precognitive abilities would say "the person", Sailor Jupiter would say "the form" - so this isn't even consistent within a single ficton.)


tl;dr: Just how the heck does magic work in TNB?


As for the specific case, I want Ami to be able to use this magic... but I want more to be consistent with the other writers here. Would saying "it's knowledge, she has it, she can use it in any form" step on anybody's toes?

Mak Parhar, COVID-19 denier and conspiracy theorist.

He died on Thursday, November 3. Cause of death is not yet known, but...

Quote:In a rambling video from Nov. 3, Parhar said he had recently taken ivermectin, a drug that is falsely touted by anti-vaxxers as an off-label treatment for COVID-19, even though he didn't believe COVID-19 was real.

"... That horse parasite remover? So I did take that and I feel like 40 to 50 per cent better. But I am a little bit down right now," he said in the video.

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, decided to go the route of many other disgraced companies and renamed itself.  You know after lying to Congress, hiding how moderation works from its own internal Oversight Board, enabling a genocide, optimizing its products for addiction, and sharing yo momma's extremist views, they decided that what they really needed was a name change.

Honestly, I haven't really used it much since the last name change, back when it was called The Facebook.  It was pretty cool back then -- essentially a rolodex that people kept updated, and it had a messenger product.  Back then, there was no News Feed, and people who went and repeatedly checked pages of people they knew were essentially considered to be cyberstalkers.  You weren't supposed to know every detail of people's lives.  And then the News Feed came and made it expected behavior for people to stalk and to self-promote, all in the name of user engagement (read: addition).  I joined a few anti-News Feed groups, but obviously it was to no avail.

And then all the bad stuff happened, as they made billions and billions of dollars, becoming the world's second largest advertising company.

So as Facebook is embarking on its new quest to forge the metaverse for profit, I'm opting out, and opting for the real world instead.  I logged in, found a couple years-old messages, and decided there was nothing worth saving.  Account deleted.

(Oh, and the Oculus brand is dead now too, since everything is so Meta.)

link

Pretty straightforward for this one, the song creates a VR headset the size of a set of wrap-around sunglasses, which provide someone who wears them for the duration of the song with all the effects of a day's physical training -- as in, what an expert trainer would recommend that person do in one day, not necessarily a whole day spent working out. Unusually, combining it's effects with "I'll Play For You" creates a second headset rather than focusing this song's effect, though both users will get the same workout session, so if their levels of fitness are significantly different the effectiveness will be lower. Might be useful for the Evangelion step with the twin Angel, though.

Whatever the local currency is, the equivalent of sixteen US Dollars ca 1985 vanishes from the possession of whoever wears the headset. When the song ends, the physical frame of the device may or may not persist, but it's just a pair of photoreactive sunglasses with the magic expended. They're pretty durable and adaptively block harmful intensities of light, though you probably wouldn't want to test that on an atom bomb or anything. It's materials science and chemistry, not magic.

link


The only lyrics anyone may remember might be "Ohhh~~ yeah!" but it's actually got a debate going over whether the sun or the moon is more beautiful. I figure that's enough justification for a mysterious power hog of and effect that Doug isn't sure is actually doing anything at all, just gathering inside his AoE and then releasing it into the sky, like that one Christmas song he played in DW2.

Of course, the amount of energy involved to directly change a significant amount of the atmosphere's temperature and wind direction/strength/etc. is utterly ridiculous even if he adds drawing on a node like he did that time... so instead, this one operates by butterfly wing rules, in that the effect only shows up between a few days and a week later, after the changes he actually makes have time to propagate and cause knock-on effects. The actual result has more to do with his mood and whatever idle thoughts may occur while listening to the song than explicit control, for that matter, and between the power draw and the irregular and obscure nature of the results compared to the cause, Doug's not terribly likely to have gotten much use out of this one, especially with the property damage accidentally whistling up a hurricane could cause.

Still, it's at least nice for adding a little insurance that you'll get at least a few good days during a vacation week, or to try to mitigate big storms if there's sufficient warning that they're forming.

...and yeah, the board got borked because of it when it came back.

But I've got it fixed, and after having this happen twice in two or so years, I now know what I need to (or at least can) do to bring it back.  Which is go into the Admin control panel abd run DB optimization and rebuild/recounts.

Anyway, I hope no one was too badly inconvenienced.