"Raining Horses", by Corb Lund, lyrics by Corb Lund and Jaida Dreyer, from the album Agricultural Tragic (released by New West Records), copyright 2020.

The earliest that Doug would have been able to get a copy of this song would be in MegaTokyo, when he had first access to music up to the 2030s. Which means he'd just come from Valdemar, and the association between horses and Companions was still fresh in his subconscious. Push the song a bit, and ... mares in the area start foaling Companions, maybe?

EDIT: Alternately, push a bit a different way, to ignore the verses and concentrate on the chorus. You get a horse, and you get a horse, and you get a horse, and you get a horse, and you get a horse ... everybody gets a horse!

No, this isn't a Politics thread.

Nearly half of Canadians miss high school literacy grade — and that's bad for economy

Quote:Nearly half of Canada's population has a big roadblock ahead of them when it comes to post-pandemic economic recovery — and it's not the novel coronavirus but a fundamental set of skills for daily life.

Poor reading and writing skills make up a literacy gap in Canada with consequences for both democracy and the economy. Experts say the gap is due in part to an abundance of jobs in the past that do not require the daily use of reading comprehension and information synthesis skills.

In short, literacy is not like riding a bike. It takes practice to retain those skills, and Canada's economy does not provide the opportunity to do that for many workers.

Despite relatively high education rates, an analysis of international assessments by Statistics Canada in 2013 showed that more than one in six adult Canadians fell short of passing the most basic set of literacy tests.

I know I'm going to write something set on February 14, 2017, and I figured "why not open it up to everybody else?" So... planning for "Valentine's Day in Another World"

Unlike Halloween in Another World, I'm not thinking of this as being a massive crossover. Valentine's Day is a day for couples, after all.

But we now have a displacee-run jewellery store, and there were a few characters who arrived already as couples but not yet married to each other. They're in a strange world where they can read stories about themselves - maybe it's time to either throw a monkey-wrench into those stories or hurry those stories along. And the relationships that are strong enough to be written about are strong enough to make official, right? (Usually yes, but in a few cases maybe not.)

And even if there isn't an official relationship present in canon, people have been forming new relationships in the Metacontinuity - maybe some of those relationships could become romantic. Assuming, of course, that both people in the relationship want to take it in that direction. (We might not have Nadesico in the Metacontinuity - yet - but the Hikaru/Seiya relationship there shows what can happen when only one person wants to take their relationship to a new level.)

So: Open call for scenes of people progressing their relationships to new levels, ending their relationships, or wishing they were in relationships, with OSA-P being a place to purchase jewellery that might be required. I could do this as a short-short showing only the characters at Blossom, but it would be a waste to leave out other couples who might be in the same situation.

Every time there's a new government in Canada* or there's a major event in the world, the Prime Minister writes mandate letters to the members of Cabinet, setting out in high level what they're expected to do.

Justin Trudeau has posted these mandate letters online.

Does anybody else do this? Or is Canada the only country that makes public the list of what each cabinet member is expected to do?


--
* Continuity of legitimacy of power in Canada is provided by the Head of State, not the Head of Government.

(01-13-2021, 10:11 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Rajvik has contacted me. He's okay, but he's basically leaving the forums for political reasons. He notes that yes, he can still be found on SB and SV.

At Bob's request, I'm putting up a separate thread for This brand spankin' new fanfic, so it doesn't clutter another thread.

Basically, Urd becomes Ranma's divine patron of sorts. She sends him on minor errands, meddles with his love life, etc. It's funny so far. At least the first two chapters are, the third is more basic setup of how the whole shtick is supposed to work plus Urd passing moral judgement on Ranma's inadvertent harem situation. She's got all the funny dialogue so far. I need to tweak that.

Things I'd like to do:
- Have Ranma call Hild 'Hot Mom Satan' or something like that
- Of course Hild actually puts that on her throne room’s door in a little brass plate
- Bounce Ranma off of a pubertastic Skuld newly obsessed with heavy weaponry
- Render Lind a psychotic hoo-rah drill sergeant, maybe make a full metal jacket reference or two
- But play Belldandy absolutely straight
- VALKYRIE HARDSUITS 
- Get Peorth in there somewhere
- Make Keiichi a minor god of Japanese Motorcycles
- Maybe have Sayoko kidnap him to build the Mishima Group the Best Motorcycles Ever No Seriously
-And then somehow her Mishima Group is the same as the Nuku Nuku Mishima group - or would it be funnier if they were two separate groups? 
- so of course Ranma meets Nuku Nuku and she falls in love with him because of course she does
- Somehow involve Sailor Moon and company, have Urd and Setsuna time-travel fight, which is actually a catfight in the time of the dinosaurs or something stupid like that
- Urd hooks up Ranma with a few lonely girls who may actually be said Senshi (Ami and Makoto?) and this makes his harem problems even worse
- Blow up the status quo of the Ranma gals
- Maybe have Mara give them all wishes to set them against each other
- Have Mara reveal her undying love for Urd - not sure how she’d react
- Elevate Kodachi to the status of Actual Romantic Competition
- Prove once and for all that Ukyo is Best Girl anyway
- Reveal that Kasumi is actually a Bodhisvatta from an adjacent pantheon with a bone to pick against Belldandy for 'imitation'
- Watch Nabiki goad Ranma into doing coke (but fail, this is a wholesome fanfiction)
- Enslave poor Mara to a progressively corrupted Nabiki's whims
- Basically make Nabiki the new goddess of Neoliberalism
- Bring back Skuld's little robo-gal because she was so cute
- Make Rally Vincent somehow Urd's bastard daughter (They’re both brown anime girls!) and have an entirely senseless and extremely short arc where Urd and Ranma interfere with the events of the Gunsmith Cats manga once I read more of it
- 'Bean Bandit - Him Drive Real Good'
- Confluence of the harem protagonists - Ranma and Keiichi meet Tenchi and re-enact the events of a stoner comedy or two
- Of course there has to be a D&D or video game episode
- And of course someone has to say the phrase ‘NOT ON MY CHRISTIAN MINECRAFT SERVER YOU SONOVABITCH’ completely seriously
- Get Skuld hooked on the prototypical internet, or 2chan, then turn her into an evil meme-spewing gremlin who makes Umaru-chan look wholesome by comparison
- Or, I dunno, have Skuld join Hokago Tea Time and turn it into a techno act because that’s all she listens to (it’s 1996)

Thoughts?

So you may have heard, over the past week or so, of the woman who assaulted the 14-year-old son of a (Black) Grammy-award-winning musician in a New York hotel, accusing the boy of stealing her iPhone -- a phone which it turns out she left in an Uber car and which was returned to her fifteen minutes after she tackled the kid and injured him while trying to wrest his iPhone out of his hands.

You may have heard that she left the hotel before police arrived and subsequently returned to her home in California before she was identified as Miya Ponsetto of Piru, California.  You may have heard that Ms. Ponsetto has had a prior brush with the law, being drunk and disorderly in a different hotel.

What you may not have heard is that California police have arrested her on a fugitive warrant from New York.

Meanwhile, her attorney is begging everyone to have sympathy for poor little Miya.

EDIT: Save for the racial aspect of the assault this probably wouldn't be in politics. But hey, we needed a little distraction from everything else.

Article here

What if anything does this do for Doug's policy of not using his songs?

Is anyone getting into Fanfiction.net all I get is a DDOS delay that hangs on 5 seconds

Noticed Fanfiction.net was down yesterday afternoon in the middle of reading a fanfic I had put off reading since last Novermber and was about two thirds of the way through.

Very aggravating.

I have done all the work arounds I could think of, such as trying the mobile site, flushing my browsers buffers and even starting up one of rarely used emergency browsers and trying the site.

Finally I tried "Down for everyone or just me" and it said it was "Down for everyone."

JUst checked it a hour ago and it still says it "Down for everyone."

What's going on? Any one heard anything?

HDM

According to the Onyx Path weekly meeting notes:

Quote:I’ve talked through most of 2020 about the effects of the pandemic on our creators. Well, last week, all of us at Onyx Path were saddened and shocked to hear that decades-long White Wolf creator Jackie Cassada had died of Covid-19.

Jackie and her partner Nicky Rea were the sort of writers that developers love working with: creative, conscientious, and kind...

Because Nicky has also contracted the virus, but seems to be recovering, yet still has massive hospital and other bills due to what they have been through, Satyr Phil Brucato has established a GoFundMe campaign to lend whatever financial support folks can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-author-a...-nicky-rea

In addition, Onyx Path is working with Bundle of Holding to run a C20 sale designed to assist Nicky. We are working with our partners, as well as Bundle of Holding, to send all of our proceeds from the sale her way.