Please note comments on the review reply. Will try to get to your short.
1,851 2016-03-20 03:33:20
Re: NorthernSkies or NS - Janet (213 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
1,852 2016-03-19 17:09:46
Re: Getting rid of stickies (8 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Thanks. Hope Spamanice didn't get a refund.
1,853 2016-03-19 13:14:00
Re: Say the first word that comes to mind... (1,634 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
1,854 2016-03-19 13:05:24
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Hmm. Do I hear The Punting of the Snark?
1,855 2016-03-19 10:06:16
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Okay, mod complete. Maybe a little less elegant of its own, but I think it flows better from the previous chapter.
1,856 2016-03-19 07:50:51
Re: Faux connection request? (20 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Only to your reputation ![]()
1,857 2016-03-19 02:00:34
Re: Faux connection request? (20 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
Yeah. Database consistency problem. An entity is removed but ghosts of its relations remain.
Sol, would the processing/storage properties allow the connecion list or count to be re-verified when the user's Connections page is accessed, or would that require too many disk accesses or too much latency?
1,858 2016-03-18 12:42:25
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
I have a mod for the opening of =To Find a Sorcerer=. Later today.
1,859 2016-03-18 12:41:11
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
His voice was soft,
His manner mild.
He seldom laughed,
But he often smiled.
He'd seen how civilized men behave.
He never forgot and he never forgave,
Not Sweeney,
Not Sweeney Todd—
The demon barber of Fleet Street!
1,860 2016-03-18 10:11:23
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Don't fear the Harvester?
1,861 2016-03-17 11:10:48
Re: Acts/ Dictates/ Mandates/ Mantle - Amy's Thread (1,905 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
An Elevation of Elves
A Horn of Unicorns
A Chaste(Horn) of Unicorns
A Taling of Fairies
A Growth of Gillis
A Gruesome of Gillis
1,862 2016-03-17 09:08:04
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Following this chapter, I will have an action thread and two-to-four discussion threads to interweave. (Heal patriarch, discuss circumstances, events, plans, show evolution of Shassa and Engalt ... and cross-link.) (And, as I wrote above, I will have a week of disaster-dodging.) But I will try to work the individual threads out, starting with the action thread. I expect two chapters surrounding the patriarch (Maurand, I am thinking) and maybe a short chapter on planning and departure. And then ... the culturing-cellar of corruption.
And along the way, I expect I'll be renumbering a few existing chapters.
But that's a ways down the road.
1,863 2016-03-17 06:58:16
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
K appears to be winking in and out of our universe. I find conversations where he is being addressed, but when I look for his posts, they're not there.
The other day upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
He must be with the CIA.
1,864 2016-03-17 06:56:39
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Okay, short transition chapter up. The next one may take a while; I've got another disaster to dodge (and I don't mean the next chapter). But I'm feeling better, and this episode will launch me into the next episode better than anything I thought of before.
1,865 2016-03-17 05:04:00
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
And take your fight out in the parking lot! Cheez ...
1,866 2016-03-17 01:02:07
Re: Acts/ Dictates/ Mandates/ Mantle - Amy's Thread (1,905 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
The collective singular is fine. When you need the particular plural (fishes instead of plural fish) use Gillis plants or Gillis pots.
Geez, some people don't know the proper past tense of sh*t. English is an irregular language, and whatever you're mapping into it can be just as irregular.
1,867 2016-03-16 23:52:15
Re: Say the first word that comes to mind... (1,634 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
What!ticism
1,868 2016-03-16 10:07:40
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Not so funny if you're the one who gets it. Apologize to Amy (grrrrr).
1,869 2016-03-16 09:16:34
Re: Acts/ Dictates/ Mandates/ Mantle - Amy's Thread (1,905 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Heck, present-and-past-in-parallel like Dark Shadows, which opened a huge genre door.
1,870 2016-03-16 09:14:16
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
I heard they missed one on the 'flu shot this year.
1,871 2016-03-15 17:24:51
Re: Repost Chapters? (7 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
I've done that. It confuses readers and potential reviewers. Die-hard reviewers are not deterred, but what about new ones?
1,872 2016-03-15 10:18:58
Re: The Sorcerer's Progress (1,528 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Okay, updates to Shogran's Waifs are out.
If you want a repub so you can get the points you deserve, let me know.
Now, where are all those things I need to do today after I get some sleep?
1,873 2016-03-15 09:36:36
Re: A great loss (172 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
njc wrote:Newton showed that the laws of physics in the sky are the same as those on earth; I'm arguing (on much less rigorous grounds, to be sure) that our learning of people-society-culture is of the same kind as our learning of hard-soft-hot-cold-safe-dangerous.
...
As a generality, I disagree, but my reasoning is from a complicated understanding that there is in reality no such thing as determinism -- except within a narrow context of classical physics -- which is why you'd have to reach out to Newton to support your assertion. Every horror of Man against man is brought by thinking that all we have to do is teach the individual that X is wrong, even if we have to kill him in the process. ...
Whether X (where X is nothing like landing a lunar module) is a right or wrong thing to do can be ascertained by looking through the prism of morality and not utility, and 'morality' is to an individual's actions as kinetics is to an individual molecules's actions.
I'm not sure I know how to evaluate your last claim, so all I'll say is that I wasn't addressing that point. I was addressing how we learn in the two realms, and to what degree the methods and mechanisms are comparable--if they are at all. I believe, on the basis of subjective experience and the Principle of Parsimony, that to a large degree they are. But of formal proof I have none. (Argument by analogy is an important mode of legal argument, and I believe it also plays a role in much moral reasoning, particularly in in considering what is just in a particular circumstance.)
Implicit in my point (but not occult) is that learning matters, ie. that morality and social regard of others is largely learned behavior.
1,874 2016-03-15 05:11:10
Re: Repost Chapters? (7 replies, posted in TheNextBigWriter Premium)
I'm going to re-open this as a request.
I have a few close-knit reviewers (thanks, "guys"!) and oftimes I would like to repub-for-points--pay my points over again so my reviewers will be rewarded for coming back and re-evaluating my work. I can do this by copy-to-new-version, but then I (and my reviewers!) lose all the existing reviews.
I'm asking Sol and his team to look for a way to accomplish this without messing too deeply with their system. It could be a way to take the money#####points and clear the 'you reviewed this already' info (will that work within the existing data model?) or to copy the text, history, and reviews to the new version while somehow marking the existing reviews as 'historical' so they are not counted when deciding whether to reward a new review (but that could duplicate a lot of data, unless you found a way to link the history stacks), or some more clever way that fits the existing data model.
Of course, it will help to know how many other people will be helped by this.
1,875 2016-03-15 03:41:51
Re: Acts/ Dictates/ Mandates/ Mantle - Amy's Thread (1,905 replies, posted in Fantasy/Magic & Sci-Fi)
Try this:
Behavior of ghosts is explained by stories ...
Events occur in the present ...
Behavior of ghosts increases/changes ...
Examination of the ghost stories show they are inconsistent with history, human motivation, etc. (See Fridge Logic on TVTropes.org) ...
Present events are linked to the ghosts' history and their stories ...
Present events have dangers which are unknown and misunderstood ...
Correct interpretation of the ghosts and their stories reveals history that explains present events ... and leads to resolution of mystery/jeopardy (and 'jeopardy' might include Romance as a secondary element).
The challenge, after doing it at all, is to keep it from becoming formula. If you frame the stories well enough and with enough different twists I think you could play it for at least eight or ten stories, perhaps of multiple volumes each. False or incomplete solutions can keep things going. (Ellery Queen did that a lot in the early stories: "Solves two murders three times!") Histories of WHEN the apparitions have historically occurred may also provide clues, just as subsequent murders can muddy--or reveal--the truth of earlier ones.