1 This footage is from a BBC production called "The Great Martian War" that I found to be nigh-on brilliant.  It was on BBCAmerica a month or two ago, and I watched it in one sitting, it got me so hard.

Here's a promo for it.

This is starting out slow, but it remains clever. Oh Noes! Without usury, the economy is screwed!

 it's still available on Crunchyroll and I recommend it highly, hell in a week or so you can be caught up!

1 Test 

1 You actually compose your posts on the live website?  I had expected that you were doing the bulk of the writing on your local PC, and only doing final edits and formatting on the site itself...

2 I tried to write my posts in Word for a while and then copy/paste and add pics and links but that led to formatting peculiarities as well as youtube videos that didn't work. Instead I try to save as often as possible, but in this case I utterly derped. 
Instead of switching from DRAFT to PUBLISH and hitting SAVE,  when I edited the post it was already published so I switched it from PUBLISH to DELETE and hit SAVE, after which I experienced a period of regret.
I believe the technical term is PEBKAC.
 

3 Huh.
Paragraph breaks don't exist in comments anymore? 

4 Oh... Double-spacing doesn't exist in comments anymore.

5

If you're using Firefox, hitting "enter" creates a break, which is a single line feed. The entire comment created by Firefox is one paragraph.

If you're using IE, hitting enter closes the paragraph and opens a new one, which is a double line feed.

Getting a single line feed in IE is "shift Enter", which creates a break. Getting a double linefeed in Firefox is just hitting the enter key twice.

6 I'm using Epic, which is a Chrome based browser. It's been pretty good, but the last two updates have made it a tad twitchy with Minx. This paragraph thing is very new.  Thanks for pointing that out. I really need to once again check Opera, Safari, and on my Windows partition Midori and IE for Minx compatibility as upgrades have changed things.  

7

IE compatibility is really pretty poor. If you try to use the "link" gizmo to add a link to your comment, it puts the URL right at the beginning of the comment.

Or at least it does for me when I try to add links to my comments here and at Wonderduck's place. Oddly enough it works fine for me in comments on my own blog.

Anyway, it's been like this for a couple of years. So when I need to write a comment with a link in it, I compose it using FrontPage and copy/paste -- which works.

8 The editor in general has always been a little, shall we say, non-standard.  Pasting over a selection, for example, inserts the pasted text but does not delete the selection. (And for me, it also scrolls the page up to home.)

9 So I tend to watch this on Sundays (I put the RoosterTeeth link in my Weekly Comics bookmark folder.)

After watching the fight against the "wolves" I came to the startling conclusion - all of the girls are Bisect-uals.

Kids...My lawn...Off it...GET!

Then the other day, it occurred to me.

This is just The Chipmunks for today.  

This genre is not without its merits though. It's perky, you can dance to it and after listening to that for an hour and a half, I find myself so disillusioned with humanity that I'm not really all that concerned about Ebola anymore.

1 I can stand "God is a Girl" and "Angel with a Shotgun" and not much else from that genre.

2 If you think Vocaloid sounds odd, you should try UTAU. Took me some 30 runs of Uta-hime and Tripple Baka to realize suddenly that there are words... and they make complete sense!

1

It's true that the middle ages suffered from a lack of liquidity, but that's because they used silver and gold as money, so the money supply was limited by available metal.

But then there was a huge silver strike in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, resulting in flooding Europe with "Thalers", 1 ounce silver coins minted in Joachimsthal.

At about the same time, the Spanish began bringing in huge amounts of gold and silver looted from the New World.

The effect overall was inflation, because now there was too much money.

2 Some people have argued that the D&D universe is already in the grip of runaway inflation, considering that some magic items sell for upwards of 100,000 gold pieces. If you figure each gold piece at one troy ounce (which would make them really small, given how dense gold is) and with a troy ounce at 31.1 grams, then that would be 3.1 metric tonnes of gold.

3 Magic screws up everything.

-Spell components take a tremendous amount of value directly out of the economy. Resurrecting requires what, 5k gold pieces' worth of diamond dust? Even a lot of lesser spells take 10 or 20 or 100 GP worth of materials. Some of these effects can create economic value worth the price, but not nearly all of them do.

-Brain drain. What do people with high INT scores do? They become wizards, because why swing a sword or make shoes for a living when phenomenal cosmic power awaits? But like the current educational system in the US, this means that you end up with a lot of people who have got their Wizard Degree but find that their school isn't in high demand (especially the illusionists and necromancers...) They've got enough education to be unemployable in the regular labor market but not necessarily useful skills.

-Rolling from the same idea, this means that by and large, "fix it with magic" is going to be the go-to answer for any problems you run into. Crop failures? Forget introducing the three-field system, just bless those fields! You don't need firearms to arm your militia against encroaching bugbears, apply fireballs until well done! Epidemic make you wish you'd invented the germ theory of disease? Nah, just get the divine casters on the job. Basically, since your educated class is heavily invested in being able to Fix Things With Magic, that's going to be what they do when they run into a problem. This means you don't get a lot of social progression, as wizards don't have an incentive to provide scaling solutions (and in fact have lots of good reasons to prevent things like the spread of firearm technology - they actually did a Forgotten Realms story about that, if I recall correctly.)

-Want to be a blacksmith? Better pray a wizard doesn't set up with the Fabricate spell and drive you out of business...

-Of course, a lot of the Bad Things in the world are there precisely because some wizard created them back in the day. Or because some wizard opened a portal and they came through it.

-They have a nasty habit of not dying, not only meaning that their wealth doesn't go back into the economy, but then you get things like liches making life worse for everyone else.

-On top of that, there's a lot of direct wealth destruction going on. Dragons don't just hoard gold, they raze villages. Necromantic hordes roll over the border areas, leaving nothing alive behind them, and even if they lose the pivotal battle, the land is still fallow for lack of farmers and livestock. Eventually demihumans take advantage of the open space and civilization retreats just a little further...

Of course, if you have to live in a world with magic, you want magic on your side too - otherwise you have to live with most of the downsides of living in a magic world but without any of the good stuff that results. So it's not like one side is going to unilaterally fire all its wizards and clerics... not if it doesn't want to become a "former side" anyway.

But you're not likely to find a Renaissance in D&D, simply because the wizards have massive incentives to wizard, not to spread the power they've accumulated through the populace as a whole... and anyone smart enough to advance society will benefit personally much more from being a wizard, when the other choice is being a philosopher. (And even if you get a few altruistic ones, they get murdered by other wizards who don't want their rice bowl overturned...)

1 "the PC venom displayed in episode 2 is not intended to be seen in a good light"
That's my tentative conclusion as well, after seeing a couple of lines in Episode 4.
I really liked this episode.  Most of the things that annoy me about the new season were completely missing this time.  It really felt, mostly, like a Classic Who storyline in a lot of ways.

 We now know WHY the school had rocket powered lockers. Also: we can assume Jeaune keeps a tutu in his....for some reason.  

 

One can certainly do worse than Takahashi and Terasawa. 

Neither Space Cobra nor Urusei Yatsura were big hits in the US, both had been off the air in Japan for over 5 years when the videos were made, but the videos did pique some interest in anime at the time as they were shown on MTV.

However, it may be surprising to learn that that in 1991 AMVs were not really new. In fact fans had been making them for some years (mostly via Betamax), trading them and occasionally showing them at cons. 

Due their existing long before internet streaming video existed in it's current form, and the limitations of magnetic tape as a medium, very few of the really early AMVs can be found. However, this faded, umpteenth generation copy of one I saw between 1989 and 90 is on You Tube...

It's been 24 years so I'm not sure WHO did it, but I think it was either Pam Buck or Keith Mayfield.  

1 When I lived in Philly and went to the Philadelphia Animation Society meetings, there was a guy named Steve Cunningham, (IIRC) who also made AMV's One of the better ones was Mr. Roboto using Gundam footage.

I always thought it would be amusing to use footage from Tezuka's Bagi set to the tune of Devo's Pink Pussycat.

2 A conversation with an old friend has brought the correction, it was Johnathan Cunningham who made some of those early AMVs that I mentioned.

He also did an awesome masquerade costume of Peace from Wizards.

1 The climax of the first plot arc is a replay of episodes 12-14 of the first Index series. Although the Railgun S version has a lot more red paint.

2 I don't know if the creator realized the hot property he had in Misaka Mikoto when he created her, but she became so popular that I would not be surprised if the Railgun spinoff sold much more than the original Index series.

In the Light Novels, she is in every main story arc except one which has almost none of the standard characters in it, and serves mostly to introduce new characters.

1

That is a great scene. (And the one that follows it, when most of Judgement turns out, was even more awesome.) I've lost count of how many times I've rewatched this episode.

It's genuinely awesome that Saten has accepted that she's level 0, and become comfortable with it, and knows that she can still make a difference. (Not that she has given up on her aspiration to become an ESPER, but it no longer eats her inside that she isn't.)

(For those not familiar, this is the last episode of Railgun S.)

2 By the way, those yellow and green things are mechs, standing about twice as tall as Saten.

3 It sure looks like she's teeing up to whack her friend in the head....

4 They're not that close together. Besides, it wouldn't be in character. Uihara is Saten's best friend.

5 That's what makes it funny.

1 "Try, Somy!"

2 "Roman Torchwick would like to borrow some of that."

3 "The Doctor's new companion quickly developed a special relationship with K-9 and the Tardis."

-j

4 "What? The other vending machine only has 10W/35. I can't stand the taste!"

5 "You think you hate high gas prices?"

6 "Synthetic, Schmynthetic."

7 _____ ______ _________ ________, ______ Somy Playstation.

You can fill in the blanks....

8 Mauser, "xbox 360 is better, you" ?

9 BTW, I'd like to report some silliness in the blog header.  It says "tennant" "smith".  I picture it going something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFFqwFv6j-Y.  Having said that, the answer to the argument, of course, is "[Tom] Baker."

A 19 year old athlete who had previously ignored Sci-Fi recently started doing RPGs and on the advice of some friends,  he decided to see Star Wars for the first time.....and he Live Blogged It. 

Then he decided he needed to see both of the sequels. 

1 I wonder what the death toll was among the drivers who were little more than speed bumps during the "GIANT ROBOT RAMPAGE".

Also, why do I need to re-login every single day to post comments?  I've got cookies enabled...

2 It's probably ants. 

3 Yeah, I think it's Neopolitan, because Torchwick said "Ice Cream" at one point.

Clearly at some point she created a solid stand-in for the two of them, and she has a shield.

What I want to know is why, if it was a brand new robot, when they showed it off at the meeting it was rusty?

4 Mauser, it was clearly deliberately left out to rust for either artistic purposes or to make it look more menacing.

5 I think it's actually lube oil, because if the things are made out of steel then Pyrrha will make short work of them. (She can control POLES!) 

6 But can she control Czechs?

(Sheesh, logged out every single time....)