It is now an hour into 2019 in the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and I want to wish all the forum members the happiest of new years, be it belated for those east of me or yet to come for those to the west.

Happy New Year, everyone!

If it's past 18:30UTC on December 31, then the majority of the population is already in 2019. Here's the chart, courtesy of xkcd:



(And my thanks to Dave Watson for sharing with me the phrase that I used as the thread title.)

Taking the long view and starting a thread where we can reserve settings that we want to play in once the main story's done and our SIs and their families are out exploring the Metacontinuity.

This is for settings that would be more trouble than it's worth to try to fit into the four-arc storyline (because they're set in alternate worlds, or alternate times, or otherwise don't fit well with the setting that we've already built), but that at least one of the writers thinks are still interesting enough to tell at least one story in.

Starting off: Rob calls dibs on Allison and Lillia. (Alternate world with alternate geography that's plot-relevant and technology that would be lost in what the existing displacees have already brought)

Any chance we can get a method of embedding tweets from Twitter?  I just dumped several in a post over in Politics and it would have been much nicer to be able to embed them instead.

If you can't due to some technical or security issue, I'll understand.

Apparently, New Jersey's Attorney General has uncovered evidence that Trump's golf course has been giving out illegal green cards and social security numbers to illegal immigrants.  They didn't trust Sessions, so they went straight to Robert Mueller with the dirt.

Quote:Florida AG Pam Bondi is the ONLY AG who took a $25K bribe from Trump Foundation not to pursue charges against Trump. #TrumpUniversity

She needs to be investigated.

Quote:Pam Bondi was on Trump's transition team. omg i did not know this.

One of ... well, let's just say someone my uncle knows, discovered a few PS3 games they hadn't traded in with the console a while back, and since I still have one and the nearby Gamestops closed, gave them to me. Not a bad haul if mostly things I'd played before, but the question I have is this: Will Persona 4 make any sense coming at it cold, or do I need to somehow (cough cough internet cough) find the half dozen or so earlier games in the setting first?

[Farnsworth]Good news everyone![/Farnsworth]

No, REALLY!

IT'S HAPPENING PEOPLE!

Lifehacker has a comprehensive list:
https://lifehacker.com/these-1923-copyri...1825241296

Black Aeronaut mentioned in a recent post in another thread that he expects the Sailor Senshi will end up with Lyrical Nanoha style Devices eventually. This thread is to brainstorm what those Devices might be... and we may as well generalize it to all the spellcasters. As usual with brainstorming sessions, no idea is too off-the-wall to not mention, although some ideas might be quietly dropped from consideration because they go in odd directions.

Let's start off with a list of what I'd like to discuss to begin with. Brainstorming sessions often go off on tangents, and that's a good thing, but we need a starting point for the tangents to go off from.

As I understand it, the average Midchildan or Belkan Intelligent Device (and the above-average ones like Raising Heart, Bardiche, and Graf Eisen) assist their masters by casting minor spells (usually but not always defensive) by drawing upon their masters' magical power reserves, and help with their masters' mathematical calculations for the really big spells. I don't know how much help the Sailor Senshi, or Sakura and Shaoran, or the Fate/Stay Night mages, or the Madoka Magica girls would get from that sort of device, since their magic doesn't appear to have a mathematical component. (Also, Ami already has the Mercury Computer.)

(Interestingly, some of the Academy City espers might find this sort of Device useful, since some Skills - including Electromaster, Teleport, and Aero Hand - have mathematical components in their use. Washuu-chan might have already implanted the equivalent of one in Accelerator to offset the brain damage he took in canon when he was shot while healing Last Order.)

However, the Belkans had something else which the Senshi could use: Unison Devices. A well-designed Unison Device offsets its master's weaknesses and supports its master's strengths, at the cost of having two minds in one body. And we've seen an example of the dangers of a malfunctioning Unison Device: the control program of the Book of Darkness before Hayate renamed it "Reinforce".

Who would risk using a Unison Device? (Consider that the TSAB isn't around to help debug them... but Washuu-chan is.) And what would they do, and what would their personalities be like?

Of the Sailor Senshi, only Usagi has flight capability - and that's winged flight, no hovering. Hyoga is also a winged flyer. Sakura can fly (and hover) with The Fly. Kero-chan and Yue can fly. Everybody else is grounded... so flight capability would be useful.

Defense would be good - most of the mages in the setting are glass-cannons, compared to the average metahuman. (Hyoga's the obvious exception here - you'd almost think she was a Evangelion Angel, not a Judeo-Christian one.) But what sort of defense?

And what else would be useful?

The floor is now open for discussion.

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/12/27/...rmer-fire/

A canon Christmas short story for Dresden Files from Jim Butcher

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12hNg...zpUJg/edit