Kobold King

I do care about upvotes. It is my reputation as a whole that I do not have strong feelings for. I deeply value individual upvotes as signs of recognition and happiness from the readers of my posts. For clarity's sake, and so no one might accuse me of misunderstanding your argument, I appreciate that you are arguing on the same side I am on. I thank you for holding Twi and I in such high esteem, in fact. I chose your post to quote as I have been searching this thread for my name periodically. (As I appear to be used as an example in this discussion quite frequently.) I seized the opportunity to restate my thoughts on the matter of current discussion, not to disagree with you in any way. My apologies for sounding confrontational.

Because the sum total of my reputation is not valuable to me. I do, however, care very strongly about the individual quality of my posts, and a downvote represents an attack on the integrity of my labor. I have received downvotes for lengthy posts arguing my side of an issue. This is to be expected, but I consider it disrespectful. People should be able to disagree while still respecting and valuing one another's contributions to the discussion; I will point out that the civil religious and political discussions that the 17th Shard has become miraculous for have almost exclusively been carried out without the use of the downvote button, and I believe this was conducive to the calm, friendly discussions we all value so much. I have also received downvotes for my RP posts on occasion, which is hurtful to me. My writing is a labor of love, freely given to the people of this forum. Every downvote I have gotten on these posts stings, as a downvote in this context clearly states that the downvoter felt that my work was worth going out of his way to communicate his disdain for. I care about downvotes because I want my voice to be respected and valued on this community. A downvote says very clearly that a post is not respected and valued. I ask, how many people have purposefully downvoted a post that they were genuinely glad existed on the forum? Is there anyone who has done this? It seems to me that downvotes are used predominantly as an expression of irritation or hostility, and neither of these things are what's made this forum great.

I now participate in that most ancient and treasured of mankind's traditions: showing grandma how to unlock her computer and check her email.

While completely unrelated, these posts exist in an odd sort of mutually opposed dichotomy.

If all goes according to plan, the family and I will be seeing The Force Awakens later today. Finally, the spoiler threads of the Internet will be my enemies no longer but sweet, sweet allies. Oh no. We'll have to do a commemorative Labyrinth viewing in his honor here soon.

Before the Great Elements consume me, might I ask why your gods created me without a soul? Also, is there any conceivable way a Soulless such as I could acquire a soul and join your society?

Backtrack's not nearly so powerful, but he could find the weakness of pretty much any Epic in the Fractured States if he was clever. He should also be able to tell what Calamity is and where he came from at a glance, but he's apparently too scared to look up at the night sky.

I was curious what you'd think of it. I loved it, but my mom couldn't get through it the first time she tried it.

A few questions for Ilui: What sorts of magical feats were you capable of as a mage? Why did you become a cannibal? You've gotta know you can get prions that way, right? Would humanity reclaiming their homeland beyond the stars benefit you? If not, why do you seem to desire it?

MV and Backtrack could currently start a club for Epics that have no idea how powerful they could actually be.

It'd be interesting to see what MV could do with his kind of momentum. And by interesting, I mean terrifying.

I wonder what kind of superpowers you'd get from that.

Hey, it wouldn't hurt. And it really does help you think of things you might not have considered on your own. I'd certainly be there asking questions!

This is not a simple question as there is no meaningful measurement of a civilization's success. We possess the technological means to attend to most of our needs; very few of us lack for food and water, as our production has become quite efficient. We are capable of holding our own against any other civilization with plutonic technology, and can create as many ships and drones as we need to make our way through the galaxy. We can even hollow out asteroids to inhabit when we lack for space. But how advanced does that make us? The Yulli are better roboticists. The Hriites and your own kind are better geneticists. We can scarcely comprehend what the Zotra-byn are capable of, and they cannot even build their own starships. Technology and science are too complex in scope for solid measurements to be made of them. We are the only ones, but there are different sub-species among us. For instance, the nocturnal Clearside dwellers are larger than I am and are adapted for hunting during the long dark nights. There are other varieties of Supernalian which evolved to be wholly aquatic. Until we unearthed fossils of our common ancestors, which lived about three million of your years ago, it was not even universally acknowledged that we made up the same stock. I myself am descended from the coastal Crownside population, that is, from the Supernalians which inhabited the mangrove forests on the side of the moon locked to our planet. The coastal Crownside sub-species makes up the stock of those which first founded civilization among our species. For many centuries the other sub-species were seen as lesser to us, but in time our cultures became largely unified.

Here's a link! And I'd love to see some Edassan AMAs.

Why do you drink air you've mixed with water and chemical syrups? At least blood contains nutritious proteins and iron.

1. This statement is with respect; the vision of humans is inferior to ours. You each have two eyes, barring accident, while we possess four. You are capable of detecting only half of the colors we take for granted. Your brains are less adapted for processing what you see than ours are, and are more easily fooled by optical illusions. Yours are adequate for the limited purposes you require them for, but lack the finesse of ours. 2. We are not mammals. As a class of life we are more similar to your amphibians, as we require bodies of water to lay our eggs and rear our young. 3a. Our calendar is one respect in which we might learn from you. Ours is not precise, for we did not track the seasons in our early history as you did. We did not plant crops which required precise harvesting times; we cultivated flesh-rearing livestock which did not have seasonal breeding patterns. When we did develop a calendar, for arranging meetings between clusters, we based it off of the movements of the other moons moving through the sky at night. This gave dates on the magnitude of months, but gave no specification on the scale of days. Generally a meeting between clusters would take time solely in waiting for the other group to arrive, as one set would always arrive sooner than the other! Instead of designing a more efficient calendar, our ancestors simply employed chains of young-but-useful ones to wait by the meeting place and alert their families when the other cluster arrived. It is only much more recently, within the last hundred years of our history, that our armies and corporate clusters have seen fit to arrange a more precise calendar. But it is a technical thing that most of our population still refuses to see as necessary. 3b. We have no holidays or calendar dates of interest. In times past, the hunting of particularly large herbivores was an occasional seldom enough to evoke much celebration upon completion. As our culture became pastoral, particularly fruitful harvests were celebrated in the same manner. As time went on, victories in battle became observed in the same way. While these forms of occasion are irregular in timing, they are uncommon periods of sudden triumph for a cluster that evoke great joy and sentiment in our groups. This statement is with respect; I have often considered your celebrations to be of an inferior quality. While yours originated as celebrations of harvests, they have become empty and hollow, tied to days instead of victories. What do you do if "Christmas" or "Happy New Year" falls upon a bleak time between triumphs? I cannot understand. 4. I did not wish to discuss the war. It was a bloody, pointless affair, fought out of hate rather than lack of land or resources. We were disgusted by your practices and you were terrified of ours. A series of misunderstandings was allowed to spiral into a war of bitter violence and extermination. Twice. Many clusters have made concessions to ensure peace, however. It has been made illegal on most of our worlds for a Supernalian to devour human flesh, except of course in self-defense. You see, we are ever willing to compromise! 5. This statement is with respect; I feel violently repulsed from the info my data-trawl revealed of these beverages. Why would you do these unspeakable things to pure water? We drink blood on occasion, but why would any being want to drink air? Of course. The Ghost Burners' Cluster invented the first plutonic generator centuries ago, and many other clusters followed suit. With the exotic energy such a generator can produce, a craft can be transported instantaneously across the cosmos, though of course particularly long leaps require more energy than even our plutonic generators can produce. Through interstellar travel we have colonized many planets within our homeworld's vicinity, and encountered many alien species.

They would work rather well, wouldn't they? Though I'm not sure how Cisco would feel about a world in which the villains make up their own code names.

I am River Leaper of the Indigo Moon Cluster. My species and yours have quarreled in times past, but there is space enough in the galaxy for us to coexist in peace. It is my wish that all sapient beings one day inhabit one cluster of allies as close as any blood-family; to pursue this goal I open this conversation to questions about the ways of the Supernalian race, the functioning of our society, and any other topic that piques your mammalian interests. For those unfamiliar with our species, we are very social carnivores native to the Jewel Supernal, a beautiful moon hundreds of light years from your Earth. Our appearance is such as this, as depicted by a human artist who goes by the name LarkoftheRiver. (A wonderful artist, as your kind goes. It is a shame she was born with human eyes.) Please feel at ease in asking me anything which comes to your minds. May this mark a day of harmony between the Humaneria and the Supernal Sky-States!

I was largely worried about it coming across as pretentious, but I think I'll try it out. Worst case scenario is that it dies down, best case scenario is that other people start their own I can pester with questions.

She'd be even funnier on Arrow. "My name is Oliver Queen. I spent five years on a hellish island with only one goal: to survive. Now--" "Five years on an island? That's nothing. I did a triumphant victory march through the city I conquered last week, and nobody showed up to cheer me on! I had to spend the next week rounding up women and children and executing them as an example to the work force, and the bodies piled up so high that I had to kill the landfill owner for not clearing enough space for them. And then--" * is shot by an arrow *

There's a neat practice I've seen in worldbuilding communities of opening AMAs conducted by fictional characters within people's settings. It's a fun way of letting people probe and ask questions about the setting, making the authors come up with details they perhaps hadn't considered yet and show off the details they already have. I'm considering running one on Creator's Corner for the universe I've been working on. Thoughts?

TwiLyght is very good at what she does. She's a spectacularly strong counterbalance to the universe of terrible fanfiction that floats elsewhere on the Internet.

Perhaps the Flash's greatest defense against Lucentia is that the CW would never let the Jagers onto their station.