Kaymyth

What do you think happens to all those trolls we don't have?

No matter how old you get, or how far out of school you are, those dreams keep coming. Trust me. It's actually gotten to the point with me now that I start to pick up on things during the dream itself and start getting annoyed with the whole thing. "Yes, yes, I'm in the wrong classroom. Oh, look, the architecture keeps changing and I can't find the right classroom, and oh, oops, now the period is over even though it's been, like, maybe 2 minutes. Are we done yet? Could I maybe have more interesting problems to deal with now?" Yeah, I get impatient with my subconsious when it doesn't give me monsters to fight.

Well, let's see here...

It's like they sense when the worst possible time to call is, and all zero in on that time like a bunch of blood-crazed mosquitoes.

Ooh! Ooh! Me! I understood it! ...still probably would've made more sense if they hadn't deleted so many scenes of it, though.

For being my long-lost brain sister!

I think that's a big part of it. We tend to equate the "underworld" with the concept of "the Very Hot Place", when really that's not the case at all. Granted, even in some of those older cultures, the lord of the underworld was someone to be feared. Poor Hades gets essentially demonized, when, in fact, he's probably one of the few Greek gods who really sticks to doing his job and not messing around with hapless humans. The only "bad" thing that he's ever really done was the alleged kidnapping of Persephone, but even that could be attributed to a bad PR department and the mother-in-law from heck being way louder at telling her side of the story. (I mean, think about it. You're a young, beautiful goddess with a smothering mom. One day, you meet the tall, dark, mysterious lord of the underworld, and he's interested. Do the math.) But yeah, I think it's mostly cultural prejudice. So, there I was, standing before the oncoming demon horde, as they roared their terrible battle cry. I lifted a fist into the air and cried out a command. Trathiathryxl, my trusty draco-unicorn hybrid, swooped in from above and landed by my side, bellowing a challenge to the demon army as I mounted. "To the air!" I cried, and we soared into the sky. We raked the army with swaths of dragonfire, impaling the occasional behemoth upon Trathiathryxl's elegant, razor-sharp horn. Bolts of magical energy leapt from my hands, striking down still more demons. We fought with all of our might, knowing that it was hopeless for us, but someone had to hold them back from the capitol. The lives of thousands hiding behind those walls hung in the balance. We didn't have to win; we just had to hold them long enough for the human army to make it to the field. In the end, we fell. The demon general brought us down with a well-aimed laser strike to Trathiathryxl's wing. One last blast of dragonfire took out an entire regiment of demons before we struck the ground. I stumbled off of my fallen mount, bleeding with at least a dozen cracked ribs, and looked up into the general's cruel eyes. Trumpets sounded in the distance. I smiled. "You're too late," I told him. "They're here." He growled deep in his throat. "Still, you are dead." He raised his sword for the final strike. I gathered the last of my eldritch energies and leapt at him, one final effort bringing me into his reach. My hands latched onto his armor and I grinned wildly, maniacially. "So are you." I released the last of my magic in one bright explosion, disintegrating me, the demon general, and everything within 1,000 feet.

For asking the weirdest question to-date on my AMA thread.

I can't speak for our brave creator Turos, but I'd say that more people working on puzzles = better. You're more likely to get a better variety of ideas there to keep things interesting for the players.

Sylvester McCoy (Seven). He was the active Doctor when I started watching, so he was "my" Doctor. Also, Ace was my freakin' hero when I was a teenager. Missed opportunity? Hmm. I'd have to go with Romana. In TV canon, they've never officially resolved her voluntary exile to E-Space. She's got a loophole in the destruction/retconned banishment of the Time Lords in that she's been living outside our own universe. What happened to her? What's happened to her in the centuries since she stayed behind? Is she still in E-Space? Did she come back to fight in the Time War? Is she still good, or did something happen in all those years to change her for the darker? So far, the writers have been more interested in coming up with convoluted ways to resurrect the Master rather than bring in another Time Lord character that has an even better reason to be around. I haven't actually read them, so I'm afraid that I don't know. From what I just skimmed on Wikipedia, he's mostly used the Romanicized names for them, so it's either a case of Didn't Do the Research or he just decided to go with the names that people know. To be fair, it's probably the latter. I'm sure there's plenty in there I'd laugh hysterically at, though no more so than things like Stargate and the Mummy. You just have to take them all as stories that exist in their own universes and don't have any real bearing on my religious practice. The one thing I do take a little bit of issue with is the popular portrayal of Anubis/Anpu. It's always, "oooooh, the dark god Anubis!" which contrasts so starkly with the gentle Anpu I know who guides and protects souls on their journey to the Duat. I think that of all the Netjeru, he's the one who sometimes gets his feelings a bit hurt.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: substitute teaching kindergarten was the single most terrifying thing I have ever done. And I've done it multiple times. They get a lot easier right around 3rd grade or so. Still young enough to be excited about school, but old enough to be relatively self-sufficient.

Interestly, I'm the other way 'round - Slytherin primary and Ravenclaw secondary.

So, my actual Sanderson collection is a bit puny at the moment. Not terribly impressive to look at. As you can see, I've got it a bit spread out to fill the shelf, and my Butcher shelf below is also in the picture to make it not quite so sad. But you know what is impressive? My library. It is my favoritest room in my entire house, and I am going to show it to you now. First, I'm going to show you what it looked like before we moved in, all cold and stark and bare: And now you can see how some paint and a lot of stuff has transformed it! You can't even tell that this detailing on the mantle is there in the before picture. The book side: And the game side: Now all I need is a nice, cozy recliner, and my favorite room in the house will be complete!

No, but my 3-year-old nephew, the next door neighbor's kid, and a dear friend of mine all are. The friend actually lived with us for a couple of years (after we rescued her from her nutball neglectful family), and I learned quite a bit about how her thought processes work. In fact, I got rather adept at translating English-to-Housemate whenever a friend or romantic interest said or did something that completely baffled her.

I kind of figured, thanks to some of the responses I got in the Religion thread, that some people were more curious, but I didn't want to derail that thread and make it all about me. So, here is a thread that's all about me! And don't worry - if I wasn't willing to answer questions, I wouldn't have started the thread at all. To go off a bit on a tangent, understand that there are lot of people who follow different pagan faiths who keep it very tightly under wraps. We get a lot of negative reaction from people who who don't understand (or deliberately misunderstand) what it is we are, and that leaves some people living in fear. Fear of being ostracized, fear of rejection from their families, fear of being fired from their jobs, even fear of having violence inflicted on them; I'm in a rare position to be able to be completely out about my religious status. I have the good fortune to work for a company that is very liberal in its social policies and treatment of employees, and my family is more or less accepting of the fact that I live my life a bit differently. Not everyone has this; heck, I wouldn't have it had I stayed in education. So I use my status to try to engender understanding, so that the next time someone else nervously pokes their head out of the "broom closet" (so to speak) they have a slightly higher chance of being greeted by a positive reaction. In short: there are more of us than you think, mostly because a lot of us are worried about what might happen if they become known. But the proportion of us who are willing to stick our necks out and talk about it is slowly growing. Now, on to the actual question. Basically, I view the concept of ultimate divinity as essentially being the soul of the Universe. (And yes, being part of the Universe ourselves, that would mean that we are each a tiny, tiny sliver of Divinity ourselves.) But, see, the Universe is big. It's really, really, really big - so big that we cannot even begin to comprehend even the scale of how big it is. We know it's there, and we want to understand it, and the Universe wants to speak to us, too - so it spun off pieces of itself that were obviously much, much smaller than it, but much, much bigger than us. Big enough to be able to impart wisdom, but small enough for us to comprehend. And it used our imaginations as templates on how to forge those pieces - those are the gods. All of the gods. For a more detailed explanation, go to the Creator's Corner board and read the Creation Myth that I posted a few weeks ago - that's my story of how the Universe and the gods came to be. The ancient Egyptians had a grasp on this kind of concept themselves - they called their gods the Netjeru, or the Names of Netjer. To them, Netjer was the source of Divinity, and the gods were the many Names that it could call itself. They had a very fluid idea of how that worked, too, as each of the gods really was his or her own self - but you could also combine two or three of them together into a new god that embodied all of those qualities if you needed to. And then you could pop them back apart again later. Basically, they had a sort of Lego deity philosophy. As for what caused the birth of the Universe? I take that question as one that's unanswerable. Whatever happened to start the Universe existed outside the laws of physics as we know them; since our brains are patterned within those laws, it stands to reason that there's a chance we aren't even capable of conceiving of what happened to start things. Whatever it was, it's almost certainly something that's outside the observable Universe, and there may never be a single human soul who ever figures it out. The ancient Egyptians had at least three different creation myths of their own that completely and utterly contradicted each other. Ask your average person back then which one he or she believed was true, I expect that they'd just look at you funny and say, "All of them." So, sure, maybe some all-powerful being started the Universe on purpose, or everything we know might be the result of some all-powerful kid sneaking into Parent's workshop and playing with their tools. Or maybe we're inside the blossoming of a giant space turtle fart. I'm actually OK with not knowing.

My husband has figured out chopsticks on the piano. Unfortunately, he's got the rhythm wrong. He's playing it in 4/4 time, when it should be in 6/8. Every measure, there's two extra notes, and it is breaking my BRAIN. ...but I haven't got the heart to go tell him he's doing it wrong.

They...they put the ENTIRE episodes up on YouTube? You mean I've been sitting here waiting for it to hit Netflix when I could have been watching this whole time?!

I like fruit quite well, but it's not usually dessert for me. I think 'cause my sweet taster is turned way down, so I tend to like tarter fruit, and tart just doesn't scream "dessert" to me. Right there with ya on the water park. I tried so hard to like rollercoasters for my husband's sake, and it just didn't work. I tend too much toward vertigo. But we're taking some time off work in a couple weeks to try to get a good weather day to go to Schlitterbahn! And I used to like funnel cake, when I was your age; now I take a couple of bites and I'm done. Mild. So mild. I am a complete and utter wuss when it comes to spicy things, which is tragic because Indian food is sooo goooooood.

You know, it's not often that I miss cable. This is one of those rare, rare times.

Chocolate. Hands-down. Chocolate is the best food in existence, and sushi comes in a very close second. Though chocolate-covered strawberries are the best of both dessert worlds. (Which reminds me - I think Imma fire up the fondue pot next weekend for the housewarming party. Bwah!) Water park or amusement park?

OK, at this point, the only real point of divergence is that you like pugs, and I prefer dachshunds and corgis.

And you know I'm not just jumping on a bandwagon. My last avatar icon was a Slytherclaw crest.

You are also a Slytherclaw? ...OK, now I'm beginning to suspect that we really are long-lost sisters...

I have no idea. That's just what it looks like to me.

I'm thinking your music writing software could be of use here. Have it spit out raw melodies, and then we just play with them until we have cool atmospheric music. Ooo. Flute duet!