Kaymyth

He probably got a lucky hunt in last night. Soon, his prowess will grow, and you'll be getting "presents" on your doorstep. Oh, the joys of severed lizard heads!

No, it's pretty specifically stated in AoL that while compounding gold keeps Miles in top health, it does not affect his normal aging process.

Oh, dearie, I was a teenager in the 90's. But I was an oddball; for example, I'm pretty sure I was the only female in my age demographic who detested the New Kids on the Block. I find (then and now) Brad Pitt to be completely unattractive, and Tom Cruise just skeeves me out (that's mostly now, but I could've taken him or left him back then). My tastes were not normal teenaged girl tastes; I was just too much of a nerd for that. It was a few years later before I finally picked up the book to try to read it, so I would've been probably 20-ish at that point. Had to force myself to plow through it. I think I blitz-read a bunch of Star Trek novels afterwards to clear my palate. But I'm right there with you on the sparkly vampire nonsense. I am Team Stake all the way.

I have to admit, I didn't particularly like him in either. One of my coworkers has tried to explain Lestat to me and convince me that he gets more interesting and likeable the further the series goes, but I just can't bring myself to try it. Especially not when there are so many Cosmere books I haven't read yet...

You and a lot of other people. I know people now who enjoy them; she must be doing something right. But it appears that I am not her target audience.

Does it count if you only made it through the first book in the series? As I mentioned in another thread, I hated Interview With the Vampire. Detested with the fire of This Book Is Not Mine And Thus I Cannot Throw It Across the Room. See, I had seen the movie first, and thought, "Well, books are always better than the movie! I should read it and see how much better it is!" Oh, younger me. How naive you were. I found none of the characters remotely likeable: Louis: "I'm a vampire and I'm sooo tortured!" Claudia: "I'm a child vampire, and I'm even mooore tortured!" Armand: "I'm hot and smexy, but now I'm in lurve with Louis, so I'm tortured, too! Even though being tortured is not really in my baseline personality and is illogical. Nope, I'm just going to be tortured now, instead of stealing Louis away and teaching him how to have fun like a sensible person." And, of course, Lestat: "I'm a raging sociopath! Someone should set me on fire!" Then someone did, much to my great joy. But he survived it. Boo. And then went on to be the protagonist in all the other books to follow. Nope. Not reading that. Then there were the descriptions. Oh, gods, the descriptions. Yes, Anne, I understand that curtains are probably indeed a very important part of a vampire's general decor. However, I do not need to know the exact color, pattern, fabric blend, and stitching details of every set of curtains in every room of every house in the book. Kthxbai. In short: where is Buffy Summers when you need her?

I respectfully disagree. "Interview With the Vampire" I quite enjoyed. Granted, I thought the book was terrible, so there was nowhere to go but up. (Apparently Anne Rice's writing style curdles in my brain. I still can't believe that I actually made myself finish that thing.)

They're basically standardized tests that are supposed to rank how college-ready you are. All high school students who want to get into college have to take them, and different colleges have minimum scores that they require for acceptance. It's a deeply flawed system, but we Americans are score-obsessed. (And people wonder why, with my education degree, I work for a bank. Among other things it's LESS paperwork and red tape. There's you're mindsplosion for the day.) The difference between a university and a college is kind of silly. A college is a place where you can go to get a college degree. A university is a single institution that houses multiple colleges, usually divided up by discipline (i.e., a college of sciences, a college of engineering, etc.)

There is a WoB out there that states that Scadrial has waffles. Why? Because someone asked. So clearly, if they have waffles, then they must have waffle cooks as well. Ergo, rank.

You know, this all sounds quite fascinating. Sadly, I am a redhead, and as everybody knows have no soul to devour.

No. I demand the addition of corgis eating spaghetti on the back of a frolicking tree sloth.

The essay is new; they didn't have that back when I took it. Or maybe it's not new so much as I just dated myself here. You know, "Back in my day, we filled in the scantron bubbles for every single question! And we walked to the test! In a blizzard! Uphill both ways!" I don't really remember the ACT as being that bad, but I was always pretty good at standardized testing. It does mix it up every time, though; I doubt that next time your science section will be so physics-heavy. It'll be something else entirely. The math section was always what killed me. Not because I wasn't good at math, but because I went to a tiny, backwater high school with limited resources and class offerings. There was no opportunity to start on algebra before high school, which limited what I could progress through classwise. It wasn't possible to make it farther than some very basic pre-calc. This. As crazy and overwhelming as it seems right now, it won't be that much longer before it's all a memory. I do not envy you; you couldn't pay me to be 16 again. And, of course, I was a horribly rebellious child. Oh, yes. Nights before Saturday band contests, instead of going to bed early, I'd short myself on sleep and stay up to watch Doctor Who on public television. It had a late Friday night timeslot, see, and my VCR didn't record well anymore. I'd build a blanket fort around my TV so the light didn't leak downstairs, plug in my headphones for the sound, and stay up till 1AM to get my fix. I had my priorities straight, yo.

Well, more listened to. He's a musician. More specifically, he is the King of Geek Rock.

Are you sure you're not Jonathan Coulton? Because that whole spiel had distinct notes of "Skullcrusher Mountain" and "The Future Soon" in it...

Egads, girl. You're 16 and you've already taken the SAT 5 times? AND a musician? You're basically Me: the Next Generation. Except for me, it was the opposite. I took the ACT umpty-zillion times (starting way too young, and rocked it hard enough that I dare not speak my score, lest someone accuse me of trolling), but only took the SAT once. Didn't do too badly, either, given that I had completely forgotten to bring a calculator and got to do all the math by hand.

They're not unaware. They may be blissful, but they are definitely aware. Every group's gotta have a pile of bacon-fed knaves who ruin it for the rest of us...

My husband and I bicycle, but we are not Jeff-type cyclists. The Kansas City metro area has a ton of awesome hike & bike paths; we use those. Right now, I could theoretically bike from home to work using these paths for 98% of the route. It would take me an hour, and I'd arrive to work smelling bad enough to make my cube neighbors cry, so I don't do it. What I hate are the idiots who completely fail to use the pass callout. If you are about to pass someone, standard cycling etiquette is to call out, "On your left!" or something appropriate. Husband and I do this. Most cyclers do this. Some do not, and they scare the everloving rust out of me every time. I blistered the ears of a teenaged boy one day because his failure to do this nearly caused an accident, and I rather like being intact and not bleeding, thankyouverymuch. In other news, apparently a "stye" is just a scary medical word for "you have a zit in one of your eyelash follicles". You know, when I was a teenager, I used to think that reaching the second half of my thirties might mean that all my acne problems would be gone. No, the acne has just leveled up and is coming up with new, creative ways to annoy me. No contact lenses for a week. OH JOY.

A first-year band teacher whose ensemble pulled a 1 at Districts? Oh, yeah. Most definitely.

Not as many as the person who made the video, but I don't think they're here, so I'll take 'em. Hah! Firefly was my favorite pony when I was a kid. I still have the plushie that I slept with every night for years. She's rather careworn, but in remarkably good shape, all things considered.

I share today my favorite MLP fanvid of all time. Some of you may have seen it, but for those who haven't (particularly those who are also Browncoats) here is the link in all its brilliance. My Little Serenity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P3HHpf-fZY

The reasonable explanation would be that TLR was suppressing technological development within his domain, but his reach did not include the Southern Continent. They had over a thousand years to experiment without interference; the Northern Scadrians have only had 300 years, and a lot of that time was spent rebuilding civilization from the ground up. Innovation takes time; new discoveries take experimentation.

I'm pretty sure double pewter would be the Hulk minus the green skin.

Enterprise's spotty record makes a lot more sense when you watch who the showrunners were through the seasons. The early seasons were when Berman & Braga ran the show. Then they left, and it got good. They then returned to write the series finale, which was by all accounts a terrible thing that completely ruins everything forever, OMG, plaid elephants This is, however, hearsay as I have generally followed the advice of other Trek fans as to completely skip it and consider the penultimate episode to be the true finale.

I play a lot of board games; Carcasonne, Power Grid, Catan, 7 Wonders, all the usual stand-bys. There's also this fantastic little card game called Chrononauts that I enjoy. And, of course, Ticket to Ride. I have friends who like to call it "Ticket to Rosemary Wins" so I usually only get to play it online. Amusingly enough, amongst the online community with their mad strategists and such, I'm merely an average player.

And lens flare. Don't forget that there was lens flare. Abrams does love himself some lens flare. In all seriousness, I'm a second generation Trek fan; my mom had me indoctrinated from pretty much the womb. I enjoyed the heck out of the Abrams films, but it's true, they weren't really Trek. They sort of waved at Trek as they warped right past it with terrible science and lots and lots of lens flare.