Kaymyth

He's so squeaky!

Admittedly, I tend to look at any and all religions (including my own) in terms of their historical origins, development, and interaction with different cultures over the centuries. Religious traditions change because it's in human nature to constantly question and reinterpret things. It's actually kind of frustrating; there's a lot we don't know about the ancient Egyptian religion and its history. Millennia of change and absorption of different cultures and incorporating those traditions into their own pantheon - there's a rich depth of knowledge that we've simply lost because so little that was written survived to this day. Just imagine how much more we'd know - not just of the Egyptian culture, but every ancient culture - if the Library of Alexandria hadn't been torched.

Give us time and we'll be back to normal. Eventually.

In addition to what Cog said, I would also put forth the suggestion that perhaps if you focused on making jokes that were actually funny, rather than insulting or annoying or outright offensive, you might get a better reception.

naproxen and a heating pad, stat

That really strikes me as an inappropriate use of a term that is not in keeping with the Shard's all-ages atmosphere.

Nah, you don't handle UFOs, you handle terrestrial phenomena. Like Bigfoot. And per our conversation off the Shard, it is true that there are certain cases where we have Bigfeet who also ride around in UFOs. However, these things are kept completely separate from each other. You track the Bigfeet (and the Loch Ness Monsters, and the Jersey Devils...) My team only worries about UFOs. We don't really care who's riding in those UFOs - aliens, Bigfeet, or whatever - so long as they're filing all of the correct UFO paperwork and we know where they're being sighted. If the oversight group wants to talk about the fact that there are Bigfeet involved, they can wander down the entire two rows that separate us over to your group. Because you care about who is a Bigfoot. We do not.

Speaking as a 39-year-old who is routinely mistaken for being a decade younger than that - yes. Yes, you will. Unfortunately, it's going to be a couple of decades before you hit that point.

There is a group in my company that has recently gotten a certain amount of oversight into some of the things that my team does. We have been very diligent in explaining things to them; what we do, how we do it, and what all of the things mean. For example, we explained very clearly (multiple times) that "UFO" does, in fact, stand for "Unidentified Flying Object." We explained what criteria we use to classify* said objects and what information we need to gather about them. And we also emphasized very heavily the part where they are all flying. So why, then, did they come to us today asking, "So how do you handle ground-based UFOs?" WE DON'T. You know why? BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING. *Disclaimer: this is not actually what I do, though the joke wound up fitting this specific situation to a level of appropriateness that I would never have expected.

There actually is a large amount of extant evidence that Judaism is an offshoot of a much older, polytheistic religion. The Garden of Eden was just Y's little corner of Creation; the other gods had their own places and their own people. This is actually where the "who did Adam and Eve's sons marry?" plot hole came from.

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure I have it down quite yet. Flirting is hard for introverts, yo.

It...it was so dark...

Yep. Also, dry air tends to create more static electricity, which I why I refer to the advent of late fall as The Time of the Zapping. (ThinkGeek sells these great little keychain things that allow you to discharge static without pain. They're wonderful.)

I hate you.

The only surefire way to remove an earworm is to replace it with an even more annoying and catchy earworm. That's right. "Yellow Submarine" is your only salvation.

My creative writing juices have finally kicked back in! ...you know, now that NaNo is almost over. I have zero chance of hitting 50k, but at least I have momentum now. This means that once I finish the zero draft of Riding the Storm, I will go back and finish the final revision of Swift as Steel. Then I can start putting it up while I dive into the zero drafts for the rest of Eva's story, then rewrite Riding the Storm and send it off to alpha and beta readers. Some of this order may be subject to change; there's the possibility that I may push through and write the zero drafts of the short story bridge between books 2 and 3, and then book 3 as well, so that I have all of the big events sitting in front of me. My timeline needs a serious standardizing, so I might need to have the full story in zero draft form before that final tightening draft of the first book.

OK, let's see how I can totally mis-explain this and maintain my [Redacted], Inc cover... Let's say we track UFO sighting reports. We have an electronic database of every UFO, along with a file for it for anytime that UFO appears anywhere. (Just assume that we can tell which UFOs are seen more than once. I know, the metaphor really doesn't make sense, but go with it anyway.) We have a master set of files for domestic UFO sightings. Underneath that, we have a subset of them that we'll call green glowy UFOs. Because they're special, and we need to track them separately, so we keep their files separate. Well, I've started a project to clean up the UFO file cabinets. Come to find out, nobody has pulled out any of the files for debunked/explained UFOs since sometime in 2003, leaving us with a huge number of files that we don't need anymore just taking up space. Compounding this problem, apparently back in the 90s, my predecessors at [Redacted], Inc for reasons unknown deemed it necessary to keep TWO separate files for each green glowy UFOs - one in the green glowy UFO file cabinet, and one in the general domestic UFO file cabinet. This is inefficient and annoying. So now, not only am I pulling out all of the files for the debunked UFOs, I am combining the duplicate files for all of the green glowy UFOs. This is a slow process and is a pain in my behind, but at least it gets me out of my cube and moving around a bit. Oh, and I am also finding that we are missing a lot of files for our UFO sightings, so I'm going to have to pull information for all of those ones out of the electronic tracking system and create new UFO files, lest our auditors come through someday and get angry at us for not having all of our UFO records properly in place.

You know what? If we're all wasting our time, then we should just waste it doing things we love and doing small things to make other people happy. Cause if there's no big cosmic bar by which we're measured, then the little things count more. (You are never bothering, for you are our Quiver and we likes you.)

Nah, it's cool. I'm used to it. There aren't many people on the forum who have 40 breathing down their neck like I do. On the bright side, I am now old enough to thoroughly enjoy looking a decade younger than I actually am, so there's that. Thanks, DNA! It does put me in a bit of an outlier for PoGo. I wasn't in the right age bracket when Pokemon originally came out to get into it, which means I'm one of those very rare people in my age bracket playing it who doesn't have kids.

....oh, you were in college. And I'm back to feeling old. Back in the mid-oughts, I dated a guy for a bit who was super in Homestar with his roomies. I remember finding it a bit odd, but amusing in proper doses. And Trogdor kind of stuck, because duh, it's Trogdor.

I feel your pain, man.

Thank goodness SOMEONE around here is old enough to get my jokes.

As things are completed, I plan on putting them up on the Cosmere Fanfic board. Swift as Steel just needs some final revising before it's ready for primetime. The rest is going to get done as it gets done, but I definitely have to get through it all. I need to finish shaking out my rookie writer mistakes on this stuff before I can really start working on original fiction.

Yes. It's Mistborn Era 2 stuff; original characters and storyline kind of dancing around the main canon stuff.