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I thought the actor playing him was so loud and obnoxious with every line, I couldn't stand it whenever he was on screen. I much preferred the luxury yacht chase scene (you don't realize how fast those things can go until the start churning the water!) and the musical interlude/dream sequence. The colors and such in that part were amazing, and I loved how all the paired lines rhymed, even though all the lyrics weren't in English.

—doctorlit, wanting more (spoilers)

(I didn't get an email that I had gotten a response. Sorry for the awkward days-old response time.)

Coca-Cola gets its name from two ingredients it no longer contains: cocaine and kola nuts. It began as Pemberton's French Wine Coca, a wine fortified with cocaine, which was legal at the time. When prohibition came about John Pemberton created a new recipe which did not contain alcohol, and called it Coca-Cola. This version did still have cocaine, considered temperance advocates a safer alternative to alcohol. With the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, cocaine was removed from the Coca-Cola formula.

Vin Mariani, another brand of coca wine, was endorsed by such notables as Queen Victoria, Pope Leo XIII, Pope Saint Pius X, Ulysses S. Grant, and Thomas Edison, who claimed it helped him stay awake longer.

Time period, location, role, wealth, culture, all kinds of stuff. If you're looking for the most common, though, you need look no further than the spear. They're cheap, simple, easy to make, easy to use, easy to train with, and they work especially well for groups in formation. With a long enough spear one soldier can help out the next three or four down the line. They were basically the standard for centuries and dozens of cultures, from the Greeks to the Japanese. At least for infantry, which is all I'm really qualified to talk about. I believe Akrinor, Ekyl, and Maslab are more knowledgeable than I, but don't quote me on that.

Of course, as I mentioned, there are variations. A particularly notable example being the Romans. While they essentially copied the Greek Hoplite style of warfare in their early days, they later transitioned to shock infantry, charging into battle, throwing their pila, then stabbing with the gladius.

In general, though, the sword was more popular for self defense than warfare, somewhat akin to modern handguns.

I want to read it.

(I totally love this. This is hilarious.

I know a German exchange student at my school, but does she exist? Gasp.)

-Twistey

Because you sure are evil, Ix. :-P

So, I've been lurking on the Wiki and making teeny little edits every so often, and having seen one of my agents on the front page, I thought back to a Discord conversation that seemed somewhat critical of people simply freely putting agents in the Featured Agents bin with the greenlighting of just a couple of people rather than the whole community. In my case especially it seemed too self-serving and unfair to the community at large. Nobody as far as I'm aware has addressed this since then, though, and it's especially telling that nobody's acknowledged the Featured Agent box for months now. Sarah Squall has been on the front page since last year, and I just don't think having the Featured Agent remain unchanged for as great a length of time as it has would look that good (since it might give the impression that people have been favoring a particular agent for way too long).

With that being said, I'm opening up this thread for your thoughts on: 1) the prospect of deciding a featured agent by community vote, and 2) how often to change the Featured Agent page. I think for the latter it used to be every month, but with the stagnation of the feature, I think agents even before Sarah have been featured for longer than that. Also, I'd like to know what qualities the community in general could use to justify a nomination for a featured agent, such as what sort of impression they've left on readers and audiences or significance in-story. This way we won't have to put forth suggested agents out of egotistical favoritism, and the people featured going forward can be reliably viewed as a standard of sorts for what both agents and the Boarders writing them should strive to be.

Obviously, given that I put Sarah on the front page in the first place just so one of my agents could be featured, I'm in a terrible position to nominate anyone at all. But at the very least I hope this discussion can help us as a group think about what it means to be the first character new readers will see once they check out the PPC Wiki for the first time.

With that I'm done rambling for now, and I really gotta get back to panicking over my urgent work deadline. Let the featured agent discussions begin!

Instead of killing your darlings, why not psychologically scar them for the rest of their lives instead? >:)

... they never said 'leave them dead'. ^_~

(Seriously though I have done that far too often.)

hS

Thanks for letting me know. It was still funny either way. :)

Tom shared a flat, because there are only so many cleared accommodations for Laundry types (especially anyone who knows anything, which he does). So yeah.

Just look at Dafydd for proof of that. :P

Taxes are one of them. If you think hanging out in a multi-verse spanning pocket dimension is going to keep the tax collectors from finding you, then you have another think coming.

-Phobos

The punch line was very well delivered and made me laugh out loud.

I do have one question, though: Where is this set? Because if it's in the PPC, I don't think taxes are actually a thing there... Hm.

*shrugs*

Rule of Funny either way. Nice work. :)

Main weapons changed based on how much money you had.

Farmers were often pressed into service, and brought their farm implements to bear in battle. It's easy to train someone who uses a pitchfork all day to use a spear or polearm. They made up the bulk of the forces, so long handled weapons were very common. They also worked great against mounted foes, so that's good.

The richer you were, the more metal could be incorporated into a weapon. Swords were the mark of nobility because they could afford them. However, these were people more likely to be on a horse during combat, so they used weapons more suited to mounted combat. Flails and maces, both of which can best be described as a lot of metal on a stick, are great from horseback. Just hold your arm out and dome some peasants as you ride by. Try that with a sword (scimitars and other curved blades excepted) and you're likely to lose it on the first hit.

Swords were more used in settings like duels and tournaments, where the artistry of sword work could shine. Little artistry to be found in the mud of an actual battlefield.

-Phobos, war hammer enthusiast

There are other people in the PPC who know a lot more about historical European martial arts than I do, so take this with a grain of salt...

From what I understand, polearms were the main weapon in a battle. They offer a lot of reach and power; a sword (especially a one-handed sword) just can't compete most of the time. There are a few videos on YouTube of people going into more detail about this, and some really cool demonstrations by weapon enthusiasts and instructors.

And we're... kind of a multi-purpose choir? We've done Mozart and "old classical", but we've also done modern pieces like "Even When He Is Silent" (VERY tearjerky, especially if you look into the story behind it.) and "Flight Song" (not as well known, but it was written in the last decade or so and I love it).

A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet. The best-known one in English is of course The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, but there are others, and many of them are glorious.

For instance, some time ago I ran into a perfect pangram (ie, a sentence containing every letter exactly once; Wikipedia charmingly uses the term 'an anagram of the alphabet'):

Fjord-bank cwm glyphs vext quiz.

... or 'the runes in the valley beside the fjord irritated the professor'. Assuming you accept 'cwm' as an English word (it's Welsh originally), the archaic spelling of 'vexed', and the use of 'quiz' to mean a professor, it's perfect!

Meanwhile, on the more intelligible side, Kaitlyn recently came across this marvel:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!

At only 29 letters, it only duplicates a, o, and u, and is of course amazing.

I would be remiss not to mention here the book Ella Minnow Pea, which is pretty much an exploration of 'what if pangrams got out of hand'. I bought it for Kaitlyn a few years back and it's hilarious. ^_^

hS

And what context are we talking about? Do you mean 'people didn't go everywhere in swords just in case they needed them', or 'in battle, swords were not used as primary weapons, in favour of [something?]'?

hS

For a brief moment, as you try to resolve the paradox, your consciousness splits to follow different paths, superimposed on each other. Normally, this waveform of you would collapse to give a single outcome, and you would go on your way none the wiser.

But now you have an impossible cube. If you are a cat in a box, then the impossible cube allows you to be outside the box at the same time. All of your superpositioned actions have occured!

You are Mozart, wealthy composer of opera in the strange language of the mysterious voice. Yet you are simultaneously a child, innocent of all that is going on. Simultaneously, you have a complicated relationship with your mother; but since Freud is Austrian, and since we're doing the Many Worlds thing, your mother is now the also-Austrian Erwin Schrödinger.

In the music of the impossible cube, the Bratwurst maze falls away. The mysterious voice screams, Die mysteriöse Stimme schreit!, and fades into nothing.

Level One Complete

-Location: Einbahnstraße, Ausfahrt, possibly Germany
-Weather: Wetter
-Objective: Determine existence status of Germany

hS

Words, Zing, words...you know some better ones. Use them.

You're ​never really sure, you know? Especially with a character who's been somewhat inactive for a few years, stories-wise. So, yeah, glad to hear it (and no need to be intimidated or whatever: as people go, I'm generally the nice and friendly type).

The puppy sends his thanks. He's...okay, I keep trying to use the wrong language here. Content/satisfied/pleased is roughly what I want here, and that's what he is with the attention. And you should see him when the dog walker comes: although my roommate knows her through friends, she'd never really visited before, so now the dog thinks of her as *his* friend, the one whose sole purpose in coming here is to give him attention and take him for a nice long walk. The only difference between that and how he sees all other visitors is that the walk is guaranteed (and none of the silly two-leggers who live with him will try to take some of the attention for themselves)!

And thanks! If I have even half a draft by the time you've finished all that (assuming you're either in the exam period now or going to be soon), I'll call it a success. My school term is ongoing, so I unfortunately can't go "ooh, summer--time to write!" and have that work out well. Still, I'm writing it in spare bits of time, so it is moving. And thanks for volunteering! The more betas the better, I expect; beyond that generally being a good thing, this is probably going to be long and something I want to really work very well. Think Cale Sèche, except, you know, a non-cowritten mission. I am intending it to have a good deal of character exploration, though, so that's another commonality. Also hopefully interesting to more than just me and the two or so people I've been running my main ideas by so far.

Anyway. Good luck with your exams, and enjoy the trip! It sounds like fun. What kind of things does your chorale sing?

~Z