Everyone has a To-Do List; even the Queen of the Succubi has one. A dear friend sent me such a list for Tera, the Queen of the Succubi, and I have to admit that I laughed over it … But then the thought came … What really is her …

 

To-Do List
By TeraS

 

Everyone has one, or two, or sometimes more than that. They know it as “The List”: that long, rambling thing that reminds them of all of the things they need to do. No matter who they are, that list is there, somewhere, tugging at their minds and telling them what’s next on the agenda. Some manage to focus that list down to a shorter length, somehow managing to put into focus what they really have to do and nothing more.

Then there’s Tera and her own list. She keeps it folded into a small square in the pocket of her long, red jacket, and she looks at it every day. The paper has turned yellow with time, the folded edges being torn slightly when she retrieves it from that pocket every morning right before kissing her Eternal and before she steps outside into the Realm. Depending on the day, the things on her list happen, one way or the other, and, as such, the list isn’t really in any particular order.

And one particular item on that list happens every moment.

On this morning, after looking at the list and putting it away, Tera spent the morning with her Eternal. This wasn’t anything really special or needed to be. She simply shared a mug of hot chocolate with him, shared a kiss and a snuggle now and then. Here and there she would tease him a bit, whispering what she intended to do with him later that evening with a can of Redi-Whip. A little touching up of her lipstick, a brush of fingers through her hair came with a sultry look and then, after one more hug and a bit of tail twining, she made her way into the Realm.

As she walked through the Realm, she encountered her sister, Rachel, the two hugging each other tightly. Rachel seemed to be concerned about something, and Tera held her hand lightly, offering her time, her love, and more to her sister. The pair talked, giggled, and by the time Rachel needed to be off on her way elsewhere, there was a glow about them both, Rachel a little more bubbly and happy, Tera a little more the sultry, passionate Queen that she was.

She walked a bit further along, and Song came into view, ponytail swaying behind her, a need in her eyes for her lover to hold her, touch her, let her melt into her arms. Tera’s smile was simmering with heat, love, and desire for her Song as they drew close to each other. The kiss was long and soulful, the moan from Song in her desire enflaming her passions. Tera held her Song closely, a lick of her tongue over Song’s lips, a caress of fingers over Song’s hip, Song’s need to submit to Tera becoming a lovely wet heat in her core. The breathless purr from Tera was met with a giggle of surprise when Tera suggested they needed to go … shopping, for heels … among other things.

That led to Song being drawn away in Tera’s wake, being the victim of Tera’s sense of fashion in a number of shops in the Realm. By the time the pair had finally found something suitable—which wasn’t all that simple considering Tera’s constant teasing and, for Song, achingly wonderful seduction. Song was awash in her love, warmed by the knowledge of her lover’s need for her. Tera watched her Song glow as she left to sing to the Realm of her bliss, her love, her wonder in the soul that was Tera. Tera’s own glow became a bit brighter, a little more encompassing.

Entering the Palace, Tera passed an alcove and then stopped, peering inside. A hooded and cloaked man stood there watching her, his features covered in shadow save for his chin and warm smile.

Her glow washed the shadows away, her arms drawing him to her, her tail wrapping around the waist of her Legion. He smiled at her words, nodded at her thoughts, and, at least once, chuckled when she promised she’d get him for something he had done before. This was their way, how it had always been. There was nothing but love and respect between them both, it was how they were. A telling game of wits, of being teased and not fearing in what the other thought, for they both knew already.

When Legion bid her well, there was a bit of fire in his eyes, a strength in knowing that she cared, held him in her thoughts, and always would, and he the same. That glow about Tera remained, and, even in the shadows where Legion dwelled, there was light within him, enflamed and with him always.

This was how her day was. Every soul she encountered parted a little better, a little more than they were before: some teased, some taught, some wrapped in passion. In every case, the glow around them, in their souls, was a little more than it was before.

Upon the falling of night, she returned home after what was, all in all, a good day. A fuzzy red sweater found itself hugging her curves, a pair of blue jeans hugging her hips. A kettle was put on, the waiting for the steam coming soon after. Tea was poured into two mugs and then she looked out the window towards the fence. The warmest smile of the day graced her lips as she picked up the tray and made her way there to meet her heart.

Her glow was there with her, warming the air, shining upon her heart, waiting at the fence as she approached. The tray balanced on the fence, a warm hug was shared, and then the tea was offered, as her heart offered some cookies of his own. The two spent their time, as was their way, talking about family, about theology, about the worlds they shared, about the lives they led. Tea was sipped, the cookies were nibbled on … or used to express a particular point and give it emphasis.

The glow surrounded them both, that of her heart mixing with Tera’s own, of a simple understanding being more than it was—the finding of light within two souls, that light being doubled and doubled again in the acceptance, in the understanding they shared. The time came, as it always did, when the two hugged, promised to see one another tomorrow, and parted once more. As they did so, the glow remained with them both, keeping with them, the light brighter than it had been, a reflection of what each gave to the other and what was returned tenfold.

Later, when Tera was curled in bed with her Eternal, a small light shone in a pocket of her red jacket as it hung nearby. Within that pocket was her list, but not as it was at the start of the day. The paper was pure white. The paper was whole. The writing was clear, as if the words had been written moments ago. The list had been with Tera since she had been given the paper by her mother and asked to write her list upon it.

 

Brighten The World Around Me
Learn From Those That Love Me
Tease Those Around Me
Look Super Hot
Buy New Shoes

 

Beside each one there was a little checkmark noting that she had done so, and did so every day. From the first to the last it reflected her life and what she had learned throughout.

It wasn’t so much a To-Do List as it was an Always-Do List, after all …

paschal: of or relating to Easter.

Some game books, I read them and I immediately want to play.

This doesn't mean what you think it means. I don't mean: I read the book and decide the game is good and better than all the others and has an awesome premise or system. I just mean they have a weird something where I feel like I need to play them, soon, for some vague reason I do not entirely understand that is not related to how much I like the game itself considered outside the book.

Examples:

Call of Cthulhu is better than Chill 2e in nearly every way, and I will and have run CoC much more than Chill but, to me, the (often very well-illustrated) CoC book is just a book--whereas the Chill book is like play me, play me, play me...

B/X D&D has no special attraction for me over AD&D, 5e or any other D&D (or Warhammer, for that matter)--but B/X is the one where, flipping through, I think I have to playyyyy...

As a system, I like DC Heroes much less than Marvel FASERIP--but the DC book is the one that I just end up staring at over and over. And the new DC adventures with the beautiful color pictures? Don't care at all.

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I think I know why, but it's weird:

All these books are under-illustrated.

The illustrations aren't bad, and they aren't just sparse (though they are that)--they also studiously avoid the central ideas of the game.

While Call of Cthulhu gives you images of cultists and cosmic monsters pretty early on, here are Chill's first three pictures:



...utterly competent, yes, but absolutely nothing about horror here. In fact, I don't think there's a single picture of a pc-like character confronting a monster or even a signifier of horror (a bat, a corpse, a clue, a pool of blood) anywhere in the book.

There's PCs, there's monsters, there's a spooky house--but no scenes.

Similarly, here's some typical DC Heroes art:


There are superheroes--but they're not fighting villains, evading deathtraps or interacting with the dazzlingly glossy DC universe in any way. They're just there.

These are both from Mayfair--who had a house style--but Basic D&D also has some of this. It has plenty of images of D&Dish characters doing D&Dish things, but the really typical activity--adventurers confronting exotic creatures in an exotic environment--is missing (unless you count the dull monsters in the intro adventure, which I don't, really). None of the pictures are as evocative as that one in the AD&D PHB of the dwarves confronting the magic mouth, for instance, or A Paladin In Hell.

There is a weird knife-edge here for me: no illustration (Shock, Dread) or generic illustration (AW, Top Secret SI) do nothing for me. Great and lavish illustration I appreciate, but don't give me this weird must-play vibe.

It's something like this: the heroes are illustrated, clearly and well. The villains are illustrated, clearly and well. But the book has not smashed them together yet--it has not described the connective tissue that puts them together.

There is this teetering feeling that something needs to happen--like a chessboard all lined up, just sitting there. Just as all the sofas and hay bales become ominous as soon as the movie starts because you know it's a horror movie, all the illustrated banalities become animated with possibility when you know they're supposed to result in dazzling murder, confrontations on Apokolips, the domains of Asmodeus.

Like you're reading...

The alligator is a large, powerful reptile, sometimes growing to a length of almost 15feet. It makes its home in rivers and swamps, and...

...and this is undeniably pointless prose on its own but underneath there's this shadow awareness that spends the whole time you read dreaming up horror-things to do with an alligator.

And something in that is powerful--because RPG texts depend on giving intimations of potentia--that dizzy, wonderful first-page-of-the-novel feeling where things could go in any direction. And when you finally do read the introductory adventure at the back of the book it is always so disappointing where--given all these options--they narrowly chose to take it. Better to spin out the readers dreaming about what's possible instead of subjecting them to the leaden realities of modules and examples where the monster waiting to ambush them is Sturgeon's Law.

I don't know if this feeling is unique to me or, even if it's not, whether it can really be usefully harnessed--who would want to intentionally create the feeling of a half-made thing? And is it even really possible to do genuinely well?

Part of this might just be the simplest trick of literature--describe in words so much more than you can show, creating a semisensed world in the mind--but supplemented with solid pictures of the principle characters to ground everyone at the table in the same reality.

I only know I keep staring at these books, year after year, not running them, not wanting to--really, when I think about it--but feeling like not doing it leaves something strangely unsaid.


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Hovertext: In fact, by this standard, the New Testament is the least true of all religious documents.

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 OH DANG IT'S ABBY HOWARD'S BAH EAST KEYNOTE!!

 

 

Hovertext: Maybe this is what those Quantum Wellness people are talking about.

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The post Heretics enjoy candy without the guilt. appeared first on Indexed.

Images for each of the holidays taking place on March 20th.

Holidays & Days of Note (and there are a lot of them) for March 20, 2016

*   Spring Equinox First day of Spring 

*   Ostara

*   World Storytelling Day

*   Sun-Earth Day also known as International Earth Day (U.N.) Not to be confused with Earth Day.

*   Feast of the Supreme Ritual and Equinox of the Gods (Thelema)

*   Palm Sunday

*   International Astrology Day

*   International Day of Happiness (United Nations)

*   Extraterrestrial Abductions Day

*   First day of Autumn (Southern Hemisphere) Giving the whole Earth a sort of Yin / Yang for today.

The post Oh my god. Look who’s here. appeared first on Indexed.

So, no.

No blinking this time.

apostasy: a total desertion of or departure from one's religion, principles, party, cause, etc.

psittacism: mechanical, repetitive, and meaningless speech.

Hovertext: Oh, wow, your Mom's here too? This place is like a freakin' Wal-Mart.

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catawampus: askew; awry.

Know your dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash.

OK, so you can get a little over the top about these, but I do notice when a hyphen is used to add a thought in text rather than the em dash which is obviously better made for it — and much nicer than using parentheses (). And — to go the full mile — why not use an en dash when you’re separating your page numbers 1–5 or months May–Sep next time?

Didn’t spot that? 

- hypen

– en dash

— em dash

Most writing tools and OSes have tricks to do these automatically for you.

autoschediasm: something that is improvised or extemporized.

factotum: any employee or official having many different responsibilities.

bissextus: February 29th: the extra day added to the Julian calendar every fourth year.

Hovertext: Alternate method: Convert humans to hydrogen, float to space, reassemble.

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Right – 1: opposite of left. 2: correct.
Rite – ceremony, ritual.
Wright – worker, craftsperson.
Write – oh, jeez, just try to define writing, wouldja? Let's see... to communicate using visual/tactile symbols that represent words/concepts. Or something like that. Sheesh. If you're reading this, you know what writing is!

Starting in 1975 The Church of All Worlds, along with publishing the Green Egg started to put out the first and as far as I know only Neo-Pagan comic book (sorry Wonder Woman and Thor don’t really count) called Mythos it only lasted for five or six issues, but one did at least feature art by big time comic artist Joe Staton.

I had all of the issues but over the years, moving here and there, have lost all of them; I haven’t even been able to find images of the covers other than the one above. 

Does anyone know where I can find scans of the other issues?

Niagara Straw

What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw?[1]This question was in reference to this Amazon review of gummy bears—but before you click, be warned that it describes the reviewer's gastrointestinal response to the candy in rather memorable detail.

—David Gwizdala

One would get in trouble with the International Niagara Committee, the International Niagara Board of Control, the International Joint Commission, the International Niagara Board Working Committee, and probably the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence River Adaptive Management Committee.[2]Which is, if I'm understanding these organizational charts right, itself a supergroup made up of three committees for individual bodies of water. Also, the Earth would be destroyed.

Well, that's not quite right. At the risk of stating the obvious, the real answer is, "Niagara Falls wouldn't fit through a straw."

There are limits to how fast you can push fluids through things. If you pump a fluid through a narrow opening, it speeds up. If the fluid is a gas,[3]Gasses are fluids. I know that's weird, but many things are weird. it becomes "choked" when the speed of the gas flowing through the opening reaches the speed of sound. At that point, the gas flowing through the hole can't move any faster—although you can still get more mass to flow through per second by increasing the pressure, which compresses the gas further.

For water, a different effect causes it to choke. When a fluid flows through an opening fast enough, the pressure within the fluid drops due to the Bernoulli principle. Water always "wants" to boil, but is held together by air pressure. Without enough pressure, bubbles of steam form in the water. This is called cavitation.

When the water is forced through an opening at high speed, cavitation bubbles cause it to become less dense overall. Increasing the pressure—to try to push the water through harder—only makes it boil faster. (See page 17 here for a description of this process.)[4]Valve designers try to avoid creating these steam bubbles, because after the bubbles form, they quickly collapse as the pressure rises back up past the valve, and the force from that collapse can gradually eat away at plumbing. This keeps the total amount of water making it through the opening from rising, even if the water-steam mix moves at a higher speed.

Another limit on the water flow rate comes from the speed of sound. You can't use pressure to accelerate water through an opening faster than the speed of sound (in water).[5]It's sort of like a traffic jam—forcing more cars into the back of a traffic jam won't make the ones in the front come out faster. The analogy between traffic jams and choked flows isn't perfect, but I still like it, because it's fun to imagine someone trying to solve traffic jams by using a bulldozer to push more cars into them. However, water very rarely reaches this point, because "the speed of sound in water" is very fast. If you try to make water—which is pretty heavy—go that fast, it tends to start ignoring the turns in your pipes.

So how fast does Niagara Falls need to go to fit through a straw, and is it faster than the speed of sound? This is easy to figure out; all we need to know is the flow rate over the falls and how much area it needs to fit through.

The flow rate over Niagara Falls is at least 100,000 cubic feet per second, which is actually mandated by law. The Niagara river supplies a total of about 292,000 cubic feet per second to the falls, but much of it is diverted into tunnels to generate electric power. However, since people get mad if you turn off the world's most famous waterfall, they're required to leave at least 100,000 of those cubic feet per second flowing over the falls for everyone to look at. (50,000 at night or during the off-season). Sometime in the next few years, the falls may be turned off for maintanence. And probably to see what cool stuff they can find.

(Important note: If you divert the water into a straw, you'll be in violation of the 1950 treaty establishing the "100,000 cubic feet per second" limit. This is monitored by the International Niagara Committee, which consists of one American and one Canadian.[6]Currently, they are Aaron Thompson of Environment Canada and Brigadier General Richard Kaiser of the US Army Corps of Engineers. I'm guessing their enforcement protocol is just some variation on "filing a report," but I like to imagine that they're empowered to physically return the stolen water to the falls by any means necessary. They'll probably be upset with you, as will the other boards I mentioned earlier, so proceed at your own risk.)

A typical straw is about 7mm in diameter. To find out how fast the water flows, we just divide the flow rate by that area. If the result is greater than the speed of sound, our flow will probably be choked, which will lead to problems.

\[ \frac{100,000\text{ }\tfrac{\text{cubic feet}}{\text{second}}}{\pi\left ( \tfrac{7\text{ mm}}{2} \right )^2}=73,600,000\text{ }\tfrac{\text{meters}}{\text{second}}= 0.25c \]

Apparently, our water will be going one-quarter of the speed of light.

On the plus side, we don't need to worry about cavitation, since these water molecules would be going fast enough to cause all kinds of exciting nuclear reactions when they hit the walls of the straw. At those high energies, everything is a plasma anyway, so the concepts of boiling and cavitation don't even apply.

But it gets worse! The recoil from the relativistic water jet would be pretty strong. It wouldn't be enough to push the North American plate south, but it would be enough to destroy whatever device you were using to create the jet.

No machine could actually accelerate that much water to relativistic speeds. Particle accelerators can get things going that fast, but they're typically fed from a small bottle of gas. You can't just plug Niagara Falls into the accelerator input. Or, at least, if you did, the scientists would get awfully mad.

Which is for the best, since the power of the particle jet created by this scenario would be greater than the power of all the sunlight that falls on Earth. Your "waterfall" would have a power output equivalent to that of a small star, and its heat and light would quickly raise the temperature of the planet, boil away the oceans, and render the whole place uninhabitable.

And yet I bet someone would still try to go over it in a barrel.

The post The mob is not strategic. appeared first on Indexed.

internecine: mutually destructive.

Contranym.

A word that can be its own opposite. I learned this from Kathryn Schulz’ excellent article, What part of “No, totally” don’t you understand, about how “no, totally” came to mean “yes.” Contranyms — like heteronyms, portemanteaus, palindromes, and semordnilaps — are neat things to look out for. Like how you can dust something to pick up dust from a surface, and dust that surface to remove dust from it. So versatile. Or perhaps confusing.

HT @jonathan_hoare