The Nac Mac Feegles don't have blue skin, they just paint themselves blue. Anyone can paint himself blue... if we have to include every species that ever painted themselves blue, it's going to be an awfully long list.

I can put them in honorable mention, if it will make you feel any better.

Ooh, yes please. Can't forget them.

"Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! We willna be fooled again!"

Of course, please don't distract yourself too much from Page 100. Your fans are waiting with palpitating hearts.

Pitches! Tar!!

He must be hung by his own entrails.

Fetch the disemboweling knives!

Oooops...

NEVER MENTION THE UPD- Whoa, that was close!

and thanks for that Arioch, having them on the honorary list is perfect

don't mention them? seriously? last 3 times I did I was about right regarding the date of their delivery :p

Either my luck is reversed, or I'm slightly telepathic.

My guess is happiness in the next 2 weeks :p

You can be our one harbinger then.

But if you're wrong even once SO HELP YOU!

If you're telepathic, tell us when they'll scrap the BCS in favour of a playoff

do you honestly think that the people in charge would rather throw around large amounts of money, or watch sport in progress?

Honestly? Look to the Americas cup after it got won from the New Zealanders, they built multi million dollar boats and rather than just race them to see how awesome they were, instead they went off to court to argue the toss over the question of 'were their sails made in their home nation?' and similar pointless arguments, and continued to do so for many years after the race was originally scheduled.

These people have more money than sense in the first place, and find that arguing with lawyers is more amusing than actually sitting down and agreeing to doing things at a table and drawing up the rules together and ultimately sticking to them in faith of the intention of the rule rather than the wording.

I suppose they have to do SOMETHING to amuse themselves, I mostly wonder why they don't build paint-ball tanks and play in a wilderness somewhere instead.
I mean that is MY dream after all ^_^

And as for 'predictions' I just make educated measures of time and the difficulty of creating the pictures based on what I see in the WIP thread.
And creating a nice picture of that shuttle will take a while, and getting perspective of say a hanger picture with said shuttle at a certain angle will take another while.
So maybe 2 weeks?
Then again Arioch might remake the shuttle from scratch and we'll be waiting months :p

The letter of the law outranks its spirit

CJ: and loopholes and bastards using them are winners.

If you can win with half the effort of your opponent, then why not?

But even I don't tempt Murphy by discussing some things three times in one day :p

Once or twice usually suffices.

As a law student I can tell you that this is very often not the case. The only areas where this is the case are legal areas where you need extreme clarity and even then the spirit is usually upheld on the side of the judge by giving the lowest possible sentence possible. The legal expectations in those areas does tend to be required very very high.

In civil law though the spirit plays a huge role. Though obviously there's a lot of difference between nations.

The biggest places were the letter of the law is abused are not courts but arbitrary tribunals.

The thing is, it's medially not interesting to show how the spirit triumphed so usually what gets in the news and what gets talked about is a case where the spirit seems to have been trodded down on.

Essentially the letter of the law has been strongly weakened in Europe after the Nazis and Commies pretty much abused it. Since both those systems were strict positivistic it showed pretty massive issues with them. So most Euro continental systems tend to be combined ius naturalism and ius positivism systems.

Obviously the letter of the law must act in a certain supreposition to the spirit. Because legal expectation is based more around letter than the spirit.

This made my day.

Oh, and this

applies to them, too. Of course.

I despise the pony-meme and just about everything related to it on general principles.

That said ... the ponies (and bronies) are infinitely superior and preferable to Twipires and their ilk.

Why do we have to live in a world where that is true?

Somebody needs to redeem vampires asap.

-> Vampire Loroi!

Riess?

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter certainly seems to be a step in the right direction, but I doubt that it is enough to redeem them. Twilight did a hell of a number on vampires, and spawned a host of lame-ass vampires in the same general directions as twipires, capitilizing on the genre of emopires.

If it hadn't been Twilight making sparkly boyfriend vampires it would have been someone else, as you yourself pointed out that the trend it capitalized on was already well under way.

If it hadn't been Anne Rice making oversensual and emo vampires it would have been someone else, as the trends she in turn capitalized on were already under way.

If it hadn't been Bram Stoker reintroducing the aristocratic and sensual vampire into the public consciousness then it would have been someone else; when Dracula was written, horror and sensuality in literature were gaining popularity and all sorts of areas of 19th century fiction and lore were being essentially strip-mined by authors of varying-but-usually-low levels of competence to produce works to capitalize on that trend. Soon, perhaps sooner than you might think, someone would have made it really work.

It is already too late to win this fight at this stage. The only way to stop this chain reaction of events is to send some sort of human flesh-covered robot back in time to kill John Polidori, or, perhaps, John Polidori's mother before he is born. The trouble is the resistance will inevitably hear of this plan and will doubtless send one of their own back in time to protect John Polidori. We should hedge our bets and send multiple agents to multiple time periods using multiple approaches to killing John Polidori. Perhaps one of our attempts should be some sort of liquid metal robot, or maybe even an attractive girl robot. I'm not picky.

Ok I'll say it CUTE, and well done

Well Solemn, I think it would be both cheaper and more satisfying to pay for absurd amounts of Vampire Hunter D/Warhammer 40k crossover films and flood the market.

I thought the goal was to improve the situation.

That seems like more of a lateral move.

X-over? This comes directly to my mind...