#diagrapher

[magicjudge]

Some cards, such as Inkfathom Witch, mention "unblocked creatures" without specifying that those creatures need to be attacking; does "unblocked" mean "attacking but not blocked" or does it also include creatures which are themselves blocking or which aren't in combat at all?

A creature only becomes an unblocked creature when it’s attacking and no blockers are declared against in the declare blockers step. (Or if it enters the battlefield attacking an unblocked, such as off of a Ninjutsu ability.) A creature that’s not attacking or a creature that’s attacking before blockers have been declared isn’t an unblocked creature.

[ununnilium]

Do you know where I can find copies of the text from magic: the gathering preconstructed deck packaging and inserts?

You know, I feel like I’ve seen them before on the Magic website, many years ago, but now, I’m really not sure...

[fierceawakening]

I think disarming police as a component of gun control isn't advocated enough. Pros: should assuage fears of gunnies about police state, murder by police officers is a big problem, U.K. seems to manage fine with unarmed police, in Australia we have an unarmed populace but armed police and it has resulted in people assaulting police with knives as a means of suicide and in one case someone successfully mugging a police officer for his gun.

That’s actually part of what I’d hope we can get to (though knowing politics I’m not sure how feasible that is.) My worry is that a heavily armed populace gives a heavily armed police force an excuse, and that the only way to fix this is some degree of de-escalation on both sides.

I am not sure how you get police to do that though, particularly now that the political environment is one where police getting military style arms and armor is celebrated by our government as “toughness.”

[argumate]

"Modern atomised liberalism can contain Amish enclaves, but not the reverse." Do you consider this evidence that modern atomised liberal cultures are superior to certain (all??) other cultures? Or do you consider it a problem with modern atomised liberalism that ought to be remedied?

superior in the sense of being more of an attractor state, that requires repressive efforts if you want to avoid it.

there is really only one question worth asking: can the community impose its will on a reluctant member? if the answer is no, then all the other cultures dissolve.

[luminousalicorn]

In Adventures in Effulgence, how did you decide to have five denominations of wishcoin from mundane pain and three more from supernaturally extreme pain, as opposed to some other numbers? How did you decide what levels of pain would produce what sorts of wish?

The concept of pain-based wish coins was stolen from “Daughter of Smoke and Bone”, which has five denominations, period.  (They also have cute names which kappa didn’t want to copy.)  Then we got all power-creep-y.  There is a denomination forthcoming that hasn’t been minted yet, if we ever get around to it.

[luminousalicorn]

Hi. I've just finished reading Goldmage (I really like your writing, by the way), and I'm curious how you got the idea for the story and how you decided what the sorts of magic in it would be? Is the answer clear enough for you to explain?

Goldmage came to me in a dream!  Two dreams specifically - the scene where Meea is fleeing the palace and the scene where Wiar says “stop me” were separate dreams, years apart, which I eventually wove together into a connected plot and single setting.

I don’t remember most of the details of developing the magic system except that I did particularly want to have magic that was costly, not D&D-style spells-per-day use-limited, not pain-limited the way some kinds of magic in glowfic are, and not abstractly education- or g-factor-limited in a way that’s hard to viscerally impart to the reader (”and then so-and-so studied for 16 hours, which is a large number, to produce the spell which took one paragraph to solve the problem”).  Nor did I want to be vague about how costly magic was, or go with the Harry Potter fanon solution of “exhaustion” (the fact that fanon has converged on this despite there being no canonical indication that wanded magic is use limited at all is I think a token of how important throttling any really good magic can be to plotting).

I knew from Dream #1 that there was “gold magic” which did stopped time.  It did stopped time and the character was still in a terrible hurry.

So I gave her a price and I came up with other things that would be useful/make sense in context of Dream #2, and gave them prices, and scattered broken mages across the landscape so that my time mage could be desperately urgent about every minute of her life and that would make sense.

[fierceawakening]

One real problem with modern GM is that herbicide resistance and pest resistance- by far the most common modifications of crops- could both be bad if they got into weed or wild populations; herbicide resistant weeds are hard to control and pest resistant plants in the wild can kill insects you don't want to kill (1 GM corn line was recalled 'cause its pollen was getting on nearby milkweed leaves and killing monarch caterpillars). Also, Monsanto specifically has done a lot of things wrong.

Thanks for that, it makes more sense than other stuff I’ve seen.

I don’t disagree that Monsanto has done a lot of bad things. I just think the way some people talk about GMOs is very polluted by woo.

[fierceawakening]

R.E. private email servers: I didn't look into that much, but I thought the scandal was at least partly about WHAT Clinton had SAID on her private email server?

Could be. But part of it seemed to be the idea she would use it at all.