Wapsi Square Forum

AnotherFairportfan wrote: ↑Sat Sep 05, 2020 10:00 pm In case you don't know about it, "Shattered Starlight" (set in Montreal} is about a former magical girl who works in the "Cafe le Dead End".

I have this in my favorites, but never got very far reading it... made it to page 18, and haven't revisited it since... Of course, having completely, or mostly completely, forgotten the story, I'll have to start again at the beginning.

Speaking of the beginning of said webcomic, the first thing I noticed when following your link was the subway sign, which said "Côte Verte", when it should have said "Côte Vertu"...

I'll have to revisit this soon...

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:51 am Speaking of the beginning of said webcomic, the first thing I noticed when following your link was the subway sign, which said "Côte Verte", when it should have said "Côte Vertu"...

Interesting. I sort of had the impression the author might live in or very near Montreal

AnotherFairportfan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 8:53 pm

lake_wrangler wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2020 12:51 am Speaking of the beginning of said webcomic, the first thing I noticed when following your link was the subway sign, which said "Côte Verte", when it should have said "Côte Vertu"...

Interesting. I sort of had the impression the author might live in or very near Montreal

You're right, she does:

Shattered Starlight's [url=https://www.shatteredstarlight.com/about/]About[/url] page wrote:The author
Nicole Chartrand is a concept artist in the game industry by day, and a comic creator by every other waking moment pretty much. She has a lot of feelings about video games, comics, manga, anime and fantasy/sci-fi novels. She lives in Montreal with her spouse, is probably drinking coffee right now and will definitely talk your ear off about Bloodborne if you give her half a chance.

(Emphasis mine)

You know, I may just have to wait a bit, before going back to read that comic: I fear if I go now, I may end up looking for errors pertaining to Montreal, rather than to lose myself in the story...

We'll see.

I haven't started reading that comic again, but it occurred to me that the name discrepancy might be in the same way that other webcomics distort brand names, to avoid legal troubles... like the one comic that has WacDonald's and Sandwich King, and so on.

Or it might just be a typo...

...or it might be a more-or-less subtle attempt to establish that This Is Not Your World Monkey Boy...

Kinda reminds me of an episode of that old show Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. There was some law against using magic to conjure up name brand items, so they had to drink Popsi and eat Schnickers bars.

On an unrelated note, I'd been having some fun making characters for D&D (5th edition), and one of them is loosely inspired by Cori, the half-orc kindergarten teacher.

Alkarii wrote: ↑Fri Sep 11, 2020 5:49 amThere is no such thing as a science experiment gone wrong.

In every science experiment you either get the result you expected and thus add support to your theory (win!), or get a different result and are on track to learn something new (win!).

Unfortunately, sometimes the new thing you learn is that someone forgot to plug in some of the equipment.

A younger astronomer was researching exoplanets and was ready to reveal a blockbuster -- a planet with a 1 year orbit, just like earth! Upon closer investigation, (s)he realized that with all the complex calculations involved, the one thing they missed was to remove the effect of earths orbit around the sun.

So, they published a paper to that effect to show what happens when you overlook the small stuff!

In particle physics, every experiment for the past 10 or 12 decades has proven that they need a bigger accelerator.

Typeminer wrote: ↑Sat Sep 12, 2020 12:23 pm In particle physics, every experiment for the past 10 or 12 decades has proven that they need a bigger accelerator.

I think THAT theory is well-supported by now...

Warrl wrote: ↑Sat Sep 12, 2020 4:30 pm

Typeminer wrote: ↑Sat Sep 12, 2020 12:23 pm In particle physics, every experiment for the past 10 or 12 decades has proven that they need a bigger accelerator.

I think THAT theory is well-supported by now...

It's actually a bit more complicated than that.

Researchers have been working with a big neutrino "telescope" called IceCube for several years. It's a array of sensitive photodetectors sunk in the Antarctic icecap at the South Pole. When a neutrino interacts with a particle in the ice (a very rare thing) it creates a shower of particles moving at almost the speed of light. As each slows down it gives off a pulse of light, and the paths and strengths of these light cones lets you figure out what direction the neutrino came from and how high its energy was..

There's a new detector array being researched and developed... this one will be sunk deep in the ocean, in the North Atlantic. As I understand it, it will be larger, more sensitive, and have better spatial resolution.

So, sometimes, the experiments show that you need a bigger particle decelerator!

You can't ever have too much liquid xenon!

Ummm, yes you can.

The neutrinos which were detected using the LArTPC systems, no longer exist. They are shattered and dead. They argon to meet their maker.

That distant rumble is the Pun Jar, awakening from it's long sleep....

(Like Godzilla...)

This is a cover i did for an apazine a few years ago - the image is an antineutrino detector which hadn't yet been filled with the working fluid - alkylbenzene.
. .
The rows and rows of domes are photodetectors designed to catch the scintillation from anti-neutrino annihilation

{The zine was half-legal-size - 7" x 8.5" - and the cpver was a wrap-around}

It was the NASA APOD for 23 May 16. {https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160523.html}

I'm kind of reminded of the room with the fizzy lifting drinks from Willy Wonka.

Alkybenzene, ain't that what kept that guy alive in 'the Andromeda Strain'?