Avatar of Penny

Status

Recent Statuses

20 days ago
Current Ethical issues aside, AI prose is just really bad.
3 likes
28 days ago
She wanted to read, she wanted to write, but the main thing she wanted was something to fight
4 likes
1 yr ago
Make it clear that you don't need him to be reading Dante tomorrow. Also suggest it would be fun if you had a private language that you could use to mock English speakers in secret.
5 likes
2 yrs ago
Luckily history suggests an infinite ability for people to be shit heads ;)
1 like
3 yrs ago
Achmed the Snake
1 like

Bio

Early 30's. I know just enough about everything to be dangerous.

Most Recent Posts


The world blazed in thousand fold relief. Ellie, through her new eyes, could see things with a clarity that was almost painful. Information poured into her mind from two sets of eyes, two sets of ears, two senses of touch but rather than overwhelming her with a glut of information it synergized into a crystalline perfection. Afterall she did have to minds with which to process it, and the additive effect was greater than the sum of its parts. Most of two minds anyway, sealed away in a corner of her consciousness, Madeline existed in a gentle reverie walled off, for the most part from what her erstwhile employee was using her body for. Ellie thought she was probably happier there, safe from the grief of her dead sister, segregated from the fear of a new and alien situation. Madeline’s lips curled with Ellie’s smile.

“Let me take a look at the wound,” Ellie-Madeline said. Unfamiliar fingers reaching out to examine Malone’s neck. There was a lot of blood and it looked extremely painful.

“Obsidian cuts cleanly, minimal crush trauma,” Ellie-Madeline noted, pressing the profilers head gently to the side. There were some surgeons who operated with obsidian scalpels as the stone could be fractured to a keener edge than even surgical steel. Malone was probably lucky that it hadn’t cut any major arteries.

“She left her bag… That is I left my bag at the terminal,” Ellie-Madeline continued. A frown touched her lips at the momentary slip up in control. Was there something wrong with the spell? That seemed unlikely, if a spell failed it usually did so during the opening moments due to some error or lack of focus. Ellie-Madeline banged against the chair beside Malone as her muscles moved independent of her own command, her head striking the window with a dull clunk. There was no pain, That particular aspect of Ellie-Madeline remained Madeline’s. Ellie-Madeline reached a curious finger to her lip where she had bloodied it against the glass. She peered at it for a moment perplexed. In the corner of her eye she saw the figure of Morgan slam Ellie into the side of the SUV. Focus fell away like a collapsing sand castle.

“What…” Ellie’s focus crashed back into her own body with the suddenness of ice giving way beneath a reckless skater. There was sudden intense vertigo as her mind struggled to adjust to two sets of inputs without the mental processing to handle it. Morgan was holding her against the side of the van and was snarling something at her. She blinked her eyes as the spell crumbled, one blink to Madeline’s blue and then one blink to her own green, her pupils dilating till they were nearly completely black. The world steadied and she heard a choked scream from the car in which her other self had been tending Malone. The door opened and Madeline tumbled out lip bloody and eyes wild with panic.

“Eleanor, Eleanor come back!” the woman whimpered her voice that of a scared child whose mother was nowhere to be found. Covering her eyes with her forearm, she shivered for a moment and then turned and vomited onto the grass beside the parked car. The effort seemed to drain her and she toppled to the side and curled into a fetal position. There was a sudden shocking vision of Madeline and Cassandra playing in a park as children, golden light streaming down from a sky Ellie had never seen. With and effort of will she blinked back psychic bleed from the aborted spell. The loss of intimacy was like a shock of cold water after making love and it twisted at her on a level below that of conscious thought.

“Miss Blackwood,” Ellie enunciated the syllables perfectly, her voice devoid of all expression but her emerald eyes smouldering with suppressed anger. From her fetal position Madeline also spoke the words in exactly the same tone and at exactly the same time, resulting in a disconcerting, almost ritualistic echo. It seemed Ellie wasn’t the only one experiencing bleed through.

“Kindly control yourself and remove your hands from me so that I might see to Miss Malone.” The backlash of the magic she had worked washed through her like a tropical evening, her skin prickling. Morgan knew enough about magic to know that both the binding and the possession would damage Madeline’s mind. All geas tore at the psyche, at an instinctive level the ensorcelled victim knew what was being done to them was a violation of their own free will. Given enough time, or a clumsiness practitioner it might lead to mental break down or worse T-Syndrome. Madelines voice faltered midway through the sentence and she shuddered, the last of mental entanglement fading.

“I’m sure you have your own business to which you should be attending,” Ellie concluded, laying unnecessary emphasis on ‘own business’ to make her point abundantly clear. She cast her gaze around her team, making the statement a general one after the fact.

Upon review need to slightly tone down the creepy mind magic before I post :P
If people will refrain from getting too injured tonight I will hopefully be able to work on a post
place holder
Sayeeda slept. It was never a mistake to sleep when you had time and one of the surest signs of a veteran was the ability to sleep anywhere at a moments notice. They had been in action of one sort or another for well over twenty four standard now and even the auto-doc with its purging chemicals didn't make up for old fashioned sleep. As usual her sleep was restless. Fragments of past battles flickered pas her as she dreamed, sometimes she saw faces of those she had killed, or saw comrades long dead. Many veterans had such dreams and she was grateful that she could sleep at all without the aid of drugs or booze.

She woke from half remembered terrors a few hours before the meeting, a thin sheen of sweat coating her body. The ship was quiet but Lonney hadn't alerted her via the comm so she had to assume that Neil wasn't in any trouble. Rolling out of bed she headed to the shower unit, stripped off and turned the water on as hot as she could stand. In space water was a luxury, but so long as they were hooked to the habs main water lines they had all they could use. She let the water run over her for nearly an hour, the head and pressure massaging away the ache of the past few days as best she could. Finally, when she could muster the energy, she turned the shower off and stepped out, drying and warping herself up in a towel. She didn't bother to brush her hair, it was short enough that it was rarely an issue.

From the back of the ship she heard a clank and headed back towards the engineering section. Neil was back there with an assemblage of junk and tools he had clearly just dragged aboard.

"Going into salvage are we?" she asked from the hatchway.

@POOHEAD189
@FantasyChic We all understand I think
"talks about dieting"


I'm not talking about dieting. I'm talking about overall characteristics of diet as a component of weight loss.
And so on. But hey eat like a pig and exercise like a Spartan if it makes you happy.

"Rather than increasing total energy expenditure linearly in response to physical activity, individuals tend to adapt metabolically to increased physical activity, muting the expected increase in daily energy throughput"

"The human body adapts dynamically to maintain total energy expenditure (TEE) within a narrow physiological range. Rather than increasing with physical activity in a dose-dependent manner, experimental and ecological evidence suggests the hypothesis that TEE is a relatively constrained product of our evolved physiology." - Constrained Total Energy Expenditure and the Evolutionary Biology of Energy Balance. Exerc Sport Sci Rev. 2015 Jul;43(3):110-6

"TEE adjusted for weight and age or PAL did not differ significantly between developing and industrialized countries, which calls into question the role of energy expenditure in the cause of obesity at the population level." - Energy expenditure in adults living in developing compared with industrialized countries: a meta-analysis of doubly labeled water studies. Am J Clin Nutr. 2011 Feb;93(2):427-41

"As expected, physical activity level, PAL, was greater among Hadza foragers than among Westerners. Nonetheless, average daily energy expenditure of traditional Hadza foragers was no different than that of Westerners after controlling for body size." Hunter-gatherer energetics and human obesity. PLoS One. 2012;7(7)

"variation in physical activity within the range engaged in by the US population is not modulating obesity risk. Only reduction in calorie intake will result in weight loss, whether done in isolation or together with increases in exercise." Physical activity does not influence obesity risk: time to clarify the public health message - International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 42, Issue 6, 1 December 2013, Pages 1831–1836

"No statistically significant changes were found in energy intake or nonexercise physical activity that could explain the different compensatory responses associated with 30 vs. 60 min of daily aerobic exercise. In conclusion, a similar body fat loss was obtained regardless of exercise dose" Body fat loss and compensatory mechanisms in response to different doses of aerobic exercise--a randomized controlled trial in overweight sedentary males. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2012 Sep 15;303(6)

"no differences were found based on different exercise durations and intensities in this group of sedentary, overweight women." Effect of Exercise Duration and Intensity on Weight Loss in Overweight, Sedentary Women A Randomized Trial. JAMA. 2003;290(10):1323–1330.

"PIs confirm that no difference would likely be observed between BWMP and diet-only programs in 95% of individual study settings." Diet or Exercise Interventions vs Combined Behavioral Weight Management Programs: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Direct Comparisons - Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Volume 114, Issue 10, October 2014, Pages 1557-1568
No one is arguing that exercise doesn't make you healthier, merely that it isn't the major factor in weight loss.

Well regarded studies exist in the New England Journal of Medicine, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The Journal of Obesity and Related Metabolic Disorders and Journal of the American Medical Association.
© 2007-2026
BBCode Cheatsheet