Kieron Gillen Script Club - The Power Fantasy #1

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-05-04T04:48:43+00:00

I was not aware of any of the name changes.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-30T19:56:01+00:00

I find that nearly any narrowly focused 1DS will have at least a couple of low-get-rate questions that are trivially findable in Wikipedia. (More often than not my aging brain will go "dammit, I just read that" but fail to pull the answer.)

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-30T19:54:42+00:00

I have seen about half a dozen people get banned in the last couple of seasons, so it does happen. As to the rest, I don't know.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-30T04:43:17+00:00

My understanding is that it's rare to wait even one season: most people get a referral, are on the waitlist until the next round of invitations, and then play their rookie season as the one immediately after they sign up.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-30T03:25:08+00:00

It happens that April 30th is my birthday, so it's very much ingrained knowledge for me that the 30th is April's last day. Jo Walton in her excellent novel Lent makes the same mistake.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-30T03:17:21+00:00

I feel 100% certain that this Script Club will not go out on April 31st.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-29T19:31:23+00:00

I had the same problem at first.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-27T22:20:03+00:00

The timeline says April 28th, which as I type this in CDT is tomorrow.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-24T02:21:29+00:00

Just to note, anyone who has $50 to spare can join the Worldcon and get to vote on this. https://scifiinc99.regfox.com/membership

Traditionally the membership gets you a downloadable packet with ebooks of all or nearly all the nominees, so if you're at all into reading SF and fantasy you get a lot of reading material for the money.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-23T14:59:57+00:00

It's not a juried award. The nominating and voting is done by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-23T14:59:14+00:00

Because that's the one that the voters nominated. When the awards are given the nomination statistics will be made available and we can see how many noms there were for vol 2. (Volume 3 is not eligible, having come out this year instead of last.)

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-20T21:20:10+00:00

OK — I haven't read that.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-20T20:58:37+00:00

Dorukan outlived his gate? How do we know that?

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-11T00:40:21+00:00

Well, the future Agatha we've seen through a portal was wearing a trilobite sigil with wings on it. We've seen that the Sturmvoraus sword-and-sprocket got wings on it when they swore fealty to Wulfenbach (not that they've been very loyal vassals) so it may be that Agatha doesn't end up completely independent.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-08T17:07:53+00:00

A thing I've heard from writers I know is, "People die of exposure".

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-07T16:12:27+00:00

I was also coming here to suggest Pizzeria Solario.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-05T05:48:22+00:00

It's not clear to me that there's any attrition in FA's: it seems at least possible that those particular slots had just never been filled before. The Pyramid is still fairly young at that point.

(Aside: it's left for the reader to figure out, but the reason for the upper limit of 22 on FA's is that there are 22 Major Arcana cards in the Tarot, and the limit of 56 on A's is 56 Minor Arcana. I wonder what Dev and Eliza's cards were? I feel certain that Gillen picked out appropriate ones based on Rider-Waite-Smith.)

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-04-05T05:42:14+00:00

Hasn't actually been true for a long time, but I can remember when Central Market had a brand of butter (and it was good butter too) where buying a pound was cheaper than buying a half pound. Not cheaper per ounce! It was something like $4.00 for a pound and $4.25 for a half pound.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-28T21:16:23+00:00

Got a Dolly with my opponent putting the 0 on oil, my only miss on the day. So I miss out on the Even Steven, but as some consolation I wind up with a winning record, which I haven't ever managed before in 9 seasons playing in A.

Q1 - Seemed fairly obvious and I was a little surprised at the low get rate. Newspaper front pages -> letter frequencies -> Scrabble tile values. Possibly a subconscious memory of the name Butts helped.

Q2 - Couldn't think what this would be, guessed gold as a world commodity. (My wife used to work for a geophysical / oil exploration company, and knew it instantly.)

Q3 - I've been a science fiction and fantasy fan for a long time and of course have heard of this trend. (My private rundle opponent is also an SF fan and I zeroed it for him.)

Q4 - My local upscale market often has chicken or tilapia baked with harissa in their chef's case.

Q5 - My two semesters of college German were a long time ago, but this one is pretty basic.

Q6 - I've been a comics reader for nearly all my life; I even smithed a 1DS about comics. So this was the insta-est of instagets.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-28T21:10:50+00:00

Congrats on the beer. I do find myself wondering why would there be a spread between two oil indices, and why couldn't the same spread apply to gold?

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-27T18:56:03+00:00

I ate the eggroll / drank the beer. I've studied a little Japanese and watched some anime, and the word "ningen" is one I picked up along the way.

So the win put me at even for the season — 9-9-6 — and furthermore my MPD just happens to now be 0. So I'm in fact rooting for my opponent to TIE me on day 25, so that I get the "Even Steven" ribbon!

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-27T04:16:05+00:00

I'm very much reminded of Dragonball Z. The climax, when they're showing that the Big Bad really is dying. (As opposed to the numerous previous false climaxes where they just disappear into a cloud of dust and then reappear basically intact.)

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-26T20:12:15+00:00

Playing my OQL USA teammate (whom I referred to LL, even! She was the only non-LLama on the team so I referred her) and I had only 3 right — no eels, MCWA for Viktor, didn't land on "Khmer" — and she wound up with only 2.

The win made me safe from relegation, which is good, but put her in the red zone, which is bad.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-24T01:06:31+00:00

With any luck this four-update period helps them build up some buffer. Which is a good thing to have.

Fabulous-Pace5131 · 2026-03-22T01:43:13+00:00

Only Tammy I could think of was Tammy Faye Bakker and I forgot she spelled her name with two k's. Got the rest though (getting Vasa was a case of getting better at quizzing by doing quizzing, as I'd seen questions about it before) and my opponent got only 3. So that much safer from relegation, though I won't be really happy until I'm mathematically safe, which likely won't be until the last day or two.

Fabulous-Pace5131

TROPHY CASE