“On this, the day of my daughter’s Read Only Friday?”
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The dialogue was in Icelandic and as a conversation tedious to translate in full, but my ‘little’ cousin (she’s in her mid-20s, which makes her about the age of my baby siblings) explained the cultural context, artistic value and importance to feminist storytelling of Studio Ghibli movies to my 91 year old grandfather, to support her suggestion that one of the concerts he goes to this year should be ‘Hisaishi conducts Hisaishi’, by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra.
One of the five to six symphony orchestra concerts he plans to attend for the rest of the year. I might have gone to that many in my life, probably mostly dragged by grandparents.
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Discussing what to do after one of the flotilla’s ships has been boarded by hostile aliens.
Diane Kamahmo, flotilla XO: Or we could detonate the nuclear scuttling charge. I’m not an enthusiast for this idea but as XO it’s my job to put it in play.
Dr Jacqueline Bohranian, chief xenobiologist: I’m sorry, did you say “nuclear scuttling charge”?
Kamahmo: Was that not in your briefing?
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“Great Mother, the aeroelastic flutter on a forward swept hypersonic wing!”
(My character in The Pirates of Drinax is neither a pilot nor an engineer, but I know at least a bit about how this stuff works in reality, and sometimes it escapes.)
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Whereas the actual pilot is played by more of a “Never tell me the odds!” sort.
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Now, that’s how you collapse into a mattress.
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“There you go. Clean as a whistle.”
“How clean is a whistle?”
Thoughts of saliva, dried saliva… black mold…
“Pretty clean, I think.”
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Reminds me of:
“Cats aren’t clean, they’re just covered in cat spit.”
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“They’re at right angles. Which is wrong angles.”
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(Magical WWII, in Iran.)
“You can get further with a kind word, a very sharp knife, and magical invisibility than you can with a kind word alone.”
(Having removed a magical influence on a Very Important Person) “I suppose we have a hand signal for ‘check if that worked’.”
“Yes, but you’ll have to reboot him.”
“Now I need to make a few dice rolls. Particularly [enemy agent’s] Sense Danger.”
“He’s an ambassador, I’m sure he has standard forms for ‘this guy you sent me screwed up’.”
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“I’d bought so much contraband I had no idea how to account for the sale of it on my taxes, but somehow they never asked any questions. I always suspected Viktor had some influence.”
“When I got out of the rackets, Viktor demanded a buyout of 500.000 krónur. I always figured it was fair enough, as he’d made me many times that, and enabled me to drive around in my own car when only ministers and customs agents had cars, even though I started penniless.”
“Sæmundur the Sharpshooter earned his name when he fired a rifle out the window during a drinking session, at what or whom I’ve long forgotten, and we were not entirely sure if he ever knew.”
- My 91-year-old grandfather, telling his younger brother tales of his apparently far more disreputable youth than previously suspected
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“If one’s being true to the original myth, Greek gods’ character sheets probably just have one number. Written in crayon.”
“This is a very safe snake. It can only just kill you.”
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“I don’t mean to disturb you, but those are my trousers.”
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“You don’t get a population of billions with interstellar settlers, you get it with Barry White on the quadraphonic sound system and a few generations.”
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“The best thing since sliced imbeciles.”
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That reminds me of a terrible joke someone told me back in college.
What’s the difference between an onion and a hippie?
Nobody cries when you cut up a hippie.
Suppose you could replace hippie with anything you want to be derogatory towards.
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During a Flash Point game on Saturday:
“Your life is important to us. We are experiencing an unusually high call volume at the moment; please remain in place and a rescuer will be dispatched to you when one becomes available.”
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“You passed your Sense Motive? You’re on an island full of magic-twisted animals and talking undead. If you knock on the door of this barricaded ruin and tell the person it’s safe to come out, and they instead scream ‘leave me alone, ghoul!’, that doesn’t necessarily mean they would like to stay on this island forever. It is possible they may harbour reasonable scepticism.”
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The Vargr pirate captain is talking to his tailor before a politically fraught party.
“Now we’re going to have the usual argument, and you’re going to lose. The answer is: More. Colours.”
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“It’s grey and grim. Like Wolverhampton. Only with a death cult.”
“So Wolverhampton then.”
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