In honor of Independence Day we watched a mockbuster and played an American history trivia game.  Due to a fluke of randomness almost every correct answer was...

2014 was forever ago, and Gardner Dozois is no longer with us, but I just finished reading Nancy Kress' award-winning novella in his Year's Best anthology.  Yes, I would go.  The chance of six thousand lifetimes.

You may e-mail my full name at gmail if you wish to claim victory without spoilering the comments.

      Continuous rain
disproportionately floods
       staff lavatories

Me:  (Looks up something online)

Mrs:  "No cheating!"

Me:  "How can you cheat at a jigsaw puzzle?"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4227879-is-data-human-the-metaphysics-of-star-trek

I gave this book, "Is Data Human? The Metaphysics of Star Trek", to my friend Chris shortly before he died from complications of muscular dystrophy.  I don't know whether he had time to read it.

It ponders a lot of the philosophical conundrums inspired by Star Trek tech, such as androids and transporters.  Our friend Tom B. says that he's chill with the idea of being scanned, destroyed, and re-created as an identical copy.  But what if the process goes awry?  This happens to Commander Will Riker, who winds up with a "twin" eventually named Thomas.  Is the "duplicate" going to be just as sanguine about being destroyed to balance the equations?  What if it's unclear which copy is "excess"?

If you played Rock-Paper-Scissors with yourself to solve this problem, would you keep tying endlessly, or are you already different enough to make different choices?  If you're already different, are you really exact duplicates?

My son and I went to see "No Exit" at the community college theatre. It's a three-person study of the thesis that "Hell is other people."

What would you do in such a room for all eternity?

My trusty steed Ki-Rin-Tin-Tin was killed by a wand of death.
Then I managed to explode my bag of holding, my two primary weapons, and quite a lot of other useful things.
And Ki-Rin-Tin-Tin-Too was disintegrated by a black dragon!
So I limped onward, no longer a mounted knight but determined as ever.
"The guardian Angel of Lugh will not accept the name Cool Hand of Lugh."
I went to my reward with 3285282 points, happy just to have made it.

There's nothing more dangerous than putting on your blessed greased +2 gray dragon scale mail in the morning and thinking that you're invulnerable.

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