I actually did a book report on that one in junior high, because it was the book I was reading when the report was due (I hung onto Xanth waaaaay longer than I really should have) but I submitted the book report under the title of one of the other Xanth books.

Cisco origin story? :)

My Waterdhavian wizard, who spent more time than he wanted to in Mirabar, says that is an entire mood. Do you know--well, he's sure you do--how many decent Maztican/Chultan fusion places there are outside of Waterdeep? Zero. No street food scene at all. Also his snake familiar HATED the climate.

Yeah, I was just looking at that myself because I also became curious. "Famine plus the process of general societal collapse" will get that job done, I suppose.

Happy birthday!

Oof. I know when I want to find bugs in MY computer programs, I often think to myself "boy, sure would be nice if I could turn this over to a hallucination-prone algorithm that probabilistically generates what answers might look like."

There has never been a more urgent need to have a society internalize the sentiment “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable men.”

As a DM I'd allow it until the polymorph ran out, as a player, out of an abundance of caution, I'd try to get the hole first. One of the few times the sentence "Throw me your hole!" becomes tactically relevant.

I will let you know if I find out.

Me with a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven: cutting it with oven mitts on, then juggling the buttered slice from hand to hand until I can hold onto it long enough to convey it to my mouth. I am 48.

"Can I move?"

Yeah, I forgot to transfer my UI settings over when I moved computers and I still haven't fixed them all.

Listen, hand color-matching might as well be magic as far as I'm concerned. You're some kind of paint wizard, those people are nuts.

A lot of people don't believe me when I tell them that one of my best winter camping experiences was caused by like a thirty-degree overnight temperature DROP. We went from slogging through slush (on top of lake ice) to cruising across solid glass (and iceboating with sleds.)

He was actually fairly careful not to, IIRC--if he crossed Federation ethics standards too hard, he'd get kicked off the ship, which means he'd have to pay for his own science, which means smaller profits down the line. He was that rare Ferengi who understood long-term planning.

In my Star Trek Adventures tabletop game our ship's bartender was a Ferengi biochemist who in his spare time used the holodeck for the kind of research you're not allowed to do on real people. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against, but he was an excellent bartender.