ZOMBIE FORUMS

It's a stinking, shambling corpse grotesquely parodying life.
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:04 pm 
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Briareos wrote:
Yorik wrote:
Poe, can I move to Tsuiraku?

Sorry Yorik, its a capitalist Island. They shoot commies and such on sight


I shoot faster.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:37 pm 
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Jin wrote:
bellofthedamned wrote:
It appears that, despite his distance from them, Ian has heard every word.


GODDESS EARS???
"WHAT DO YOUR ELF EARS HEAR, IAN?"

This calls for some shoop.

Leah, Riley, Sarine, Sarna, Meji and Meji's mom having the best orgy ever in the cast lounge.

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:46 pm 
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I'd just like to comment that in any sort of aging formulation here, it would be wise to consider two separate factors - maturation and deterioration, lets call them.

Humans mature at a certain rate and deteriorate at a certain rate. Once we've reached maturity we've already deteriorated a little, and from then on aging is nothing but deterioration. That's why young adulthood is our "peak"; it's the least deteriorated we'll ever be after reaching maturation.

Elves apparently mature at a slower rate, and don't deteriorate at all.

Half-Elves mature as an intermediate rate, and I'm not sure if they actually deteriorate like humans or not. Given that Poe has stated they have the same body-reset mechanisms as Elves do, I wonder if a perfectly healthy Half-Elf would be immortal too, and Half-Elven deaths are only due to their genetic abnormalities. It's still a question, though, how a genetic disease would slowly kill you if your body completely resets every night. Shouldn't you just live an obnoxiously long, incurably crippled life, always painfully coughing up blood or some such until you can't stand it any more and shoot yourself in the head?

Anyway... any maturation curve should have a horizontal asymptote in it, probably something in the low mid 20s; after a certain age, you're mature, period. And I imagine that humans, elves, and half-elves would all have the same slope of their maturation curve at age 0, otherwise you'd get some weird phenomena like young Elves and Half-Elves maturing faster than young Humans and then slowing down while their human counterparts overtake them, which evidently is not the case.

A deterioration curve should probably be an exponential curve of some sort, though I suppose a linear curve might work. Will some old fogey on this board please confirm or deny whether your body breaks down faster as you get older or if it's really just a constant pace? Either way, there will need to be some sort of cutoff involved here... the graph must end when it goes above a certain point, when you're so deteriorated that you're dead.

Your final "age curve" should probably be maturation plus deterioration. Thus elves would slowly "grow up" to an apparent age which we'd call somewhere in the mid-20s, but in a bit better shape (i.e younger-looking) than any human in their mid-20s, and stay that way forever. A human would mature to that same maturity point faster, taking some small deterioration damage ("age)" along the way, and then decay until their death. A half elf would mature to that apparent age in an intermediate period of time and... whether half elves deteriorate at all is an open question still.

I'll let someone else figure out formulae for such curves which match the available datapoints we have (both of them).

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:47 pm 
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Might be relevant to mention that (according to my half-remembered Things I Saw On National Geographic mental database) if humans matured at the same rate as tigers, we would be sexually mature at age 2.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:56 pm 
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Senko wrote:
Really I'd have thought it was the other way round as in if she say's she's 17 but looks 12 you run the other way (refering to Meiji here).

That assumes she actually _looks_ the age she claims to be...


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:37 pm 
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It just struck me that a possible complication or maybe even disproof of my previous post is that the graph of chronological age vs apparent age would necessarily be linear for humans, since "apparent age" is just "how a typical human looks at that chronological age". It seems like this would be very difficult to accomplish as the sum of two complex functions.

Perhaps it would be better to graph deterioration on a completely different axis (requiring a 3D graph to represent, ignored in the case of Elves and maybe Half-Elves), and just graph maturation as linear functions with an artificially limited range (so you don't predict that 3000 year old Elves will look like 1000 year old mummies... instead they look like 25 year old hotties like Sarine). So H(x) = x, E(x) = x/3, HE(x) = x/1.5, something easy like that. (Half-Elven factor of 1/1.5 chosen because it gives good results for Meji [17/1.5 = 11.33] and Ian [34/1.5 = 22.66], and Elven factor of 1/3 chosen just cause it's half the half-elven rate, since we have no relevant datapoints). Limit the range to say 25, and you get that Elves reach full maturity at around 75 years of age, Half-Elves reach it by around 37, and of course humans reach it at around 25. Bear in mind that just as humans are "young adults" in the range of around 18-25, a 54 year old Elf would still definitely be an adult, and a 27 year old Half-Elf likewise; similarly, a 45 year old Elf would be sexually mature inasmuch as a 15 year old Human is, and a 22 year old Half-Elf likewise.

The bottom line being, Meji is definitely pedobait for Ian any way you slice it. But maybe Santurielian (sp?) culture is primitive enough that 12 year olds are freshly marriageable material to them.

(Also, maybe it's just me turning into an old man, but I don't remember 12 year olds looking like Meji did in that river scene way back when... so maybe Bani's comment about her looking like a 12-year-old was just girlish banter, in which case this might be all wrong).

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 4:06 pm 
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Hmm...

I am 22. Typically, I am mistaken for being around 24 to 27. My mother is in her fifties, she looks much younger. My grandma is in her eighties, she looks like she's fifty (or did last I saw her, before Alzheimer's set in with a vengeance).

My point? Even among humans, aging is not a species-wide or even a family-wide constant. It's not even a person-wide constant, as I looked about two years younger than my actual age for quite a while there. Attempting to generate an equation to accurately predict age based on appearance is just plain doomed to failure. It's fun to try, but people are just too wonky to predict in such a linear way. At the very least it's a curve.

^-^'

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 5:48 pm 
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There is no precise age curve for half elves, as they are a particularly... unstable race with a wide range of variations.

On average, a Half elf reaches maturity somewhere between 25-30 years of age.

The average lifespan (not factoring in the considerable numbers who die earlier due to illness or congenital problem) is around 225-300 years

Gestation period is approximately one year if the mother is elven or half elven. Nine months to a full year for a human mother. (a rather high risk of premature birth)

The age for puberty to kick in is all over the map and thus really not something that can be averaged well.

The half elf menstruation is generally five days every three months.


An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. Additionally around that time it also becomes in rather poor taste for then to continue to refer to their parents as such instead of simply referring to them as relatives.


Gestation period for an elf is approximately two years.


A Troll actually reaches maturity much sooner than a human, somewhere between 12-15 years of age at which which point the aging cycle begins to slow considerably.

The lifespan (not factoring in that reaching old age is an extremly rare event for a troll, especially males) is around 700-800 years

Gestation period is approximately six months.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 6:56 pm 
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:-o Pregnant for 24 months? Like an elephant? Oy.

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 6:58 pm 
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Wow, that's.... absurdly detailed. Suppose that's just one of the things when creating a detailed universe like ES has.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:23 pm 
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Wark wrote:
Wow, that's.... absurdly detailed. Suppose that's just one of the things when creating a detailed universe like ES has.


Absurd to you, but heroin to my inner number cruncher/rabid RPG ruleset enthusiast.

So half-elves don't even get true immortality- all this crap they have to deal with and they don't even live as long as trolls. Man, they get the short end of the stick all kinds of ways. 'Course, death is a blessing for some among their number...

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 7:59 pm 
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Michael Poe wrote:
An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. Additionally around that time it also becomes in rather poor taste for then to continue to refer to their parents as such instead of simply referring to them as relatives.



Aaack. 350 years of adolescence. How can elven civilization possibly have survived for so long?

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:26 pm 
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Graybeard wrote:
Michael Poe wrote:
An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. Additionally around that time it also becomes in rather poor taste for then to continue to refer to their parents as such instead of simply referring to them as relatives.



Aaack. 350 years of adolescence. How can elven civilization possibly have survived for so long?


it's less an adolescence and more that period between 17-24 or so when they're not teenagers but not really expected to be adults yet ether.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:54 pm 
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And now we nice to see the detail thought out there, incidently its half elves who don't live as long as Troll's I notice Poe didn't give an upper limit to Elven lifespans (or if he did I didn't notice it) and we know Sarine's over 2,000.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:26 pm 
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I believe it was covered in Ian's Elven history spiel... something along the lines of how they have a problem with the existence of Exitalis, given they're a race that only dies if they've been killed or otherwise accidentally died.

And I seem to recall Sarine being somewhere around 3,000 years old.


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PostPosted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:31 pm 
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Michael Poe wrote:
Graybeard wrote:
Michael Poe wrote:
An elf reaches physical maturity a bit over 150 years of age; though socially they won't really be considered an adult till they are nearly 500+ years old. Additionally around that time it also becomes in rather poor taste for then to continue to refer to their parents as such instead of simply referring to them as relatives.

Aaack. 350 years of adolescence. How can elven civilization possibly have survived for so long?

it's less an adolescence and more that period between 17-24 or so when they're not teenagers but not really expected to be adults yet ether.

Right. Adolescence, in the "teenager" sense Americans experience, is a culturally specific phenomenom. Most societies follow one of two paths: they put you out to work or arrange a marriage when you hit puberty, or you work as a lower ranking member of your own extended family until you set up on your own or inheirit something, anywhere from the mid-teens to the early thirties.

If you are really unlucky, of course, you get to be a spinster sister or the Prince of Wales, extra baggage into your middle years, waiting for someone to die of old age so you can have a life of your own.

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PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 1:09 am 
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Saturnalia wrote:
Jin wrote:
bellofthedamned wrote:
It appears that, despite his distance from them, Ian has heard every word.


GODDESS EARS???
"WHAT DO YOUR ELF EARS HEAR, IAN?"

This calls for some shoop.

Leah, Riley, Sarine, Sarna, Meji and Meji's mom having the best orgy ever in the cast lounge.


YES.

SOMEONE. OMAKE.

NOW.


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 3:27 am 
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What, no Bani?


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PostPosted: Fri Feb 16, 2007 10:21 am 
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BloodHenge wrote:
What, no Bani?


And let us not forget the Rape-kun. I wonder if he gets any bigger when you activate his adult mode...

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PostPosted: Sat Feb 17, 2007 7:39 am 
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All those links to the far history of the comic urge me to ask a question:
What the hell happened to the coloured pages? I remember some colour-blind kid (RMG) that done some nifty colouring on the comic... Where is it?

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