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So here's the scenario. I wake up, I'm flat on my back and I can't move except for my head and my eyes, and I can't speak. I'm terrified and sense an evil presence, specifically an evil scientist, somewhere in the room but cannot see him.

This is consistent with what I know about sleep paralysis.

However, I'm not flat on my back in my bed. I'm flat on my back on a patch of perfectly flat swampland, with a grid superimposed upon it, each grid square about two or three feet across. Nearby I can see an alligator watching me. The unseen scientist is operating on me, implanting an egg (resembling one of those plastic dinosaur eggs you sometimes see in natural history museum gift shops) into my chest cavity, to use my body as an incubator for the egg. Somehow I know that this is an alligator egg, and that the alligator nearby is its mother and is very territorial. One wrong move by either me or the scientist, and she'll attack me. The scientist is narrating what he's doing and the reasoning behind it out-loud, in a calm, detached manner. He's speaking in the third person, and his voice is slow, with a slight Southern accent, bearing a very close resemblance to a narrator I remember hearing on an old educational recording, distorted as if being played back on a very old phonograph record, but I know that he's talking in real time.

This feels more like a regular nightmare. However, I'm wondering if its possible that my sleep paralysis-hallucinations were simply much more elaborate than those people normally experience during sleep paralysis. Could the facts that I'm much more aware of my dreams than most, and/or that I knew a good deal about sleep paralysis ahead of time have caused this to happen? What do you think?

Not that conspiracy theories are particularly credible to begin with, but certain ones such as satanic ritual abuse, "Paul is Dead" and flat earth theory that have less "street cred" for various reasons and are taken less seriously in general, even in the context of fiction.

I'm working on a conspiracy fiction webshow and am trying to work in aspects of as many different existing conspiracy theories as possible, and I'm trying to figure out where to draw the line, so as to not break the audience's willing suspension of disbelief. How hokey is too hokey?

Not the kind you get on rewards cards from stores, the kind you get on credit cards. How do you get them? What do you do with them once you've got them, and how? What does the bank get out of it? Are they worth it?

ALSO: Can you get them on debit cards instead of credit cards?

Like, somebody else altered the evidence after the fact to make it look like it was them that did it, without knowing that in actuality it really was them that did it

I mean yeah, one comes from God and the other comes from Satan, but you can't exactly tell where they got it from just by looking at it, can ye? Joan of Arc is proof of that. I suppose you could ask, but the Satanic sorcerer is just going to lie and say he got it from God (or maybe Satan lied to him and said he was God).

How about the nature of the powers? Yeah, not really.

Witches allegedly sit on the top of water instead of sinking because its pureness rejects their wickedness or something, but Jesus can walk on the top of the water too, and he's fricking Jesus.

Magic powers identified with witches by manuscripts on the topic of finding witches include:

✠ Bilocation (also used by St. Anthony of Padua, St. Gerard Majella, St. Pio of Pietrelcina, St. Severus of Ravenna, St. Ambrose of Milan, and St. Martin de Porres)

✠ Projecting a ghost version of themselves (also used by Paul the Apostle)

✠ Flying around unaided (also used by St. Bessarion of Egypt, St. Mary of Egypt, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. Joseph of Cupertino, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Martín de Porres, and St. Seraphim of Sarov)

Additionally, the following powers are forbidden in the Bible itself:

✠ Divination (basically *every* prophet, although they called it "prophecy")

✠ Raising the dead (used by Jesus again, St. Francis Xavier, St. Patrick, St. John Bosco, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Rose of Lima, and the Prophet Ezekiel with his army of skeletons)

So how do you tell?

I used to go to the same restaurant after my Monday appointments every week (because it was good and convenient) until one week they brought me my drink before I ordered, because they already knew what I wanted. After that I went out of my way to go somewhere else for several weeks before coming back.

More recently, the server at another restaurant I frequent recognized me and commented on the fact and I've already decided to avoid the place for several weeks. I explained to the person I was with at the time that once you're a regular you're obligated to continue being a regular, but after reflecting I think that was really just the best explanation I could come up with at the time, and I'm not really sure what the real reason is. I guess I just don't see myself as a "regular customer" sort of person, although I'm not sure what sort of person that is.

The end result is that I don't get stuck in a rut, which is good I suppose, but I'm not asking about the end result.

I get paperless billing, so they don't send me bills in the mail, but they still send me pamphlets, and I don't want any pamphlets. The bills at least serve a purpose. They tell me that I've got to pay soon, so I can pay on time. The pamphlets don't serve any purpose. They just take up space and waste paper. I looked at the Account Settings on the website, but there wasn't anything there about mail.

Many of the websites that I've got accounts on have a section on the profile page that lets you "update your status". I've never actually done so as I've been able to figure out neither the purpose of doing so nor what that would consist of. Obviously it involves posting text of some kind, but beyond that I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen anybody else's status updates, although I doubt I'd have recognized them as such if I had.

I know that crows are very intelligent as birds go, and I hear rats are pretty smart rodents. Both of these animals are scavengers. There were other examples I heard before noticing what appeared to be a pattern, but I can't recall them at present. Now, I know that not all non-scavengers species are less intelligent than their scavenger relatives, so it would obviously be less of a rule and more of just a general tendency, but would it be an accurate assessment, or am I just seeing patterns where there aren't any?

Yahoo! has officially and unrepentantly ruined Yahoo! Answers for everyone everywhere, and the last bastion of blessed green sanity, http://f.answers.vip.bf1.yahoo.com/, is now apparently a dead link. As the cons of the new format greatly outweigh the pros of Yahoo! Answers existing in the first place, I have decided to leave, as I hear many others have done.

All I need at this point is a website to use instead. Something convenient, user-friendly, and filling roughly the same function as Y!A used to not so long ago (Q&A-format preferable, but not required), with a large enough userbase to be able to reasonably expect an answer, and a design that isn't aesthetically repulsive.

My only regret is that I used AdBlock Plus the entire time I was here, so Yahoo! won't suffer any losses in revenue (no matter how small) from my departure.

He had one costume in Captain America (the war bonds costume and the improvised costume don't count), a new one in Avengers and if the publicity stills are any judge, he's getting a new one in Winter Soldier. What's up with that? It makes sense for Iron Man, since Tony is constantly tinkering with his armor and upgrading it. That's part of his character. But with Cap its never really explained, and as far as I can tell none of the other Avengers ever get new costumes. I thought the first costume was fine.

I've been reading up on hoaxes lately. Some of them are religious. Fake relics and fake miracles and the likes. Well to hell, the remains of Noah's ark, lost tablets mysteriously found in such-and-such's back yard, enough preserved pieces of Jesus's body displayed as relics in various churches to build a couple dozen Jesii, weeping statues with concealed pipes in them, that general sort of thing. Everything from simple misinformation and misdirection to complex forgeries and elaborate staging of events.

And it got me thinking about what goes through the heads of these people. I mean, having created a hoax and knowing it was a hoax created by them must conflict somewhat with the faith of the hoaxer, and with it comes the threat that if exposed, it might undermine the faith of their fellow believers. And a non-believer wouldn't really have much motivation to fake evidence of a deity at all.

So what does religion say on the matter? Is it a sin? A heresy, even? Is it touched upon in the scriptures at all?

NOTICE: This is a question about the content of religious beliefs and teachings, not the the truth or falsehood thereof. I enjoy the typical R&S banter as much as any, so I won't completely forbid it, but I'd like to kindly request that you keep that on the back burner.

Somebody posted a comment on something they did that included the word "logcaban", apparently used as an exclamation. It appears to be a misspelling of "log cabin", but that doesn't make any sense in context. The content had nothing to do with log cabins, the woods, lumberjacks, Abraham Lincoln or any other vaguely cabin-related things. I haven't been able to find any definitions and am completely baffled.

The comment was just "logcaban i love it" [sic], if that helps at all.

I preformed the same search twice. The first time the tabs were "Web, Videos, Shopping, Images, News, More" the second time the tabs were "Web, Images, Shopping, Videos, News, More". I preformed a different search and they were "Web, News, Images, Videos, Shopping, More". What the hell is going on here? I'm getting really sick of going for where the Images tab is supposed to be—where the Images tab has *always* been—and getting Videos instead.

They're good bacteria. Cut the made-up technobabble and call them what they are.