Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]

I’m an alpha male. If you study me in captivity I will display downright unnatural behavior.

I’ve always actually liked NASA as a US government agency. Thing is they take the kind of scientist whose skills are intensely useful to the military industrial complex and let them do goofy shit like this that doesn’t hurt anyone instead. Sure, sometimes some of their tech ends up useful to the military anyway and that’s terrible, but to the people who think this is a waste of resources that could have been better spent fixing infrastructure or helping the poor I want to ask:

If we consider labor as a resource, do you think the actual experts in autonamous robotics, rocketry and atmospheric dispersion involved in landing a little box on Venus would be fixing pot holes or running homeless shelters without NASA? I think they would be much more likely to be working on some project to have an army of drones defoliate all of central Asia or something like that. I think it is cool and heartwarming that they successfully landed a little robot on Mars and care so much about it, but also many of these people have skills that are only useful for exactly this and like 25 different crimes against humanity, and letting them do this is not a waste of resources.

Wait, that’s just 2.25 kg of dung per hippo. That sounds like way too little. I’m pretty sure a human being could produce 2.25 kg of dung in a day with the right team spirit and some elbow grease, but you’re telling me these dainty, bashful cowards can’t do better despite weighing so much more? Pathetic.

Hedgehog. I know about all about youth culture and the “Sonic is a hedgehog” games.

Won’t the boulder roll back to the intersection anyway?

Ok, that’s a new one. Calling you a fascist for saying Lenin was a Marxist…

I can usually take these liberal takes in stride, but this is like they invented some new kind of weapon. I feel this weird itch to engage with them somehow, and that’s not healthy.

Me too! What’s your destination?

I am a bit bothered by how the modern borders of Croatia seem like they are designed just to prevent Bosnia and Hercegovina from having a coast. I get that you can have a thin country, but they are really pushing it. Give them one beach!

He looks like he discovered that his girlfriend was actually just a pile of lit dynamite sticks assembled into the rough shape of a woman.

Silent reading is actually a shockingly recent invention. Because the letters “make sounds”, the natural way to process a phonetic alphabet is to make the sounds of the letters as you read them and listen to yourself speaking the text. This goes on way later than many people realize. Being able to do silent reading at all was still a pretty remarkable skill in the time of Shakespeare. Being unable to read something without speaking the words was common probably well into the 19th century. Actually, as someone who works in education I can tell you that I will still recommend kids to read things out loud if they find something difficult. It’s what phonetic writing languages were designed for, and it increases accuracy and comprehension.

Wait… Are you guys not doing the Highlander thing? Because I’ve been cutting the heads off of other Lemmy users to absorb their power, but if there can actually be more than one true Lemmy user then wow… That is some egg on my face, but anyway the monthly users should start increasing again once I stop!

Sincerely, the 900 or so Lemmy users I for lack of a better word now “represent”.

I think the first series he wrote may have a bit of a slow start. The one I’m hate reading is his latter work about the knight Sparhawk. I was convinced the plot of the first book would revolve around stopping the nefarious plot that he - I swear to god - just happened to overhear a villain just explain to an entire room in an inn. Like 8 or so chapters later and he is on a different continent, kidnapping an ambassador after having completely stopped the evil plot, fought in two major battles, adopted a child, commited arson, survived a shipwreck and infiltrated a cultist meeting. It’s remarkable how fast things can happen if none of the characters have any personality you have to write around.

He got into writing fantasy because he thought the people who read fantasy would read absolutely anything. He wanted to get as much money as possible for as little effort as possible, and since he didn’t consider fantasy to be real literature he figured it would be easier than adventure books about rock climbing, which he had written before, because he had to do literally no research. Reading them as an adult it is obvious that they are very lazily written. Every character has a personality that can be boiled down to a single adjective like “grumpy”, “sneaky”, “funny”, or in one very annoying case “having an axe”. This lazy writing however means that because the characters never really have much to say about anything things can move at an incredibly fast pace. This is what I liked as a child.

The Powder Mage trilogy is kind of fun. The setting is more late 18th/early 19th century than medieval, and it is far from perfect, but a bit of French revolution era fantasy with magic and gods and stuff never hurt anyone.

China Miéville’s New Crobuzon series must qualify as fantasy somehow. It’s New Weird, but you have weird magic and grotesquely weird fantasy races living in a fantasy world, so it must count. Also, because Miéville is some flavor of trotskyist you get a fantasy world written from some kind of Marxist perspective, but because it is a fictional world where Stalin never existed you don’t have to read 50 pages about how every successful socialist revolution was never real.

What I’ve read of Robin Hobb has been fun, but it’s been more than a decade so take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.

You could also hate read David Eddings, a child abusing drunk of a hack author who hated the genre of fantasy and all of its readers. That’s what I’m doing, because I want to examine my childhood idol more closely. This is a bad idea and will not improve your life in any way, but it is something you could do.

Once this happens to the music industry, we need to make sure the kids are all prepared to open Netscape Navigator, go to AltaVista and search for “Napster”. They’ll thank us later.

I wonder how many times he could have gone “And then she makes me suck her feet again” in the script before someone intervened.

That must be extra embarassing for the cops since all Italians are notorious cowards.

I like that engine.

To save even more money, switch over completely to a diet of things you find on the ground.

To save even more money, stop bathing, showering and brushing your teeth.

To save even more money, stop living in a house and move into the sewers.

To save even more money, stop wearing clothes.

To save even more money, stop communicating with expensive words, settling instead for grunting, growling and maybe barking like a dog. Consider filing your teeth pointy.

To save even more money, stop using tools. Emerge from your sewer hideout only at night to prowl the streets on all fours, feral and bewildered, eyes grown pale and milky from years in the dark sewers darting maniacally back and forth while your filth-encrusted teeth and nails twitch in anticipation of the slightest movement.

This is how I was able to afford a starter house by age 30. This and a $400 000 loan from my father.

Well, as he found out from one of those young Japanese males, the answer is a firm no.