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2 yr. ago

  • Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.

  • they’ve also read 1984 and thought all “adult” books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring

    I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it's pretty short and punchy as books go. Espionage, sex, torture, murder. Orwell was Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy was cool.

    If you're looking for something that's endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

  • I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn’t Harry Potter in their lives.

    Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.

  • They're lining back up behind Eric Adams, which is functionally the same thing.

  • inflation is good if you borrow money

    at below the rate of inflation

    Inflation going to 2% to 6% when you've got a credit card with a 30% APY is of very marginal benefit.

  • secretly wants changes and can blame someone else

    So many of these Republicans are fully aware that the bill will break the back of the healthcare industry in their states. None of them want to stick their necks out for it, though. The mega-donors will forgive them in the end, but the primary voters are only going to hear "You're a Secret Democrat for voting against MAGA".

  • Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like “health”.

    One way of escalating drama and tension is by injuring a main character. The scene in Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor has to knock the T-1000 into the blast furnace with consecutive shotgun blasts, isn't nearly as cool without her doing it with a wound in her arm. Frodo collapsing from exhaustion gives us the incredible moment of Samwise shouldering him and carrying the guy, ring and all, up the slope of Mt. Doom. Tinkerbell fading away after hearing "I don't believe in fairies" is what gets the audience on their feet applauding her by the end of the third act.

    And particularly for folks invested in the coolness of their characters, some conflicts are much more fun when the outcome isn't anything either storyteller or player could have anticipated. A totally unexpected David v Goliath moment, where a scrawny guy fells a giant with a lucky shot, will be the kind of story people talk about for years - whether David or Goliath or both are PCs.

  • To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building”

    I think this is more implying that you don't have to work from the same framework for every fantasy world. Not everything has to be set in Arthurian Medieval Times with Crusader-Era social sensibilities. The menagerie of mythical creatures isn't a prerequisite or delimiter (dragons / unicorns / etc are not a requirement nor are robots / cthulhoid horrors / woolly mammoths disallowed). You need internal consistency (to a degree) but you aren't forced to adhere / omit any genre trope.

    I would say, at an absolute bare minimum, you need some kind of fantastical or supernatural element to make it "Fantasy" as opposed to "Historical Fiction" or "Science Fiction" or some other category of fictional prose. Although, the genre of "Magical Realism" does make even that distinction a bit fuzzy.

    many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building

    You don't necessary need to go through the whole work of World Building if you're just banging out a short story or novella. Even serial writers don't necessarily bother going deep on the background material until they feel the need to expand the scope of the setting. I mean, look at the Star Wars setting. George Lucas didn't have Jabba the Hutt defined as a big slug monster until the third movie. In the original film, there was a cut scene in which Han confronts Jabba, who was just a be-feathered chubby gangster.

    If you're just spitballing or cranking out bits of fiction in brief, World Building can be superfluous. A story that takes place entirely in a single house over the course of a long weekend doesn't need the kind of scaffolding that a Long Walk to Mordor requires.

  • If they don't taste like peppermint, I'm sending them back.

  • Even republicans don’t want fascism.

    A “Trump Boat Parade” in Jupiter, Florida, on Sunday was joined by neo-Nazis waving swastika flags, shouting “White Power,” “Heil Trump,” and “Make America White Again!”

    What's been truly revolting is in watching how many liberals have jumped on the fascism bus. Kristen Gillibrand is fully in bed with the Silicon Valley techno-fascists. Richie Torries can't get enough genocide, whether its via our migrant concentration camps at home or our outsourcing of genocide to the Middle East via Israel and Saudi Arabia. Sitting Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams has gone all in on MAGA, after receiving pardons for his chronic misuse of public office and funds from the President. Gavin Newsom is flirting with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as a podcast host. Half the 2026 Texas Dem Congressional slate is fully in favor of turning the US/Mexico border into the new Iron Curtain. The Florida Democratic Party wants a Bay of Pigs 2.

    It's Italy in 1924 all over again. Oops! All fascists.

  • You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems

    It's crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.

    Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication... A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.

  • Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

    At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing "dir" into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.

    Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.

  • How can immigrantion matters be considered a civil matter if you criminalized someone’s immigration status?

    Because you have a judge who rubber stamps your twisted legal reasoning. And you've got a liberal opposition that only knows how to shrug at fascism and deflect blame onto college leftists for not voting harder.

  • Can we revoke trumps citizenship and deporting him?

    Ask Merrick Garland.

  • He's been handed a blank check by liberals who were terrified of the phrase "Defund ICE". They embraced reactionary politics and doubled down on police and military as a remedy for the BLM protests and the COVID economic crisis.

    Trump gets to be the judge because Trump quite literally got to appoint all the judges.

  • they’re more scared of Zohran than they are of Trump.

    Well, of course. Why would anyone be afraid of Trump? He's not even Muslim.

  • Bizarre AI-generated images are currently flooding Facebook, as engagement hacks and bots run rampant on the social media platform, spawning a meme-worthy image that has been dubbed “Shrimp Jesus.”

  • Imagine thinking that person behind that hole is a woman

  • I mean, I know plenty of kids who learned this without strict parents. School staff, daycare workers, business managers, cops... anyone in authority looking to impose rules also taught these lessons.

    You'd think nobody on this sub has ever shoplifted before, ffs.