themeatbridge

You know how you have to pay extra to have insurance to pay to take care of your mouth bones and your face balls? Well, what if we did that but with all the bones and stuff? Like, why are your foot bones included in the same insurance that pays for you to have knee bones or neck giblets? Why not do all the bones and stuff a la cart? And then maybe skin can be a premium add-on. We could charge separate for the red goo that’s all on the inside everywhere, and then it’s like a subscription model for having parts. We can sell it like “don’t pay for the parts you don’t have,” and people will think that they are saving money because each part costs less than the whole, but paying for everything costs more.

-some Health Insurance board member somewhere, probably.

… I should start an AI company.

This will result in more unplanned pregnancies, more dangerous abortions, more suffering for women, more poverty, and fewer intelligent people in South Carolina as people with the means to leave do so.

I feel like I’m going to be responsible for Trump sending ICE to raid the Shady Pines community event planning committee that picks the color schemes for their weekly card games.

It’s a good thing I’m going to be protected by my denial.

I recently tried to DM for my son and his friends. One of his friends insisted he wanted to be a DM. I tried to gently encourage him to allow me to DM for them, and he would have much more fun as a player. Nope, he insisted, and like a good DM, I let him discover for himself why he was wrong. It was fun to be a player character, and they all learned a lot about running a game, so wins all around.

I’d rather spend 10 minutes avoiding 4 minutes of advertising on a streaming service I pay for. Luckily, it doesn’t take nearly that long.

The hell is a USian?

Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”

Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).

Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.

I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.

To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.

You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.

I think I still have my google voice number.

It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?

Boiling gets the sweet carrot flavor out of the carrot and into the stew. It’s like onions and celery, the point is not to have mushy bits of formerly flavorful vegetables, but to have those flavors in the food. If you’re making a mirepoix for soup or stew, it is a mistake to leave big chunks or slices of carrot intact.

Roasted carrots are different, though, I agree.

As silly as it looks, there’s a good reason for this. You can’t just have a blank page because the user is going to wonder if something is missing. You have to say that the page is blank on purpose, at which point it’s no longer blank. They could say “The only thing on this page is this sentence explaining that there is nothing else on this page” but that seems somehow more ridiculous.

I think it’s just the font, but XKCD would have recreated the table and added a subtle, obscure reference to acknowledge in the alt text.

I think I still have one of those FM dongles in a drawer, in case I ever need it.

And that would be hilarious.