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there should be a state of affairs on this website where at all times exactly one user has the ability to @everyone and there's some continuous ongoing competition(?) determining who wields this power. discuss.

#endorsed #but also 'there should be a state of affairs on this website' is the best combination of words since 'hie thee thither'.

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This clearly shows the doctors being blasted backwards ("kept away") but not any opposing force being applied to the apple-eater!

(replace one magnet with an apple, and the other with your least favorite doctor)

Or maybe that doesn't work. Maybe there is an equal and opposite force like usual, and OP just happened to be exactly evenly surrounded by other doctors not shown in that picture. That's fine.

In that case, you instead place the doctor or collection of doctors on a vertically moving platform directly above the appropriate number of apples. I believe the force applied by one apple on a person with a doctorate is conventionally called one "Newton."

We then contact each of their alma maters, and report their long histories of plagiarism/patient complaints/jaywalking. When their degrees are revoked, they cease to be doctors and the repulsive force disappears. The platform--let's call it a "medical board"--descends. Then we contact the colleges again, admit we lied, and return to start, turning some turbine or whatever.

Automate this. You can improve the design: make it rotate instead of vertical, make it not depend on gravity. You'll need to get the degree-conferring institutions on board with this, but you can throw apples at anyone who looks like they'll vote against you. They can revoke and reinstate people as "doctors" potentially hundreds of times a second.

By analogy to a "water mill" or "wind mill," we can call this a "diploma mill."

i eat 15 apples for breakfast then drive myself to the hospital just to watch the doctors get blasted backward into the drywall bc they cant withstand my aura

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"are you going to write the whole thing" dunno, sounds boring. Can you imagine an entire musical number about the color purple? Dear God.

Purpler.

You’re going to be purpler! I’ll teach you the proper hues To mix reds and blues Like they do it in the North With coloring theory I’ll Make you imperi-al Technicoloring henceforth

[…]

That whole tint is in With the Gillikins It’s complementary To what the West can wear with Your newfound purple-arity You’ll be purpler. Just not any purpler Than me!

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No, because it only applies if Biden's judicial nominees actually do make enough of a meaningful difference to mean he's better than Trump even if he's otherwise as bad or somehow worse. I claim they do, on quite a lot of issues, and that this is one way it happens.

But also.

Biden is better than Trump. In pretty much every way. (Even this one! On an issue where I expected better and am pretty mad at him! He's still better by miles!) We all know this. You, me, whoever's reading this.

If it's to the point where saying he's better than the person he is running against is so obvious, so true-no-matter-what, that it sounds like a fully general argument? That'd be a pretty good reason to vote for him.

(Also I was talking about lower court judges as much as the Supreme losers. Judicial vacancies matter a lot more than most people know, and it's one of the issues where Biden is actually better than your average Democrat.)

A bunch of UT Austin pro-Palestine protestors got arrested on sketchy charges like "trespassing." The cops said they were there to arrest people because the governor directed them to watch for "unlawful assembly," and the governor fucking confessed that it was because he thinks their viewpoint was antisemitic.

This should be a slam-dunk case for First Amendment retaliation. It isn't. Thanks to the Supreme Court, you can usually only sue for retaliation if you were definitely 100% innocent. These protestors might or might not have been technically trespassing, and if they were then they're gonna have to jump through some legal hoops with a hostile judge.

This is not an old precedent. 2019. Features special guest star Brett Kavanaugh.

The moral of the story is to vote for Joe Biden. Even if you think he's somehow exactly as pro-genocide as Trump, you probably want judges who protect your right not to get arrested for protesting it.

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Purpler.

You’re going to be purpler! I’ll teach you the proper hues To mix reds and blues Like they do it in the North With coloring theory I’ll Make you imperi-al Technicoloring henceforth

[…]

That whole tint is in With the Gillikins It’s complementary To what the West can wear with Your newfound purple-arity You’ll be purpler. Just not any purpler Than me!

#Wicked #finally saw the musical #unholy mix of musical canon Frank Baum canon and MGM canon

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COMPLETELY UNRELATEDLY it seems worth mentioning that in San Francisco CA, it is illegal to practice necromancy without a license. (Long story.)

If you file the paperwork--it costs $100 last I checked--you'd get to call yourself a licensed necromancer.

I think that law is unconstitutional. (Another long story.) But this would be a very weak test case, and the Ninth Circuit would be the worst place to bring it. Maybe there's some city in Florida?

Anyway! Theoretically, if you got that license and then someone successfully sued to overturn the law, you'd get to call yourself the last of the licensed necromancers. As far as I'm aware, this is the coolest title it's possible to get out of the US legal system.

Of course, if you are doing this just for the title, and going to court for the sake of going to court, that might be pretty vexatious. Other side can cite this Watts case if they have a sense of humor.

The court has no occasion to determine whether necromancy would ever not be vexatious.

Watts v. Regions Fin. Corp., No. 4:16-CV-740-VEH, 2016 WL 4436318, at *5 n.7 (N.D. Ala. Aug. 23, 2016)

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I feel like there's another step in there before you get to quantum-immortality-lottery-winning. Something a little more important than $2. Might even go so far as to say this is probably a bad idea.

Okay, a lottery ticket is only $2, I can pay $2 to take my belief in quantum immortality seriously... I mean, it's not really immortality, since AI still kills us all, but it's quantum house ownership.

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A bunch of UT Austin pro-Palestine protestors got arrested on sketchy charges like "trespassing." The cops said they were there to arrest people because the governor directed them to watch for "unlawful assembly," and the governor fucking confessed that it was because he thinks their viewpoint was antisemitic.

This should be a slam-dunk case for First Amendment retaliation. It isn't. Thanks to the Supreme Court, you can usually only sue for retaliation if you were definitely 100% innocent. These protestors might or might not have been technically trespassing, and if they were then they're gonna have to jump through some legal hoops with a hostile judge.

This is not an old precedent. 2019. Features special guest star Brett Kavanaugh.

The moral of the story is to vote for Joe Biden. Even if you think he's somehow exactly as pro-genocide as Trump, you probably want judges who protect your right not to get arrested for protesting it.

#as usual there's a solid criminals-don't-have-rights bloc #depending on where you look it might call this a 6-3 decision or 8-1 #the evil part was 6-3 and I promise there are reasons to expect Biden's nominees to be more with the 3 than the 6 #actually judicial nominations are one point where Biden is *uniquely* good and a generic Democrat might just give us Kagans instead of KBJs

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Context: there is absolutely no context. All the ruling had to say was "this case has already been brought and ruled on," and the judge just felt like going all-in on "we really hate this guy because of how much trouble he causes for the courts."

When the Teutonic gods tired of Loki's troublemaking, they chained him to the rocks with a poisonous snake suspended above him, dripping poison on Loki. That case arose prior to the Eighth Amendment.

Green v. Arnold, 512 F. Supp. 650, 652 n.10 (W.D. Tex. 1981) (citation omitted).

#this is technically note *11* #(though note 10 is also Loki-related) #my guess is this happened 2-3 links back in the chain of citations #also this loser thinks that's an Eighth Amendment problem? Unable to move with pointless animal-inflicted pain? #We're the country with the DEVOURED ALIVE BY BEDBUGS remember? #occasionally we give a suicidal guy a rope and watch him hang himself or just straight-up starve someone to death #I'd say the venomous snake setup has maybe 30% odds of getting qualified immunity

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The official version is they met when he was like 20 chronologically (whatever that cashes out to for a Dunedain), but also the official version was written for an audience of humans by a scribe he was king of. And is mythologizing about how they're just like Beren and Luthien. So you can pick and choose which parts you feel like believing.

I don't see it very often, but I think it's kinda funny when people talk smack about the version of russingon where maedhros knew fingon as a child because isnt that canonically what happened with aragon and arwen

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Richard Scarry is American?? But his characters are so British!

Hobbits are explicitly monarchist in theory, but it's in a distant way where you know it would change if they actually had any monarchs. When they do have a king "again" (it's Aragorn, his claim to being King of the Hobbits is actually stronger than his claim to Gondor), his one order affecting them is "no humans in the Shire, including me." So they probably stay pro-king indefinitely until one of his descendants tries raising taxes.

They're definitely in favor of other people having kings though.

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

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There's a creationist trope that goes "people think the Behemoth was a hippo? A hippo? Something so terrifying and powerful that God Himself points at it and says only an omnipotent God could make that? Ridiculous, it's obviously a dinosaur."

And I think these people might not have much experience with hippos.

one time i saw a video of a hippo eating a watermelon. they rather funny-looking beasts, aren’t they? it opens its mouth which honestly looks completely non-threatening because it had, like, six teeth, and then the handler just sets the watermelon at the bottom

and then it uses that silly widdle whisker face to absolutely fucking destroy this watermelon like the damn thing’s rind was made of rice paper. turns out, the reason it doesn’t have many teeth is because teeth are for lesser beings that can’t rip through natural obstacles by gumming them to pieces with an inconceivable bite force. and it doesn’t snap or tear into it or anything, it just calmly closes its mouth around the watermelon, pauses for a moment while it assesses just how much of its ridiculous strength it needs to use, and crushes it like one of those chocolate malt balls

you know that feeling that’s, like, when you see something and you think, “this is so far outside of the realm of human experience that any conception i have of this will forever be a mere shadow of its true nature��? i feel that way about a hippo’s strength. one of my distant ancestors likely looked up into the sky at the natural terror of lightning and believed that such a thing could only be the direct influence of a god. i channel that fear, but for hippos

#not that a hippo is even that great of a match for the physical description #but 'insufficiently impressive' is not their problem. it's everyone else's.

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So obviously your name has never been spoken for the last time because it has never been spoken for the first time. Your parents named you secretly, wrote it on a paper and burned it, and filled out the birth certificate with something completely different.

This apparently worked.

They say you die three times, first when the body dies, second, when your body enters the grave, and third, when your name is spoken for the last time. You were a normal person in life, but hundreds of years later, you still haven’t had your “third” death. You decide to find out why.

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It's both. Definitely mostly physical sustenance--lots of references to the gods going hungry without sacrifices--but also the inciting incident is "worship dries up, miracles shut down." Prometheus's eagle dies and chains fall off, oracles stop prophesying, no more thunderbolts, et presumably cetera.

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

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fruit by the furlong, the fathom, the fall, the finger, the fistmele, and fersah too. fruit by the femto-arch-micro-trans-quad-para-tele-were-turbo-decaf-foot.

fruit by the furlong

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he is still part of the three musketeers (cultural icon), even though the book is really quite clear about how it counts to three.

the thing about the three musketeers (book) is that there are three musketeers (guys) and also a fourth dude who's always hanging out with them and is part of the friend group. yet he is not one of the three musketeers

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“Can we just list off Durins I through VII,” the greatest thread in the history of theology, locked by the moderators beneath an immovable mountain for eternity.

Bonus internet points will be awarded to anyone who actually tries this exercise before voting.

Assume you need to get the spelling at least somewhat close, and if a character has multiple names, only one counts. Also, if a character doesn't have a canonical name, I'm sorry, but "that guy's wife" doesn't count.

For reference, if you can name the 9 members of the Fellowship, the eponymous Hobbit and his 13 dwarf buddies, 3 prominent women, and the guy who runs the Rivendell B&B, that's 27 characters right there. And you probably also know the name of a dragon.

For further reference, Tolkien Gateway has 637 (!!) pages dedicated to Third Age characters. (Don't click that link until you've voted, of course)

Edit: Your humble pollmaker gave this a try, and got as far as 73 before deciding she was too tired to keep trying to remember dwarf and Silm names. If you also want to share (and don't mind people being incredulous at your having forgot ____), pastebin allows you to paste text and share it for free. :)

#Silmarillion #lotr #201 sounds like a lot but “twenty places on the map averaging ten named characters each sounds much easier.