Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]

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.

Click all the images containing something sweet.

Did they actually move him to the North Pole or are they having fun with the word “Arctic”?

The Toungue map.

The idea that different parts of the tongue are responsible for feeling different tastes. This blatantly false idea was made up in 1901 out of thin air and then made its way into biology classrooms somehow. It was taught to schoolchildren (including me) for about 100 years as a biological fact, even though every human being in that time proved it false by experiment thousands of times by eating things and tasting them with the “wrong” parts of the tongue. It doesn’t quite count as an example of this happening today, because we finally realized that it simply wasn’t true and have stopped teaching it, but still: 100 years is a long time to realize that something is false when every human being in the world is confronted with physical evidence several times every day.

…Wait, why did they bring the Swedish flags out for this? Denying that our schools have masturbation rooms makes sense, making it a point of national pride that they don’t is really, really weird.

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.

It’s surreal that she managed to get on national television and say this. Aren’t there whole departments of the government/military dedicated to making sure that that doesn’t happen?

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.

I still remain convinced that he is completly fucked. This is such an out for the actual oligarchs who run Romania. They get to look good both showing that Romania is not corrupt and that they are not at all a sex trafficing hub by convicting this stranger, who is not actually rich by their standards or part of the ruling class of a crime he has demonstrably commited. I think we are about to see a textbook example of how the law is supposed to work according to liberal textbooks. Andrew Tate will in no way be mistreated while in custody and will be given the very picture of a fair trial. Then he will be convicted and face a sentence not unlike what a normal person would face.

…And then the Romanian oligarchs will probably get their Schengen deal, but whatever. I don’t expect to get to see my side win, but I do expect to see someone I despise lose pretty spectacularly. I can enjoy that.

I’m gonna sound like a fringe conspiracy theorist here, but you guys, What if this was no random accident? What if someone intentionally made the plane crash? But who? And why?

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

I claim user name of Bungiefan. I came up with it, so it’s mine. All posts made under that user name are now my intellectual property.

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.