Does Uriel run elections on a 32- or 64-bit database engine?
Also, my phone dictionary didn’t have Uriel until just now. When I tried to swipe it, it suggested Hitler. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
In 2016, the fate of the world hinges on Hitler’s engines of state.
(Source: averyterrible, via misanthropymademe)
I got an email that was like “I saw you commented on a HN thread about $product! We just launched something vaguely similar to $product! You should check it out!”
I didn’t remember $product at all, so I read through the last year of my HN comments and couldn’t find the thread in question, but I might have failed to look at all the subject lines because I was reading my comments. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I didn’t comment on $product itself in the last year.
So basically, I got nerd-sniped by a spam email into reading a load of things that I myself had written.
Especially annoying because the thing they launched does interest me, but I don’t want to encourage that kind of marketing.
OTOH, at least past me wrote some interesting things.
http://ranma-official.tumblr.com/post/151930443745/misanthropymademe-sinesalvatorem
@sinesalvatorem: god damn what an awesome and kind person who deserved absolutely nothing, please don’t dogpile on this saint
OP blocked me so I can’t reblog, but, regardless, this.
Turns out OP has the entirely predictable backstory of being harassed by people in geek communities, now wants a perfectly acceptable safe space or perhaps gender separatism but for nerds, and uses the typical MGTOW approach of never actually going her own way but instead hurling vitriol into the tubes and acting surprised when it goads a reaction.
Like, I can understand wanting a safe space and I can understand venting, but why not tag it as such instead of making sure it looks indistinguishable from every other applause light for spitting on the nerd peasantry.
That would have been better, but I think this is one of those instances where we have to make the world better even for people who don’t do the best things.
OP’s post was crap and dogpiling on her was also crap.
(Written while reading Runes and Revenant, the latter being the last one that I’ve previously read.)
The Haruchai are a lot like Batman. I will do this perfectly or not at all.
But also, martial arts, tonal language, and collectivism? They’re Chinese Batman.
Wait, why do they have a tonal language at all? They’re natively telepathic. Why would they have developed a spoken language until they met other people? But when they meet the Vizard they speak to him just fine. Does it have more range in some circumstances? Or I guess maybe the telepathy came later.
The telepathy doesn’t really feel like a thing until the Last Chronicles. It kind of feels like it was hinted at before, and then it became just assumed knowledge, but there was no moment of revelation.
There’s a running theme of if you are good, you do not compel people to do things. Not for the greater good, not for their own good, not ever. This will only end badly for you. Which, I don’t know that in the real world it actually ends badly most of the time, but I am very much on board with the you do not compel people thing.
(One exception I can think of: Atiaran compels Foamfollower, but then he’s all, “you could have just asked”, and I guess that makes it fine. Speaking of which, she compels him using his name, and IIRC he’s reasonably clear that this sort of thing has some kind of power. This kind of power is never brought up again except for the Insequent.)
It does take this way too far, sometimes. Telling someone the consequences of their actions is not compulsion.
A related theme is how the white gold only works if it’s given willingly, but the definition of “willing” is stretched. Kasreyn’s ocular apparently counts. So does Foul’s torture of Linden to blackmail Covenant, or so he thinks.
Actually, in the first Chronicles, isn’t Foul trying to kill Covenant and take his ring? Then in the second, the ring is apparently useless unless given willingly. Is this an inconsistency, or did Foul learn better, or?
Linden, Covenant and the Haruchai all judge themselves by standards they’d never apply to anyone else. Covenant recognises it in the Haruchai; Linden recognises it in Covenant; no one recognises it in themselves.
I quite like the time travel mechanic where, as long as you don’t know what’s going to happen, you’re probably safe from introducing paradoxes. I’m not sure this mechanic would work in rationalfic, but it’s neat. It makes a certain kind of sense: everything you do is the future having a causal effect on the past, and what you do comes from what you know; the more you know about the future, the more the future is effecting the past. It’s not 100% reliable (the Theomach has to do some deliberate work), which also makes sense.
Kasreyn says that everything is flawed, so he can’t make things perfect, so he has to deliberately introduce flaws, unless he makes them with white gold which is itself flawed, in which case he can make things perfect because they were made with something flawed. This is… I can vaguely see how it might kind of make sense?
…does Mistweave ever get any direct speech? I guess he probably does, but part of me feels like he doesn’t.
There’s no writing in the Land. Fortunately, everyone seems to have a really good memory.
This time through, I developed a headcanon that the Land’s inhabitants were brown-skinned. Then partway through Runes, Liand is described as characteristically brown-skinned. Boom.
(Covenant is (headcanon) a white southern guy. The first Chronicles are about how a load of brown-skinned people need a white guy to save them, but they can’t compel him to do it, and he’s worried about the risk to himself if he tries.)
“Assuredly,” says the Mahdoubt. “Assuredly,” says the Theomach. Pretty sure I didn’t pick up on that connection first time.
Not a fan of how the Insequent are mentioned for the first time in book eight of a ten-book saga. Admittedly one of them appeared in book five, but in a way that could easily be a retcon. Linden’s not happy about it either, but the fact that she’s not happy doesn’t make me happy.
IIRC Donaldson planned the First Chronicles by themselves, and the Second and Last at the same time. But in many ways it feels like they were all planned together. Lots of elements of Covenant’s voyage (Elohim, Sandgorgons, the One Tree, ice) all get a mention in the First. The Land’s history is much richer in the First than the First and Second need it to be, e.g. with the Viles, Demondin and ur-Viles - but then it becomes integrated to the plot in the Last. Time travel is new in the Last, except that the Ranyhyn have been doing it since the First. The Insequent are just an incongruous exception to how well developed they feel.
The Worm of the World’s End is another exception, I don’t think that got mentioned in the First; it also feels kind of inconsistent with the existence of the Creator.
Linden keeps choosing to believe things because she doesn’t like the alternatives. This is terrible. Fortunately for my enjoyment, it does not protect her.
10 year old harry potter speaking these words
oh god, this is like the most controversial paragraph in the whole damn thing
rivers of blood have been spilled over “by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian!”
RIVERS OF BLOOD
Blood spoils out in litres. ..
And someone screams a name: *Aaronson!*
But if he answers, if he arrives to bring order to the chaos, he arrives too late.
Dear Viewer, The world is vast and full of wonders. So on Friday, the 13th of January, please… watch something else. #ASOUE
The first trailer for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix!
OKAY DEEP BREATHS
my favourite part is that he’s walking around the set, explaining that this is a set, setting out that this exists in a fake world, but he’s still in character as lemony, and olaf is still in character in the background. like that’s such a lemony snicket, universes-within-universes way of doing things I can just hardly cope
@anniemariebrett we don’t have plans for that weekend, right?
(via gruntledandhinged)
Spoilers for The Girl With All The Gifts, both film and novel
I liked the film, I haven’t read the novel apart from the wikipedia summary.
Apparently Carey (the author of the novel and the screenplay) said the ending of the film was “absolutely faithful” to the ending of the book.
No, not really. The endings are similar on the surface, with Melanie deliberately releasing the spores to infect everyone. But the backstories have changed: in the book, second-generation hungries come from first-generation hungries who retained some human instincts. In the film, they come from first-generation hungries who were infected while pregnant, and they ate their way out of the womb.
So in the book, the second-generation hungries have a chance to rebuild. They can create a society that will outlive them. It may not be a human society, but it will be a society of people. This is a maybe-kind-of-okay ending.
But in the film, there’s no such chance. Mothers can only have one child before getting eaten alive from the inside. They can’t reproduce at replacement rates. Their society is doomed, it can maybe keep going for a while, but it will be constantly diminishing until it eventually dies off completely. This is an almost-definitely-terrible ending. It is not faithful to the book.
(That said, I’m interested in seeing what that society does. They don’t have much education, but they seem to be smarter than humans. Maybe they can coordinate, have 50-year generations and delay the inevitable. Maybe they can delay it even further by aborting any foetus that isn’t twins. Their only hope long-term is to develop artificial uteruses, maybe they can succeed at that.)
Work got me a kinesis advantage a few days ago.
There are a few things I’d change about it, both in hardware and software. In particular, there’s room for loads more buttons. Also, it’s not clear whether or not it’s going to fix my wrist, though it does seem to be helping.
But what’s great is how natural typing feels on it, much of the time. Using modifiers and some of the symbols doesn’t, yet, but typing English text is like… it’s not that I’m not making mistakes, and when I do I often lose my flow. But in flow I’m not moving my hands at all, just my fingers, and something about that makes it feel like I’m not actually typing, just thinking things that get translated on to the screen.
Maybe I just wasn’t touch-typing properly, before.
“Might” as in I don’t know. I seem to be cis-by-default, but I may not be cis; I don’t have a strong gender identity, but I may have a gender, whatever one of those is, if it happens to be different.
This is not super important to me. I don’t experience dysphoria1. I currently have no plans to transition, socially or physically. I’m not asking anyone to change the pronouns or name they refer to me by. (Though if you’re curious, my girl name seems to be Penny2.)
Real-life people: I don’t want this getting literally everywhere. I’m not asking you to keep it a secret, but I guess I’m asking you not to treat it as interesting.
Some relevant details to follow. Content warning: my sex life.
When I was working out the number theory test, there was one computation that I fucked up the solutions to because I thought that 6-40 = -36 for some reason. It took me like five minutes to find/fix the error.
I’ve graded four tests, and so far two of them have made the same error.
Glad to know it’s not just me, I guess?
Update: Have graded all 19 tests. Half the students made this error. (Including one who made it, got to the end, checked his answer and saw it was wrong, and reworked it correctly from the beginning. Good for him!)
@necarion is guessing this is like the thing where the bat and the ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs $1 more than the ball.
If you’re used to positive numbers, the answer looks like it should end in a 6, and -36 is the obvious candidate. This doesn’t feel quite the same to me as the bat and ball question.
(I, too, had a moment of wait, -36 isn’t correct?)
Doing the thing where I have a real blog where I hold myself to standards, and a tumblr where I just try not to be completely stupid.