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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.

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Also if the problem is that people are using both stoves, then, okay?

That's making people better off. They now have an additional thing they've judged as worth using. If your goal is to fix the breathable-air problem then yeah, we can't really call that a success. It's just failing in a way where it still helps people at least a little, so, whatever. This isn't PlayPump.

But-- I love the implication that the Duke headline writer thinks "this could reduce carbon emissions" is the only part Western audiences would care about. Unless they're right. If they're right I hate it.

Blaming random African aunties just feeding their families and not the billionaires literally setting the world on fire sure is something

#if someone ever decides to unilaterally fix the greenhouse effect with geoengineering we're all going to be so confused #are there environmental problems other than “number of carbons”? Maybe! Do we know what they are? IDK; how does it affect climate change!

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Definitely not majority, sorry. That'd be nuts.

Plurality is...complicated.

Wikipedia's numbers are >10 years out of date. Not really their fault; everyone has to work from the 2011 census.

Around 30% of people in India speak at least some English (this is also ten years out of date; assume it's higher now). It's pretty universally taught and those kids are adults now. Realistically, English is the first or second lingua franca there and there aren't going to be a billion people who don't speak it at all. I would bet on 425 million English speakers being an underestimate. Keeping in mind that not everyone in the US speaks English (or speaks the same English) and that should be a comfortable margin.

I've heard it's more consistent, too-- relatively little variation, more similar to the English on the other side of India than whatever I'm speaking is to AAVE. (If true this would check out: it was being taught top-down, pretty recently, specifically for the purpose of making communication easier.) So it makes sense to talk about "Indian English" as a single very large dialect. But you probably don't want to trust an "or so I've heard" from a guy who just mixed up plurality and majority.

openai outsources some kind of training to africans -> chatgpt uses words like "delve" a lot more often than americans do -> an anti-meteoric rise of the word's usage in papers suggests academics are using it to write a ton -> some people who don't want to read ai-generated text filter out text with the word -> nigerians discriminated against

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These are already the main dialects of English--most English speakers are Indian, etc--but LLMs do seem pretty likely to accidentally speed up how fast it gets adopted by "official" people.

openai outsources some kind of training to africans -> chatgpt uses words like "delve" a lot more often than americans do -> an anti-meteoric rise of the word's usage in papers suggests academics are using it to write a ton -> some people who don't want to read ai-generated text filter out text with the word -> nigerians discriminated against

#ChatGPT: a power grab by Nigerian English speakers against the Indian incumbents? #worst framing

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Context note: there is absolutely no context. Judge just woke up and felt like it I guess.

As is our policy in drafting decisions, we generally include only those facts which are necessary to our decision. We eliminate irrelevant facts such as whether a trustee's actions were manifest under the imagery of a full moon, unless, of course, a trustee's affliction from lycanthropy impairs the administration of the estate.

In re Eagson Corp., 61 B.R. 609, 611 (Bankr. E.D. Pa. 1986)

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Saw some of the Interminable Leather Discourse on my dash. Has anyone ever done an authoritative estimate of how bad it is or isn't?

They don't raise and kill animals specifically for leather. The hide is 4-10% of the monetary value of animals raised and killed for meat.

(10% according a rando on the leatherworking Reddit; 4% according to The Leather Lobby Incorporated's page on We Swear We're Not Evil, You Guys, citing a source that does not seem to say that. I'm just going to call it 5% for the round number.)

Approximately 55 square feet of leather per cow.

The lobbyists up there said it was 69% cows; the rest is sheep+goats+pigs, with pigs being the next biggest. Make it ~42.6 square feet per dead animal; the true number will be a bit smaller because they're not all pigs.

(Apparently if you buy Chinese leather and aren't careful about your sources they sometimes sell leather made from cat or dog skin and lie about it. I assume leather-wearers are not okay with this, but would be interested to find out why. Like, I know my reason, but it's probably not the same one.)

40 square feet for a small men's jacket. More for large, less for women.

A typical leather jacket kills about 1/20th of an animal, in the same ballpark as eating 100 (beef) burgers, or about half of a (chicken) burger.

Animals killed by faux leather:

Literally none?

If every plastic jacket you ever buy ends up in a landfill, that's like...one really big trash bag? A few square feet of area that didn't have much of anything living on it anyway?

Not trying to be sarcastic here; I just genuinely don't see how this hurts or kills much of anything.

Making plastic can't possibly be good for the environment, but it's definitely less bad than growing a one-twentieth-ass cow.

Final opinion on the Discourse:

Depending on how much meat you eat and how long you wear your clothes for, wearing leather is probably less bad than eating beef but around that ballpark.

It is way less bad than eating chicken.

As always, someone who eats as many cows as they want and no other animals has accomplished most of the good things about being vegan with barely any effort. This stays true if they also wear leather.

Arguing about leather is like arguing about the difference between mostly-vegetarian and actually-vegetarian.

I was hoping it'd be a small enough difference that I could say whatever, it's a rounding error, I'm gonna go buy leather now. It wasn't; this is a real difference.

But it is small enough that if you want to wear a leather without people yelling at you, you can skip buying chicken for three weeks and link the activists here so they get mad at me instead of you.

You know, if Internet arguments sound like a fun use of your time.

#leather #the interminable leather discourse #that is a serious offer-- if anyone wants to take advantage of it I'd consider it a win #might have to withdraw or change it if I screwed up the numbers though #obviously what's actually going on is that leather is meaningfully bad but nowhere near the worst bad thing normal people do #and *also* extremely visible and makes a great signal #so it's perfectly placed to keep getting argued about forever

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USAmerican ex-protestant who thinks catholics are all fun loving progressives because their evangelical preacher told them that but as a bad thing

#I'm in this picture and feel ambivalent about it