From a natural law perspective, biting necks is clearly the intended function of a vampire's fans. Cutting yourself, on the other hand, no way.

It's unfair that women should have to compete with biological men in the marriage market.

They used to. It produced problems, the famous example is someone's shirt having "MAY" written on it, becoming "YAM".

Consider Phlebas is like a porridge with lots of almonds and bits of apple and banana and sultanas chocolate chips and so on. It's very interesting, but not everything necessarily belongs there.

The Player of Games is like a porridge passed through a strainer. Much neater, but less interesting.

*Boba Fett, not Jango

Banks: The Idirans are sequential hermaphrodites. They spend part of their lives as females, and part of their lives as people I can write.

Banks' greatest sin is the Jango Fett thing. Having made Horza this cool drifter with alien powers who goes on cool adventures everywhere and doesn't back down from anything, he makes the Culture think he's cool too.

Billions of people are dying every day, they can get over one fuckwit.

I'm no Consider Phlebas hater. The toxic masculinity works for the novel to a certain extent, it adds to the portrayal of Horza as an obstinate reactionary. I'm not sure where that extent ends, but it's certainly before Balveda's suicide.

Banks' Culture exists in a constant tension between expressing his opinions on utopia and his opinions on women. Consider Phlebas is torn by it.

Get behind thee, Moorcock!

I swear half of Scalzi's output is parodies of old-school genre trends. How are the kids going to understand it if they don't read the canon?

bsky.app/profile/jose...

"I don’t want to harp on a municipal election"

Vance goes on about the municipal election for twenty paragraphs, went on a break to boast about destroying American industry and science, then ends with another ten paragraphs on the municipal election.

Scalzi descended to Reddit to attack the curmudgeons. Tragically, when he returned to BlueSky he was still on their level.

I was trying to work out what swear words they were censoring.

I don't agree with people who keep Pokémon like Magnemite or Pikachu unevolved forever. It's cruel, let them grow naturally. Otherwise they're trapped in Neverland forever, like Michael Jackson.

I wasn't convinced by how quickly Mark became a good guy when I read the story sequentially. Starting with Mirror Mirror must be like getting introduced to Vegeta late.

The Warrior's Apprentice is a good start. Not the first in the series, but the first to include the person who became the main character. Her writing is a lot more refined too; it's often said the first book was an adapted Trek fanfic.

So based. I am now a Germanophile.

I've enjoyed it, although it seemed a bit basic once I played Tzolkin.

The expansion missions made the game feel a lot more random in a way I didn't like, but I didn't play enough to be sure of my opinion.

Review – Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden Auril the Frostmaiden has claimed Icewind Dale, laying her enchantment upon it: a terrible curse of perpetual winter. The denizens of Ten-Towns – ten settlements clustered around the lakes at the

'Unfortunately, like several of the other official D&D campaigns I’ve seen, Rime of the Frostmaiden only flirts with being something innovative and unique before abruptly ripping off its mask and shouting, “Aha! Just kidding! I was a railroad the whole time!”'

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/45...

Yeah, if you go too low then you reduce their marginal marginalisation. That's unethical interference with your subject.

I thought, "surely not vaccines", and it's funny to see Dawkins try to defend vaccines to his new bedfellows.

Crypto-enthusiasm is forgivable in the 90s, but terrible in the 20s.

I certainly wouldn't call him fascist for this. But I get why someone might conflate being a scammer with being a fascist in the modern political environment.

Actually, ‪@neotiamat99.bsky.social‬ can I ask you for a source on that one?

I did not want to learn this, but the Cryptonomnicon does end with them founding a gold-backed cryptocurrency so I'm not surprised.

Shrike?

Okay, but did they have wings?

Just read it.

I've also read-shirts. It takes a lot of refinement to make your writing seem so unrefined, so it's strange that both very carefully written novels seem like unambitious genre parodies that don't really go anywhere. They both got awards though. Is he always like that?

The reason speed limiters are a bad idea is not that their intended policy outcome is bad, there is no good reason to speed in residential/urban areas, it's that they pose as a band-aid reform but aren't actually cheaper/easier/faster/more popular to implement than full-on "ban cars"-type urbanism.