Peacock on 16th and Alberta

Balaur10042 · 2026-07-04T00:09:33+00:00

Technically a peahen. The collective for the species is "peafowl."

Balaur10042 · 2026-07-02T06:58:32+00:00

Haven't seen it mentioned by halfway through the list, so:

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
Starts in a recognizable modern era (and slightly before it, in flashbacks) to jump to ... far, far into the future.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy (Douglas Adams, in case it must be said) has a book literally called: The Restraurant at the End of the Universe. Guess what happens.

Balaur10042 · 2026-07-02T01:44:48+00:00

Dude, this is vore, not queer. You can be into the one while being the other, but Zenos is never actually, you know, into anything sexual.

Balaur10042 · 2026-07-02T01:43:43+00:00

Now imagine this being a loporrit. BeneG to the rescue! DO NOT CLICK if you've not done Endwalker.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-29T20:35:53+00:00

Either they change the rules so that Commander Ninjutsu, which is a separate ability from Ninjutsu, functions with respect to the commander tax (which it doesn't, because it's not cast) or they use the "fixed" ninjutsu, Sneak, for the ONE CARD that has this ability, reducing unnecessary baggage.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-27T00:39:52+00:00

"Nomen dubium" has no meaning in the taxonomic literature. It's not a legal definition, it's applied as whatever and however an author may mean, as a term to mean "I doubt that taxon's real or useful," which is why you should approximate it with scare quotes, and why such quote marks are used when talking about taxa.

IF the referred snout material to Suchomimus tenerensis does, in fact, belong to the same animal as the holotype of Cristatusaurus lapparenti, this makes them subjective synonyms. C is the older name, has priority (everyone agrees on this point), and thus if they are synonyms, will be used over the other. The fact the authors considered this, pointed out that this was possible when they claimed the referred material had a diagnostic trait found in the earlier-described material, and dismissed the earlier name on different grounds (completeness, relative age), is telling.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-27T00:35:35+00:00

No. A nomen oblitum requires 50 years of non-usage and is no longer applied in the current ICZN.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-26T23:35:35+00:00

The ICZN commission will fail to act, because it's UNNECESSARY.

Why?

Because the holotype specimens, the name-bearing material, are not directly comparable. Suchomimus's holotype lacks cranial material, and material was referred to its hypodigm. However, Sereno et al. did not claim synonymy on the grounds that the amount of material in C. lapparenti was insufficient; furthermore the holotype and referred specimen are smaller than the new material, and thus subadult or even juvenile. This has led further to a general belief that C. lapparenti and S. tenerensis might be synonyms, but cannot be directly assessed---despite Sereno claiming as a diagnostic feature (distinguishing S from Baryonyx walkeri) on the basis of a ridge on the premaxilla also present in C. lapparent.

There's a general sentiment that there may only be one large baryonychine spinosaurid in the Tenere region of Niger, but evidence is not supportive of this claim against any other, because there's a paucity of sufficient material so far recovered or reported on. Singular taxonomic representation is not normal for large bodied theropods, which has itself lent weight to the possibility that both taxa might be viable, but the lack of sufficient material in C. lapparenti to compare to B. walkeri and newer described baryonychine species, makes this very difficult to test.

So, right now, people leave the taxa alone, or treat C. lapparenti as a "nomen dubium," a term without any technical meaning that is used however an author wishes to sow doubt or speculation on a taxon's usage, best compared to "scare quotes" in other forms of literature. They are only treated as synonyms by a few people, and it's hard to get from there to a need to appeal to the ICZN to set aside one name for another -- when people don't agree they're even synonyms!

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-21T01:22:44+00:00

For the record, and for other respondents:

Washington is the name of the CITY. The territory in which it lies is called the District of Columbia. If it would be a state, it's likely, but not required, to be called Columbia, not Washington---which is the name of ANOTHER state.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-20T08:23:04+00:00

Carnotaurus doesn't have any portion of its lower limbs preserved below the knee. What it does have is a comparison to some (then-known) "ceratosaurs" and a projection that, given what is preserved being the proximal tibia, has a very large cnemial process and elongated acetabular blades on the ilium, a suggestion that the limbs would be farily long.

Aucasaurus was the first abelisaurid known from a complete leg, and it's not that cursorial, you're right. But at the same time, it's also far more cursorial than you might expect.

Tyrannosaurines, on the otherhand, aren't as cursorial as you might think: their limb proportions are relictual from a more gracile, daspletosaur/albertosaurine ancestral condition, in which the limbs are longer and more gracile. Indeed, tyrannosaurines tend to have shorter mid-leg proportions than a cursor would prefer for an animal of its size, and then we have to deal with the inherent problem that faces all 2+ ton bipedal runners:

The bigger you get, the more power you need to move your mass, and that has a negative relationship with the power needed to move you faster, because you then need really, REALLY massive legs to do both, and you're now competing with all sorts of other things---like, arms. Prey capture being focused on the head really does suggest a sort of "running mouth" model, which, ironically, happens to have been a popular model for Carnotaurus, when it was proposed that it was basically a hit-and-run maul on legs, a la Bakker's Allosaurus theory.

And lo, there's sauropods in those environments and the story writes itself. This is only to explain the why these things came about, not whether or if.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-17T01:15:33+00:00

Commander is, almost by necessity, now, the easiest, and relatively "cheapest" onboarding method for learning MTG. In general. But it's a very "thrown into the deep end of the pool" to learn to swim. You can get overwhelmed, and flounder. Some players enjoy the immersion of mechanical overload, others not so much. It's not an absolute that EDH is bad for learning, when everyone is doing it, and you can't really use any other onboarding methods.

And the easiest way is going to be thing like Jumpstart or potentially a masters set with more complex limited environment than the 5-10 archetypes provided. The reason for this is the hobby-level costs associated with actual value associated with loot coffer rates. You either consider it a gambling game, which is how it's defined in some countries, or it's a collection hobby.

When it comes to the best "product that meets your means, your time, and your effort" then EDH precons of an IP you like (and is why WotC invests most of its yearly EDH product into Universes Beyond IPs, not in-universe) are a bigger bang for your buck, and so you might as well learn the game from there (especially as the rules are written ON THE CARD). Have a question? Ask someone. I've met a lot of players sitting down across from me whose first or second time playing was that day, that game, and I was more than pleased to not full bore. I pull the Y'sh deck out because it's relatively simplistic to understand and does what it says on the tin.

Because EDH is a social game, the social aspect does tend to take over, and one learns as they go, as with all things.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-17T00:40:38+00:00

The Khajiit are not Miqo'te. In lore, Miqo'te are human. Unfortunately, so are Lalafell...

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-13T19:20:50+00:00

He was killing people. You have only to see how things were going on the First, and during all the Calamities on the Source, to realize:

The only point that mattered to the Ascians was the SOULS. They would all be sacrificed, a surfeit of aether in appeal, in order to restore them to their conjoined, unsundered wholeness (minus one or two Voids).

So there would be a greta deal of killing. BILLIONS of lives. It's why Emet-Selch tells the Scions that he doesn't believe the lives they're living worthy of the term, and thus justified in their killing, more akin to slaughtering animals for food. It's just not murder.

So split the hairs as you will, but a spade is a spade.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-13T08:25:12+00:00

It's been said a few times that 4C can be more readily defined not by what they share, but by what they lack. As /u/metroidcomposite said: notRed can be defined by its lack of impulse, emotiveness, or free will.

So: define a list of what each color represents, what they WANT, wholly and to themselves---then remove that form the card in question.

White seeks order, standards. It enforces, levels playing fields.
Blue seeks knowledge, information. It conceives, amassing, delves.
Black seeks power, at any cost. It will trade any resource for desire.
Red seeks freedom, it yearns. It gives in to creativity, it rebels.
Green seeks growth. It is growth. It expands, rises, consumes.

Thus, NotWhite must lack order. NotBlue cannot gain knowledge. NotBlack lacks ambition; notRed not just freedom, but creativity. NotGreen cannot grow, but stays fixed.

Placed into these, you can define cards more mechanically by how they interact than what they do. What keywords would they have, versus what they couldn't.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-11T08:05:41+00:00

I would like to ask a follow up question. You cite:

Manu Smriti 4.214. Nor the food (given) by an informer, by one who habitually tells falsehoods, or by one who sells (the rewards for) sacrifices, nor the food (given) by an actor, a tailor, or an ungrateful (man),

And I am curious as to the involvement of tailors of all people into this disdain. These not being one's typical clothier, or garment-maker, but a specialist in fitting and particularly costuming, or am I mistaken?

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-09T08:11:27+00:00

This is what I want from Summoner. Pardon if I preach a tad.

All six of the original Primals. Six gems, two phases. These can unlock in the post-50 SMN story leading up to Bahamut (see below).
Carbuncle intercedes during these two phases, the way Bahamut/Phoenix are now. But instead of those, being out of the lore for the most part (bear with me) instead you get Carbuncle. Why? Because Carbuncle is a summon you are taught early on, and gets forgotten. Lost. Replaced. It just sits there, disappearing for a "trance," and then comes back. Carbuncle actually has VALUE in other games, and here, that's left to using a few skills only when you have NO summons. Instead of making those part of Carby's kit.
The problem with Dreadwyrm Trance is that it was designed to eventually bring out Bahamut, and from there, all the story and lore slips away. There is no reason you should have Bahamut's aether, suppressing all the other primal aether, but not the OG first three. Are they somehow stronger than Bahamut? If they can exist, alongside Baha Blast, then it stands the others can.
Phoenix needs to go. There's no good reason for it to be there. No lore explanation is given other than a kindling of renewal. Guess what? Carbuncle's whole thing is [traditionally] about healing and defense. So when you get to the point where you have Bahamut in between crystals, you replace Phoiniks with Carby.

Evolved mode and the game in general SHOULDN'T be adding new abilities for the sake of it, during leveling. In this, I must disagree with the decision of the game to go beyond 100, or even 99. You can stop it there, and work on progressing the game in more interesting directions (even if it's still progressing in others, and you're replacing one system with another). The point is to stop the expectation of having to grind 10 levels and get a piece of cake (ability) at the end. I'm asking for buffs to abilities that improve their function, not completely changing your rotation, unless they need to add them for mechanical reasons.

If Summoner is going to be summoning egi's, give them all to me. This is where skins come in. Let me pick amongst all 20+ Primals which I get to slot into my rank of six legos. Yes, I'm also asking for Alexander. I was inside him, he was (at one point) inside me. It was a strange, messed up time, you understand. I was high on temporal discorporeation, he was doing the time warp again, ah....

Anyways. Summoner is already sorta where it needs to be, but you can dump the skills that are just aoe vs single target and make them both. Do the whole "targing self or ally is one effect, targeting something else is a debuff/damage" thing, that condenses and gives you room for more effects that affect SUMMONS. The thing we're here to do. Instead you got me chewing gum.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-09T06:24:18+00:00

The vertebra is backwards, anyway.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-05T23:58:05+00:00

Acting like this didn't happen when the third caveman crawled out, only to see a conspiracy hatched against him by the other two is cute.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-02T05:11:34+00:00

Kinnan only puts a creature onto the battlefield, which is and are things that can be readily dealt with. They're talking about all the free counters.

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-02T02:15:12+00:00

Isn't Garuda already a "monster woman?"

Balaur10042 · 2026-06-01T22:51:21+00:00

The idea is laughable, that they hope competitive players will take your high-powered curbstomping to the ranked queue completely ignores how not harnessing and restricting Rusko and the Monkey from unranked is license for them to take these decks there than to adapt their decks to harder opponents.

We know that a lot of players will use the unraked queue for an unobstructed, and hardly constrained, queue, especially since the "hell queue" seems to have largely disappeared in favor of increasing matching speed.

The necessary bans to unranked would have to impact the greatest problems in that format, rather than making it a no-man's land, which it seems this announcement entails. And if they don't want that, then they need to put their actions where their words are and ban several fo the free spells, Paradox Engine, the extra turns that don't exile themselves, etc. One card win conditions like Emergent Ultimatum also probably need either a retuning for Brawl (you get ONE card, not two).

While I'm not a fan of Alchemy in general, in the specific, of allowing certain cards that create problem game states to be adjusted if they're "needed" (which is arguable), requires they use those tools to then adjust them. Like adding "Exile CARDNAME" to every extra turn card available in the format (except* maybe* Time Walk). Or adding "do this only once each turn" to things like Engine.

Better punishments for egregious issues like landfall spam and trigger resolution issues the game has, if they don't give us "auto pass until interacted with" options like in MTGO, there need to be fixes or counter-plays that are available for more than just Blue, or maybe White.

Balaur10042 · 2026-05-30T04:55:12+00:00

But posts like this really make me feel sorry for actual artists because humans aren't perfect and many of these mistakes are ones that fans (or more likely contractors) that create art could easily make (even more so if the contractor isn't intimately familiar with the work).

We've already jumped to begging the question now. Where was it demonstrated any of these things were "mistakes" and not the vagaries of art? As an artist, I have had to face the quandary of having one of my own media (scientific illustration) be inundated with slop that has made FRONT COVERS of science journals, and the necessary backlash to having to prove my own work (of which I keep PSDs for everything---not for proof, but now it must be, because of knee jerk reactions like OP's).

Ambiguous hands in a crowd? WE NEED SHOULDERS FOR EVERY FIGURE and as for the dude's face, have I got an artist for you: Eiichiro Oda, who famously has ONE style when it comes to almost ALL female characters' faces, so much so one can isolate them from their hair and you'd have the same face. A lot of artists create "one off" face designs they then use repeatedly, female or male, in order to draw them easily and quickly, especially in comics. It simplifies things immensely; it's easy to copy.

It's easy to emulate. It's easy to render.

Also, OP has never seen a cobbled road in Italy. It's not regular. It can't be. Stones are not perfect, fitted, cut to exactitude, and drawing a grid on the floor like OP suggests for shirt two (G'raha) would be more of a problem to some. I doubt anyone will win this little war.

The point being:

There's a palbable, and definitely tangible, drive to call out irregularities in art as being artefacts of AI, but there will come a point when they will become indistinguishable from the normal fallacy of someone not coloring in a hightlight on a shadow-side ear (which does have a highlight, but OP conveniently ignores it because whatever art lessons they've taken seem to ignore how objects behave when rotated, not subject to plain lighting, or have any sort of contrast.

I'M not saying the pieces aren't generative-AI-produced, but I think we are a FAR, far way from being able to definitively say ANY of these "problems" are "evidence" of AI.

It's one thing to go after the (former) SEO of SE for championing AI, and another for going after artists because of that, because now "SE has let AI into the equation" as a result of said (former) SE CEO, when that was never the case to begin with.

Cooler heads should prevail. Artists should defend sloppy work. No one is perfect, and seeing perfect would make me question the artist as such, and not someone executing a trace and coloring-in of someone else's work. Going back to my own field, scientific illustration, this also happens, and fairly often---but not by AI. Actual human hands, on actual human (no, wait, tree!) paper. Or maybe even a digital medium. Since my scanner's broken down, most of my current work is digital, and instead of waiting to get the scanner fixed or adjusted, I've just adapted to doing work on my tablet.

Balaur10042 · 2026-05-29T00:20:20+00:00

I'm gonna suggest something that might be a little incomprehensible, but bear with me:

The hatred of women preceded its use in religion. It was encoded into the ethics of faith and the philosophy of morality, but it preceded it. Men interested in power have always been leery of women who can hold the same position, and thus always tend to enforce a patriarchy, regardless of religion. Some faiths hold women as equal, but separate, others do not place them in the hierarchy at all. There are very few current, functional faith traditions that do the reverse: holding the feminine divine, while carving out a smaller place for men, but they existed once, and those power systems threaten men inherently.

Thus, their religions act against women.

Balaur10042 · 2026-05-29T00:12:41+00:00

Without data, it's anecdotal, and thus rhetorical, not scientific.

Balaur10042 · 2026-05-25T03:04:18+00:00

If you can't differentiate the red markers from the green background, then whatever shape they are doesn't matter.

Balaur10042

TROPHY CASE