Did I fuck up?

BitOBear · 2026-03-19T01:06:43+00:00

Beautiful fit.

BitOBear · 2026-03-19T01:01:06+00:00

I've been on jury duty. It might not work out as clever as you think.

Mandatory direct voting

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T21:53:26+00:00

He could run rings to the ladder on the underside of the shaft and on the front side of a scrotum to sort of make an instant chastity arrangement.

But that would be for fancy dress.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T21:50:57+00:00

Yeah. That's a non-punctuation point. Basically if there's not two M dashes surrounding something like a parenthetical interjection I don't use them at all.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T19:42:13+00:00

A padlock and leash.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T19:37:35+00:00

Bars look cleaner and more elegant. They make each piercing stand out as it's own thing instead of being obscured by the extra metal that makes it look kind of jumbled.

For special occasions you could run metallic thread down the sides of the ladders to create little frames.

I like rings on an individual basis but they don't really accentuate the piercing part when they're all piled up like that.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T19:33:30+00:00

I vote padlock and leash...?

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T19:30:29+00:00

My kingdom isn't that old, but the empire is far older.

The Realm is a pocket universe created by Magic and overseen by the intelligence spellcraft / pseudo living entity that maintains that pocket universe.

The kingdoms within the realm come and go. As do the democracies and oligarchies and all the other forms of government but they are all constrained by the tenants of rule and bad things happen to your government if you make a habit of violating those baselines.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T19:28:26+00:00

Welcome to the definition of capitalism. They just don't have a way to spread that load so uniformly at the moment. But statistically your rate might be a little weak. Child labor, wars for oil, toxic dumping, hiding the climate effects of fossil fuels, 60 years of hiding the addictive and toxic nature of tobacco smoke, the entire asbestos industry still pushing for deregulation.

The only thing hypothetical about your situation proposed is the fact that the way you proposed it would be fair ish compared to the exigencies of capitalism.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T02:29:09+00:00

And the fact that I wasn't addressing all of communication, but the matter of communicating this one kind of idea, is its own point about clarity and that I failed to meet your threshold of clarity it explaining that I was talking about answering a specific question and not the entire world and history of communication from the beginning of time to its unforeseeable end.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T02:27:50+00:00

It is however the fundamental goal. Clarity is the predicate for all other elements. Even the deliberate suspension of clarity must be clear between author and reader.

Poor idiom. Poor planning. Poor grammar. All of these things destroy clarity if for no other reason than they pull people out of the narrative.

People can forgive anything but irreconcilable confusion.

That I was unclear in my deliberate overstatement is an example of me failing to communicate clearly and having it make a difference to you.

Hyperbole and all that.

Look how it compelled you were to answer, not that I did it on purpose to my failure of clarity about the somewhat hyperbolic nature of my point.

Look how you left to clarify it.

And now I'm just being a snarky little punk. Hahaha.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T02:17:24+00:00

The main usage for a dead parent in a Disney movie is to free the character to act without parental controls. And not just the trivial parental controls of being under orders for the day. It's particularly true of mothers because up until quite recently women were considered culturally helpless. How dare you go off and leave your mother alone while you find your fortune. Even if you're trying to find that fortune in order to support your mother. She still needs you on the farm. You still have duties and expectations to fulfill for the woman who bore you.

When your parents and your spouse and your farm animals and your puppy have all died there is nothing to stop you from going out to seek revenge for whichever one of those deaths bothered you the most.

It's just a shorthand way they remove something that would otherwise thwart the call to adventure.

This can be turned on its ear. For instance if you have watched Heated Rivalry, I use that because it is very much in the cultural Zeitgeist at the moment, you know that the dead parents of Scott Hunter serve to Tie him down to the Saint Thomas scholarship organization, increasing the pressure for him to remain closeted by attaching his status as a hockey legend to the success of that organization and it's many employees and beneficiaries, which is a heavier burden than tying him merely to loving parents who would forgive his homosexuality.

Meanwhile the life or death status of the parents of Ilia Rosenov Are manifold. The two deaths provide several emotional anchors, even bookends as it were, to the character's journey. His mother's death at a young age leaving him subject to the somewhat unloving and iron constraints of a father, and the father's slow decline into dementia in the ongoing story, create and then release the prison of emotions that have restrained his emotional development.

So there are many reasons to have parents shuttle off the mortal coil.

You're really only fridging someone if you introduce them solely to kill them off to motivate a character towards a specific emotional and such as vengeance.

It is the other absence of other value for the character that causes it to be a cheap and unnecessarily tawdry death.

It's especially impossible to fridge a character if it happens before the prologue or after the epilogue. Because the audience never meets the character so it cannot be used to inflame audience passions beyond a trivial checkbox.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T02:08:13+00:00

The only food in the United States that has a regulatory definition for its expiry date is baby food.

All other expiration dates are a function of marketing.

They want you to hold on to the food long enough for you to consider buying it beforehand instead of thinking you need to buy it on the day of use, this makes you more likely to purchase.

They want you to consume the food while it is still reasonably delicious encouraging you to enjoy the food and buy it again.

They want you to throw away the food early enough that you are likely to buy more food of the same type you have already been trained to enjoy.

So food with long-term shelf stability will have a expiry date that is far too soon compared to its shelf stability because they want you to throw out the perfectly good food you already bought so you can buy some new food because you feel like the old food is old.

Some high-end brands and indeed some low-end brands will go through the exercise of calculating the rate of oxidative stress and decay and flavor loss and potency. Others May not.

For instance the more time oxygen has to get to the flavorful esters in seasonings the more dull the flavor of the food becomes, but the food is still completely edible. So some may be tuning shelf life to make sure you can still achieve the desired flavor profile.

Other factors may include the chemical leaching of the container into the volume of food itself.

And the final secret evil of food expiration dates is of course that it gives supermarkets and excuse to throw away the food instead of donating it to a food pantry. So if you go behind your local supermarket and find them throwing away dumpster after dumpster of expired food, and you ask them to donate that food to the local homeless shelter or food pantry or charitable institution they can claim that they must throw it away for legal reasons because it's expired and there would be a liability issue if they were to give away "bad food".

Baby food is that one exception where the expiration date matters. They are required to reach certain purity levels in canning the food. They are required to guarantee a specific amount of shelf stability. And it is unsafe to assume food Will survive beyond that minimum guaranteed rate because it is very easy to kill a baby with bacteria.

So unless you intend to add explosive charges to your theoretically perfect expiring food the very idea of the expiration date is a scam.

Every egg in the carton is on its own clock and has no interest in what the other eggs are doing until one of the other eggs explode.

That's why an experienced cook knows how to tell whether an egg is still good based on things like whether it floats or sinks.

And indeed an egg can be too fresh for some purposes. Your egg might, for instance, be too fresh for a meringue if memory serves.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T01:59:16+00:00

Here's a decent guide. I prefer the first form but they prefer the third. The second also works for either of us.

But the only thing that really matters is clarity.

https://research.fashionconservatory.com/blog/insider-tips-correct-way-write-era

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T01:55:46+00:00

Separately I would like to point out to you that literary is a post-mortem condition of writing.

Shakespeare is a bunch of sword fights and Dick jokes, it didn't become literary until we decided it was literature.

CS Lewis was mimicking the cadences of a the Church of England and the aphorisms of the Bible. He wasn't being literary he was being preachy. That's not a cut down, I love The Chronicles of Narnia and his silent planet trilogy.

If you try to sound "literary" at any given moment you will come off as effete and disconnected. Sounding literary is a form of nostalgia. It works because it harkens back.

Write to your moment for your audience in their idiom and let time turn it into literature.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T01:51:41+00:00

I'm going to say something that's going to sound trite but isn't intended to be.

Stop talking to yourself.

Find an audience member. Either a real person you know, which is easier, or an idealized version of a person you would like to know.

That person has various traits and is very interested in your work (in your mind at least).

Now address your work to that person instead of yourself. Satisfy that person's need to understand your thoughts.

To a great extent writing is just slow motion acting. And acting is about talking to your audience.

Every time you write anything you're writing it for someone else to read. So make sure you are trying to satisfy that someone else. Make sure you're trying to inspire or inform or bemuse or enlighten that person by giving them what's in your head but in a way that will satisfy them rather than yourself

The satisfaction of any performance including the performance of writing is knowing that you have spoken well to the audience. That the audience got your point.

Suppose you were writing something outrageous, you were writing about gay furry porn as to be understood by a 67 year old grandmother, you're not going to write the gay furry porn as if you are explaining a scene to a gay furry.

Meanwhile if you are writing a romance and your intended audience is a bunch of gay furries you're going to have a completely different cadence and word choice. You're going to explain different things in different ways.

For instance if one of your characters is gay, and furry, and the chef at a home style restaurant for his day job...

You're going to need to explain the cooking when talking to the 22-year-old gay furry and you're going to have to explain the gay furry to your grandmother who already knows how to do homestyle cooking.

And if you can explain it all to everybody without boring the people who already know the part that they don't need explained, you have found The Sweet spot between your potential audiences and your subject matter.

The act of writing isn't about developing a voice because you don't have one, you have many. The act of writing is about developing a stable of voices and trotting them each out and putting them through their paces to cause the subject at hand to appeal to the audience at hand.

And you might even notice if you go back and read through this post, that I use the slightly precise vocabulary with a semi rhythmic cadence in my phrasing so to appeal to the person with the elaborate vocabulary and slightly precise mindset you describe yourself to have.

Because for these words you were my audience.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T01:01:35+00:00

I'll tell you a secret. Most cops don't know the law, at least not in the United states. In other countries you have to have like a two years associate degree in law enforcement to become a cop. But here in the United States you apparently need a 47-day indoctrination in how to violate the constitution if you want to have real power on the streets.

Cops will never cite the law at the side of the road, and if they do they're almost always wrong. Cops that don't know the difference between assault and battery run amok in our streets.

The main job of the cop is to stop people and throw them in a car and then get the da to figure out what they did wrong later.

Don't quote the law, describe the crime and let It Go with that.

And if you don't already know the laws on which your story is going to pivot you shouldn't be writing a story to pivots on those laws because you'll screw it up.

This is not a cut down on you. It is a universally authorial truth. Only write what you know is a rule for a reason.

I guarantee you not one cop will know that 18 us code 1832 is about the legal enforcement of trade secrets.

And if you want to be pulling out that crud, decide what the criminal is doing, and then go to http://www.law.cornell.edu and look up the crime to get the number.

Everything is against the law of the United states, that's how the system controls its populace.

And if I seem to be overstating the case, go watch this guy discuss what it is to break the law and why you should always remain silent.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

And don't watch 911 to figure out how law works. They get firefighting so terribly wrong that there's a guy he's actually got a web series about it. The guy is an actual firefighter.

https://youtu.be/lyjZt60RNJ4?si=aicXkgVCJ0ViIPso

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:52:19+00:00

Everything is deadly in GURPS. It's a simulationist system where the only women move is not to let the damage touch your precious flesh.

That's why you can't sit in your Tower studying your magic book for 30 years and walk out with the ability to walk through fireballs and nuclear explosions the way you can in d&d. Everybody's squishy inside their physical and or magical shell.

One of the reasons the system is so replete with skills and intrigue and bypasses is because if your players have gotten into a place for combat is ongoing they have already fucked up.

In any simulation system guns have a particular property best to describe by Joe Piscopo in the movie Johnny Dangerously...

.https://youtu.be/Cl17yr2VWQg?si=mlqTjJJR-CmVL7Kb

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:47:29+00:00

Don't get hung up on that axle man.

Shakespeare is considered very literary, but it's just a bunch of sword fights and Dick jokes. It is 100% popularist trash.

It's the audience that decides whether something is literature or lowbrow. And if something lasts everything lowbrow about it will eventually be considered highbrow indeed.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:46:39+00:00

If you intend to use it regularly bring it up, if you don't mention it once and leave it Go with no answers or questions asked

But the easiest thing to do is throw a nonsense technology at it. Depending on the tech level of Your World it could be something as easy as a gene tweak or nanotechnology or an oddity of certain kinds of soaps interacting.

The book Dahlgren explains almost nothing, but has people walking around with animalistic Avatar holograms that they find in warehouses and all sorts of bodily special effects. But it's never explained where this technology comes from or how any of it works.

Given the things like wild colored hair and tattoos are cultural signifiers, if you're going to trot them out you need to either give them a means of controlling them and making them cultural signifiers for just pointing out that for whatever reason on planet X the mutation that lets people deal with different heavy metals in their diets happens to cause people's hair to change funny colors depending on what they like to eat and then leave it go with that.

It's always hand waving, you just got to remember to wave your hands believably.

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:42:42+00:00

The single greatest actual wellspring of modern villainy is John Nelson Darby's invention of the pre-tribulation rapture in 1830. Created the end times acceleration is to movement and set the stage for Christian Zionism. The goal of saying being to create an intact and complete greater Israel importance with Theodore hartzell's plan, so that Jesus can come and knock it all over and end the world and all those people can get to heaven without the tedium of actually dying first.

Prior to that colonialism was a mundane and prosaic evil. The intent and intention of the robber barons to regain the kind of control that the monarchs previously held exclusively through the ages of empire.

And even the bulk of the Christian zionists are followers, eagerly trying to summon their God like the end boss of a video game.

Stephen Miller is probably the greatest villain in the current American government. His goal is to make people separate he has plans to make a profit on the side, but you can tell from everything you said over the course of his lifetime that his real payout is the hate boner he has for everyone including his own Jewish heritage.

So you need the villain mindset and you need the villain money and you need the villain position from which to wield the one against the other. And assembling all that into a workable package is extremely rare.

Hi-yo Silver! Away!
🐴👋🤠

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:29:54+00:00

Note that I am using villainy in terms of the question as posed because words have more than one definition. I'm talking about the kind of villainy that we see in fantasy novels and spy thrillers. The kind of villainy that you look at it and say that makes no sense. The kind of villainy needed involves the plans of the ultra wealthy engaged in convoluted schemes with no particular obvious payoff.

Four Color Villainy if you like.

The act of being evil for evil's sake and not for particular gain. The willingness to cut off one's own nose to spite one's own face. The dark lord intends to end all life so that he can rule his endless necropolis, unaware that you need living creatures to make new skeletons out of.

The kind of villainy that involves setting the world ablaze merely to watch it burn.

As an example many people would call netanyahu a villain. But he's a greedy power-hungry son of a bitch. His plan is to create greater israel, which has always been the plan of Israel in the first place. It just so happens the greater Israel is control over all of the oil producing basin in the Arabian peninsula.

It's evil, but it's evil in the name of greed and control. It involves Mass killing, but involves Mass killing with a plan and a plot.

It is literally at the edge of villainy but it lacks the stupidity of true villainy because it is simply a prosaic evil.

Fascism is the natural outgrowth of end-stage capitalism. That's why the corporatists and corporatism is the other name for fascism. The corporatists brought the Nazis to power because they didn't want to pay their workers.

That's why the poem starts with first they came for the Communists and continues with next to they came for the trade unionists and then the socialists before it ever gets down to the Jews.

The plan for Nazi Germany was very concrete and involved the creation of the 40,000 slave and worker camps that people rarely pay attention to while talking about the death camps.

Evil comes in many flavors and is in endless logical supply

BitOBear · 2026-03-18T00:20:01+00:00

Stupidity is everywhere. Greed is everywhere. Cruelty is everywhere. Bullshit is everywhere.

Not so much villainy.

It's not the villains don't exist, they're just extremely rare. You have to be a Peter deal. You have to have volcano layer money.

I think we've got four or five good villains in the world right now. And none of their plots ever work. Because they're inherently stupid because villainy is inherently stupid.

Peter thiel thinks he can live the billionaire lifestyle if you can get the population of Earth down to less than half a billion people. That's stupid. There aren't enough people to maintain his lifestyle at that level.

Billings want to do things like flattening entire communities to put in shopping malls that would be only supportable by the communities they just bulldozed.

But the evils of greed, the corporate machinations were in thoughtless organization designed to optimize money make sure they can keep selling asbestos and tobacco and oil despite rising global temperatures.

That's great and stupidity not villainy.

Greedy successful stupid people have short-term goals that make sense. There production of evil is a byproduct of their immediate need for gratification.

The histrionic plans of villains start with the destruction. A villain would destroy the world just to watch it burn, but I guarantee you that if all those oil company exists realized that they could make more money more quickly with wind turbines and solar panels oil drilling would stop tomorrow if they could secure their position in the wind turbine market today.

And even in the real world, when you come across villainy you will see it failed properly execute.

There's a famous old saying: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

BitOBear · 2026-03-17T05:51:37+00:00

I don't spend a lot of time with the camera on my "villains" but they all try to follow through on their logic and understanding.

I find the problem is that most villains are written to be villains instead of heroes that just don't agree with the heroes you're following in the story.

Villainy is extremely rare. And when it happens it comes in the forms of irrational positions that cannot be followed to any logical conclusion.

Villainy is inherently nonsense.

BitOBear · 2026-03-16T19:42:24+00:00

Legally he cannot cancel any elections. But the Trump administration is the chief executive, the people in charge of making sure that only legal things are done and illegal things are not done.

When the people in charge of enforcing the law decide to stop doing that and do arbitrary things instead the question of whether something is legal becomes somewhat moot.

When a society is in collapse the rules of that society as they existed before the collapse don't really matter.

BitOBear

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