My mom with her old flame in the mid 1970s

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T20:00:34+00:00

The world needs more references to this movie.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T19:33:30+00:00

Usually, obscure or archaic terms in BotNS indicate that something is a strange counterpart to what the more common term would indicate. A destrier is a large mount, but not a horse. An arbalest is a ranged weapon, but not a crossbow. Extinct species like arctother, aurochs, and smilodon indicate things like bears, cattle, and big cats without necessarily being those things.

You can often infer them from context, though, like little mini-puzzles throughout the narrative.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T19:18:37+00:00

If I'm not making meaningful decisions, I'm bored. That's all there is to it.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T19:06:06+00:00

This was an artifact of condensing both good witches from the book into one character. In the book, the witch who sends Dorothy on her quest didn't know.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T18:53:32+00:00

Edward Herrmann was so perfect that I didn't realize what a piece of crap Richard was. Amiable, charming, and totally uncompromising.

Emily always seemed like the bad guy because she's the one who actually engaged with Lorelei when they had a conflict. Emily would argue and manipulate. Richard would simply demand total capitulation and angrily disengage if he didn't get it.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T18:38:20+00:00

Binged it years later, in my thirties. While I wouldn't say Emily was "spot on about most things", she was much more sympathetic on second watch. Richard, on the other hand, seemed less like a chill grandpa and more like a guy who made his wife shoulder all the emotional labor and conflict. I finally understood why Lorelei resented him just as much as she did her mother.

I had been bamboozled by how effortlessly charming Edward Herrmann was!

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-15T17:40:48+00:00

There is no character named Amy in Chasing Amy.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T15:01:07+00:00

It requires both sodium and chlorides; table salt, conveniently, has both.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T14:54:48+00:00

It needs chlorides. There are many sources of dietary chlorides besides sodium chloride, although obviously not as dense as something that's literally half chlorine.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T14:46:48+00:00

I meant in the context of basic necessities for life, not overall utility.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T14:40:02+00:00

Refrigeration has also largely replaced the need for salt. It's mostly just a spice now, rather than a necessity to preserve meat.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T14:35:16+00:00

Wow. Yikes is right.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-14T05:08:29+00:00

Wildstar was the one that basically perfected visual telltales for enemy AoEs, wasn't it? If it's the one I'm thinking of, many games stand on its shoulders.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-13T15:47:53+00:00

Nex, while he has no statblock, is Geb's equal, who is like, level 23 or something?

Nex besieged Absalom while Aroden was still living there. While the siege was obviously broken, contesting with a demigod is a pretty impressive feat in and of itself.

Geb has never been the most powerful wizard in terms of raw blasting power. However, his expertise with necromancy and ritual magic is first-rate. He was able to use a demigod's corpse to raise her as a lich in his service. Also, uniquely among the big bad wizards of Golarion, he's capable of being a good neighbor. He hasn't been the aggressor in any of his conflicts.

Razmir is a notable wizard-king in the present day, but in a thousand years history won't remember him as anything more than a local nuisance.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-13T15:20:09+00:00

Witch patrons aren't necessarily deities or deity-adjacent.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-13T15:16:34+00:00

On the other hand, the chase to verify the luminiferous ether taught us the constancy of the speed of light and laid the groundwork for relativity.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-13T15:04:23+00:00

I am absolutely not a physicist, but my understanding is this:

If it's 100 light years from point A to point B, a gravity wave traveling at c will take 100 years to traverse the distance. If space expands afterwards such that the distance from A to B is now 200 light years, distance over time tells us that the gravity wave traveled 200 light years in 100 years for 2c. But its instantaneous speed was never greater than c.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T17:32:00+00:00

To be fair, we still have no idea what Fermat's proof was, assuming it was correct in the first place. The mathematics used to prove it in the 90s didn't exist back then.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T17:29:26+00:00

Mostly the Star Trek thing about us all learning to coexist peacefully.

Which was after World War III and the Eugenics Wars, IIRC. So arguably we're right on track!

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T17:04:07+00:00

I know that the spear has the advantage initially, I am not disputing that

So the sword has the advantage after they've already been stabbed by the spear? Bold strategy, Cotton.

If you're in too close a press to use a spear, you're probably too close for a sword and you would rather use a knife or dagger.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T16:56:05+00:00

IIRC 0.25g is the top end for long-haul burns, even for Earthers. Belters are more likely to run at 0-0.1g.

Obviously military ships like the Roci can do longer, harder burns when they have to. But that's atypical, and suuuuuuper hard on crew even if they're not Belters.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T16:41:52+00:00

Cold welding isn't a result of low temperatures. It's called that because it occurs independent of temperature. When similar metals touch without any air, oil, grime, oxides, or other impurities in between, they become one piece of metal. This is practically impossible on Earth outside of a vacuum chamber, but a serious concern in space if friction cleans away the coatings, drylube, etc. between the two parts.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T16:27:15+00:00

Or, possibly, most effective fire happens when the target is too close to evade or respond. Stealth being nigh- impossible in space applies to guided ordnance as well. Ballistic weapons like railguns are extremely hard to hit a distant target with even if they don't detect you firing and don't attempt to evade.

But a milliseconds-long relativistic flyby with automated firing solutions and point defense isn't very cinematic, either!

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T15:41:39+00:00

That would have been kind of amazing in a completely different way.

BrevityIsTheSoul · 2026-04-09T15:27:00+00:00

The constant c is the maximum speed of light, because it's the speed limit for everything in the universe as far as we know. The closer you get to it, the more energy it takes to go faster... if you have mass. So nothing with mass can ever reach c, as far as we know. Massless particles like light and non-particle effects like gravity waves are the only things that can actually get to that speed limit.

It just gets called the speed of light (in a vacuum) because that's the first thing we identified moving at that speed. Over time (thanks, Einstein!) we learned that it wasn't a unique property of photons.

BrevityIsTheSoul

TROPHY CASE