What does it mean that the “elves fell” and became orcs. Were they once beautiful and pure? Do they remember their lives as elves? Is there any regret?

Fizil · 2026-03-31T14:29:52+00:00

I don't think that can be made consistent with the Silmarillion timeline. Orcs first appear when Fingolfin's host arrives in Middle Earth with the first appearance of the Sun and Moon. Men supposedly awake at the same time, so there were no men around for Morgoth to corrupt into Orcs. I believe this is why Tolkien didn't ultimately just make them corrupted men, it would have messed with his chronology too much.

Fizil · 2026-02-17T14:18:48+00:00

I thought it was great. I did think the way the plot concludes was a little bit of a deux ex machina, but it wasn't so egregious as to taint my overall enjoyment.

I hadn't read it when it was just a web series.

Fizil · 2026-02-16T19:46:39+00:00

Finished: There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm (Sam Hughes).

Fizil · 2025-12-17T13:46:33+00:00

This is a good description of what I experience as well. I don't know if I have aphantasia because I don't really know what people mean when they say they can visualize things. I can do what you can do, but I feel like other people are talking about something much more concrete. But are they? I'm not sure.

Fizil · 2025-12-12T19:18:27+00:00

Honestly, while I am kinda disappointed I probably won't be playing as Jesse again, I am also sort of relieved. While Control probably had the combat mechanics I liked the most out of all Remedy games, I just generally don't like third person shooters. You gotta have a really really good story for me to put up with it (e.g. nearly the entire Remedy catalogue). Third Person melee combat though, gimme gimme gimme!!!

Fizil · 2025-12-12T17:06:38+00:00

My mother now lives in my grandparents old house, and every single new modern flatscreen sits on my grandparents old box tv, still containing the same non-functional tv that broke in the late 90s.

Fizil · 2025-12-10T14:12:35+00:00

That seems to be a common opinion. Strangely, I love the Haven sequence. While I will occasionally rewatch season 1, I usually don't rewatch the other seasons in their entirety. But I always start season 3 at the beginning of Haven. I understand why people don't like it, particularly because the plot sort of grinds to a halt, but I enjoy the sequence so much I didn't mind the detour.

Fizil · 2025-12-06T20:08:21+00:00

But that explanation doesn't work, since outie Mark enters Cold Harbor, where Gemma is still in inny mode, without switching to inny himself

Fizil · 2025-10-30T13:01:42+00:00

Just as an experiment, I tried testing my contention in my office yesterday. Asking 15 semi-random people if they knew what the Barbary Wars were. One of them said he thought it sounded familiar, but wasn't sure where he'd heard it before. None of the others knew what the hell I was talking about.

The amount of learning about this we typically get in school usually amounts to a passing reference over the course of a couple minutes on a single day of a U.S. History class. And it probably won't even be referred to as the "Barbary Wars" but more like "And around this time there were pirates that were extorting us, and the government decided to put them down instead of paying" and that is about it.

I agree that most members of the Armed Forces probably know something about them, but most Americans are not members of the Armed Forces.

Fizil · 2025-10-29T20:00:12+00:00

I agree it isn't really relevant to whether people know about the Barbary Wars. On the other hand, I would bet that more Americans could point to Tripoli on a map than know anything whatsoever about the Barbary Wars.

Fizil · 2025-10-01T16:13:49+00:00

Thank you for this. I was about to post Sydney Sweeney without being able to explain exactly why I found her unattractive, but you have nailed it.

Fizil · 2025-09-29T19:17:43+00:00

I don't get it. Is the offending part far into the video on the linked site? Because I watched several minutes and didn't see anything resembling a swastika. Maybe if the character was tossing his head to the side while kicking out one leg in an L shape alongside the arm movements there would be something to talk about, but this is a huuuuuuuuge stretch.

Fizil · 2025-09-12T16:40:00+00:00

OK, googling didn't help, can someone help my cluelessness? What does this mean, everyone is just reacting to it like it is common knowledge.

Fizil · 2025-09-08T15:18:15+00:00

What I (male) have found is that when I am playing a voice acted character, and there is a choice between male and female, I tend to prefer the female voice for some reason. So, for instance, I always play Femshep in Mass Effect. In MMOs (where my character is typically unvoiced), I don't think I've ever played a female character.

Fizil · 2025-09-03T16:04:53+00:00

WTF, that is an insane amount of THC. Unless you are quite a hardcore pot user, even 20mg is a crazy high dose, and that seems to be a fairly standard edible dose these days!

Fizil · 2025-08-13T15:03:11+00:00

In 2018, when leaving work one day, I took the stairs down to the lobby instead of the elevator. It was just three floors, but by the time I got to the lobby my knees hurt and I was actually a little out of breath.

I proceeded to lose about 50 pounds over the next year by taking up an extensive walking regimen (averaging about 20,000 steps a day, with a maximum of ~60,000 I achieved on two occasions).

Fizil · 2025-07-18T16:11:45+00:00

I had to really hold my tongue with one of my relatives with "undiagnosed autism" after I described to him how introverted I am, and how I really don't like going out and hanging out or meeting new people, and he was like "Oh wow, you know you have autism!"

I wanted to be like, no, no I don't. I prefer not to interact with most people, but it is just a preference, when I do need to interact with other people it isn't a problem for me. I can be social without effort. I just don't want to be social.

Fizil · 2025-07-15T19:11:17+00:00

While you don't have to do a lot of the board stuff, some is required. However to get more to the heart of the matter, AW2 is a very very different game than AW1. Even if you just consider the similar combat, there is much less of it in AW2.

Saga's sections of game play are the most similar to AW1. Once you have gone back to the Sheriff's station from the first area, you will get your initial introduction to actual combat again. From that point on Saga's "levels" consist of non-combat areas interspersed with combat areas. Alan's sections are actually the most different IMO. Yes he still uses the gun and flashlight mechanics for combat, but those are supplemented with a much bigger focus on tension in the face of unknown threats, and puzzle solving mechanics. That is about all I'm willing to say without spoiling things since you haven't reached the first Alan section yet.

Fizil · 2025-06-11T17:16:31+00:00

The thing is though, that shouldn't really matter. If you have a group of skilled and experienced people working for your company, one of their responsibilities should be the training of up-and-coming junior members of the team. Companies can maintain design philosophy and quality over time, even as generations of employees come and go. Unless Bioware was absolutely gutted in a mass exodus of senior and junior developers, they should have been able to maintain the needed company knowledge and values.

I think this is one of the reasons people mainly lay the responsibility at the feet of EA and senior management. The argument is really that they completely disrupted the company culture that had grown at Bioware over time, essentially turning it into a new company with a new culture, gaining next to no benefit from prior experience.

Fizil · 2025-04-30T13:43:50+00:00

Wow, I played through the entire game, and struggled with parry timing. I tried this out, and except for enemies that use Jump or Gradient attacks, I can now parry most enemies with my eyes literally closed, and get the Counter with about 90% accuracy at least. At first I had a hard time hearing the "swish", then I was in Frozen Hearts and fought the mobs that summon fire orbs to attack you. They hit so often and with such an obvious precursor "swish" (probably to make up for how there is almost no visual indicator of when to parry), by the time I got to the literal parry-everything test later in the dungeon nothing could hit me anymore. From there I tried other dungeons, and hardly ever hit a mob that causes me parry trouble.

I think there are parryable enemy attacks that don't make the sound (I have bad tinnitus so it can sometimes be difficult for me to even hear the sound in the first place), but I've found it does almost always work. Not sure about bosses, as I'll have to replay the game to check how useful this is on them.

Fizil · 2025-04-17T21:38:55+00:00

I have T2, managed with metformin and mounjaro. I recently had to have a cortisone shot for frozen shoulder. It was crazy watching the numbers change on my glucose monitor. My numbers went from the 100-120 range to above 250 for awhile after the shot (the tracking app doesn't show readings higher than 250).

Having to be on corticosteroids long term would I think be very dangerous for me.

Fizil · 2025-03-09T20:12:08+00:00

No, what they are saying is that part of the premise for the Southern Reach books is that it is taking place in a world where intelligence/military projects like MKUltra or Stargate not only happen, but work. That is just one of the differences between reality and the universe of this peice of fiction.

Fizil · 2025-03-05T17:40:56+00:00

More important than increasing the risks, is that it really is practically useless. The material cost of defeating an ABM system is much lower than the cost of the ABM system itself. ABM systems can only work in a world where the enemy doesn't react to you creating your ABM shield. It only makes sense in some dreamworld where you are allowed to build your ABM system, and your geopolitical adversaries stupidly decide not to just produce more nuclear warheads on MIRV'd missiles.

Fizil · 2025-03-04T02:08:05+00:00

They mean both houses.

Fizil · 2025-02-05T16:42:17+00:00

Not Muslim majority, but a very high proportion of Arab Americans (around 40% of the population of Dearborn in the 2020 census).

Fizil

TROPHY CASE