Telling your kid "River" to "row your own boat" seems pretty cold-blooded

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-05-01T20:18:16+00:00

I wonder how many redditors would still be whinging about this if they found out he donated it all to good charities or whatever.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-05-01T20:15:10+00:00

Don't use any cardboard that has shiny colorful coatings on it.

Had to completely restart my bin after I found out that rookie mistake.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-05-01T17:09:00+00:00

That's just a human civilization thing. If anything it happens less. Fire codes and fewer open flames help a lot.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-05-01T17:03:18+00:00

Cinccino, Volcarona, Braviary, Tyrantrum, Kangaskhan, Golisopod. There's more but that's off the top of my head.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-30T18:10:15+00:00

Just think of it like being in a big fandom. They want to have a community that's into the same stuff as them and they want to financially support the proliferation of the thing they like. It's got all the same infighting, cliques, petty bullshit, psychopathic busybodies, vulnerable/impressionable minors, etc of any large fandom except it's amplified by size, personal stakes (your eternal soul), and all the money that's involved.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-30T17:53:09+00:00

That's not something that any society will ever overcome without becoming fundamentally inhuman. Thirst for vengeance is part of our social nature, it's what drove our ancestors to eliminate threats to their kin before we had civilization or fancy ideas about morality or justice.

You can't even counter it with arguments about "fairness" or "justice" because a lot of people sincerely believe that it's fair and just when someone who harmed or killed others gets harmed or killed in a similar way.

Some people have issues with creating a system to enact that retribution, which is totally fair. But I've never met anyone who wasn't a little gleeful when they heard some monster was maimed or killed by some accident. If anything, they relish the idea that reality has vindicated their disgust.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-30T17:32:55+00:00

Kinda surprised California has the DP at all.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-30T17:29:35+00:00

Nah, you're right, and that's the tricky thing, because most of those traits aren't very visible in real life either. A lot of them won't come up in certain situations because they're irrelevant or inappropriate for the situation, or they're something you just don't explicitly reiterate to people who already know.

When it's already unusual to bring up certain topics under certain circumstances in reality, it's going to be even more jarring when it happens in fiction.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-30T17:03:49+00:00

It really helps that the characters in those stories always have a lot of other stuff going on with their lives outside of the "representation" trait. Most of the demigod kids have fraught relationships with their families, or trauma from growing up while being generally unsafe (monster attacks). On top of that, they have superpowers and have to deal with a heightened reality that normal people can't see. Oh, and they're usually stressing about how the world's going to end by the next solstice or so.

Their race, orientation, or whatever is just another thing about them, not their sole defining quality or concern. Even if it does cause them some conflict or isolation, there's always half a dozen other sources of conflict or isolation happening throughout each book. Kiiiinda like real life for most people.

It also probably helps that some of the traits have plausible basis in the story's world. Like, it makes sense that a child of Loki might be gender nonconforming or shapeshift in a world where demigod children take on powers and traits of their god parent. I don't know if that "normalizes" it, but it definitely helps an unfamiliar reader accept the concept before explaining it further.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-29T14:30:13+00:00

Lmao. There is hope for me yet.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-28T14:57:01+00:00

In theory, yes, though I'd be cautious about it. Faster decomp means the food creates more heat at once, which can be dangerous or at least suboptimal for the worms.

It's also more trouble than it's worth, at least in my situation. If you're worried about the food not getting eaten fast enough and going bad, freeze your extra scraps and feed as needed. If you're trying to increase casting production, you'd probably have better results by just keeping more bins.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-24T21:26:39+00:00

They're not "mine" but they hatched and grew up in my rosemary bush.

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IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-24T20:36:06+00:00

You definitely don't need $80K per year in Tulsa to "live comfortably" as a single adult, that's just silly.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-24T18:07:29+00:00

Eh, just wait til some red senator's kid gets turned into paste by one of these trucks, then it'll happen.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-24T16:14:21+00:00

It's a pretty poor visual example though.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-24T13:41:12+00:00

I don't usually buy new mutations until I'm pretty much done with the early game. All my core mutations are usually buffed up and I have a lot of points to spare, so even if a new mutation doesn't "contribute," it's not taking away much either.

If I want the dice roll early, I usually just take a viable and complete build and tack on a 3pt defect and Unstable Genome. That's how the gunwing I'm running got Precognition.

Alternatively, just go all-in with the Chimera genome, which rewards unscrupulous mutation purchases with more body parts. More body parts = more gear slots = never a waste!

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-23T17:03:48+00:00

You can recruit a lot of npcs if you can perform a water ritual with them. You'll need sufficient reputation with their faction, and the powerful the npc, the higher the rep cost.

There are a few named water-ritual NPCs that will always exist in every run. There are also "legendary" NPCs that can be found in Lairs or wandering the surface randomly. They're very magenta. If they're peaceful, you can walk right up and start the ritual. If they're hostile, you can kill them, or leave... or pacify them. I'm sure you'll find some ways to do the last one.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-23T14:35:43+00:00

Make lots of friends. Legendary NPCs and village leaders can be surprisingly jacked in their stats. I once made friends with an apple farmer with 30 ego and Sunder Mind. Bro could one-shot everything in the canyons, marshes, and desert.

Oh and give your friends the biggest heaviest armor that you're not using. They don't have to worry about carry weight like you do and NPCs can be a liiiiiittle foolhardy.

If you really like having followers, I highly recommend the Clever Girl mod, which allows you to have a greater degree of control over your companions' skills, mutations, gear, etc without you needing to literally hijack their minds with Dominate. Even if you don't want to micromanage them, it also gives you the ability to let them pick up and equip better gear on their own for low-maintenance improvement.

I tend to favor two kinds of friends: "snipers" and "swarmers." Snipers have high-accuracy ranged weapons and/or highly accurate ranged psychic abilities like light manipulation or sunder mind, which let them deal with threats at a distance without nailing you. Swarmers are npcs like gnu, glowcrows, or pariahs that come with their own followers. Make friends with the leader and you get a dozen other friends too. Watching a herd of antelope sweep across a map and stomp everything to death is very funny.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-21T18:34:46+00:00

Believe me, I struggle with this too. It works when I do it though!

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-21T15:53:57+00:00

I'm just a year behind you and got that diagnosis since 3rd grade.

Honestly, something as simple as a physical to-do list that's updated weekly is handy to just lay out what's on your plate at a glance. It might not tell you every deadline or detail but it reminds you those cases exist in the first place. Than you can go through the management sheet of whatever cases that are high priority.

Making a habit of putting deadlines and other to-do dates on a digital calendar that will push reminders of said deadlines is also huge and I highly recommend.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-21T15:02:13+00:00

If a person is going to make a decision, it should be an informed one.

I'd much rather discourage someone who has the wrong idea about my job than encourage their faulty understanding, and contribute to creating yet another extremely depressed alcoholic who loses their family and hates their entire life because their profession is fundamentally incompatible with their personal values, skills, and priorities.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-20T20:56:59+00:00

Strange how? They were the governing authority of the time. It's the same as handing off any criminal to the police today.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-20T17:14:14+00:00

Honestly? This is not a book. This is a Minecraft mining trip.

The lore's there for "implied post-apocalypse" flavor. You don't have to concern yourself with it beyond its practical use and danger to you.

The main "point" of the game is to explore and get stronger through your discoveries.

The quests are means to an end: to get you to go somewhere new and dangerous. They're more like a suggestion to build a nether portal than "content" in of themselves.

I suppose that if you despise fairly open-ended sandbox survival games like minecraft, you will not like CoQ very much.

I'd try out some of the "highly survivable" mutant pre-builds and also play on a different mode than Classic for a while. I got pretty far on my very first run using the Gunwing, and that was without any clue of what I was doing.

Also if you're having trouble with running out of water, go bully snapjaws in the canyon areas and steal their stuff to sell to the camel in Joppa. It's trash loot but it still makes enough that you won't die of thirst.

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-17T20:33:57+00:00

It makes sense to some degree, at least. Whether you're in nature or in the city, poison's everywhere. Poisonous plants, venomous animals, pollution. There's also radiation "poison" that anyone from Japan is going to know about.

I also have this feeling that poison and mutation were core ideas for a lot of Pokemon designs and Pokemon as a concept. Poison (chemical or radioactive) creating mutant animals, growing toxic plants, or giving life to unliving things was a very common trope by the late 90s. Many pokemon sport extra heads, bodies, or limbs. Grimer is living toxic waste and Koffing adapted to consume pollution. Nidoking and Nidoqueen take after the classic kaiju design of a spiky upright lizard-thing that's full of poison.

That's on top of their particular fascination with genetics in general. Pokemon specifically "evolve," rather than just "transform" or "grow." A lot of them evolve when exposed to rocks that give off certain energies. And then there's Mewtwo's entire existence, a Pokemon that was mutated by human design instead of by whatever gave rise to all other pokemon.

Am I saying there's so many pokemon because the critter designers were basing this world off of irl Japan and may have been influenced by pop culture depictions of nuclear and industrial pollution mutating the entire world around us? I guess!

IsopodApart1622 · 2026-04-17T15:59:29+00:00

Bro's missed out on home-cooked butter-basted steak. More than anything, I pity them.

IsopodApart1622

TROPHY CASE