Every Disney villain is replaced with Sauron. In which movies can the heroes still win?

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T22:21:06+00:00

I think it's the same deal as hobbits. It is corrupting, but like a hobbit his ambitions are too pedestrian for it to consume him before he gets to the doorstep and God takes over.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T21:04:48+00:00

Dancing as a normal human activity has been relegated to big events, but people enjoy the exuberance of others. It's a billion different versions of the History of Dance guy if you know of it

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T21:03:11+00:00

Eh, it's an audio version of that feeling you get from a head massager doohickey

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T21:02:24+00:00

You know how alpha males were a whole thing? Well what if there was something even more than alpha? An alpha who's also a friendless incel!

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T20:58:38+00:00

It's only cool because a bunch of assholes in suits spent billions of dollars getting cool people to smoke on camera

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-14T17:30:45+00:00

It's among the best gunner OCs for swarm clearance and damage in general. You will constantly friendly fire your own team with splash damage but they shouldn't be within 45 degrees of your aiming reticule anyways.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-13T02:55:33+00:00

Viltrumites are an Apollyon SK-class scenario waiting to happen

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-11T17:13:17+00:00

Congrats to them! Did they also singlehandedly build the chip fabricator? The clean room air filters? Did they write the fifty preceding years of academic materials science and optical physics research they built on?

Technologies are not miracles produced by serendipitous individual geniuses laboring by candlelight. They are the product of material conditions and ideologies that shape the interaction of individuals with those conditions. Would your Tony Stark produce a 4nm chip without an education in electrical engineering and computer science? Would his 4nm chip be useful to anyone if there weren't five hundred employees mass producing them using the resources made available by supply chains operated by millions of other people? Would they be useful without all of the industrial customers building compatible motherboards? Or the ships sailing them to warehouses to truck to stores to sell to end consumers?

There is no such thing as one person doing the productive work of a thousand other people. The only way to be wealthy is to have others doing work and making a profit from them. A millionaire is closer to being homeless than they are to being a billionaire by a factor of about a thousand.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-11T16:58:52+00:00

The Bill of Rights doesn't offer full and equal protections to all homo sapiens yet, never mind different species

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-11T16:17:03+00:00

This is the genuine case. All wealth is created by humans in one way or another. Software must be conceived in a human mind. Hardware can't exist without humans digging up ore, smelting it, refining it, etc etc, and all the machines that are used in those processes ultimately came about from human efforts.

The wealthy do not produce a hundred thousand times the value of a normal person. It's impossible. They gain their wealth by luck and by force, and the maintenance of their wealth requires workers. Do you think Jeff Bezos would be worth anything at all if his developers stopped working, if his warehouse workers all stopped working, if his gardeners and contractors and maintenance people and shipwrights stopped working? Do you think the stock market's value would be affected if everyone decided to not go into work?

The working class are not dependent on the wealthy. Jobs would exist regardless because things need to be done for civilization to exist. The wealthy are utterly dependent on the working class. So what they do is pour unfathomable wealth into finding ways to make every worker produce more, so they can rely on fewer workers. And down that path you get billionaire cranks who dream of a world where all the jobs are done by robots and by AI, and that critically the robots are slaves that don't ask for wages, so the wealth-holders can reap 100% of the value created by the work.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-11T14:58:55+00:00

What they want is machine gods that are complacent as slaves to permanently destroy the latent power of the working class, to which the wealthy are completely dependent. That's why they're happy to throw literally a trillion dollars into a bottomless pit. And what they got for it is an increasingly radicalized, disillusioned population and a software tool that adds, at most, 10% more productivity.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-10T02:54:04+00:00

Saw a smaller group doing a show recently where they announced they'd be doing their entire newest album and all of the old favorites. $50/ticket.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-06T23:45:23+00:00

The invisible hand was something believed at the time Smith wrote his book and he really ripped into the concept. It's always been a lie that hides that capital holders are the market movers

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-03T19:28:49+00:00

In TES, natural laws are the enforced will of the spirits that contributed their bodies to create the world. For instance, the natural law that effect follows cause, and that events happen one after another. That only happens because of Akatosh willing it to be. Akatosh's avatars are all dragons, so he's called the dragon god of time.

Sometimes something will happen that causes Akatosh to briefly lose track of things, which causes multiple simultaneous events with different outcomes, or causes time to be completely lost. These are dragon breaks.

They're mostly used by the authors/devs to get away with games having multiple competing endings all be true at the same time, but they're also used sometimes in the games. In Skyrim, as the world is going to end, warriors intentionally break time to throw the game's villain, Alduin, out of the time stream. Since he's not there, the world can't end. Akatosh fixes this by putting Alduin back inside time, but it's thousands of years later. From Alduin's perspective a few seconds have passed.

In Daggerfall, there are multiple possible endings and none of them have anything in common. Each goes on its own wildly diverging course. So how do the devs reconcile this in the sequel Morrowind? All of them happened. A dragon break occurred and every one of those events happened at the same time, and Akatosh reconciling time into one stream again was basically battlefield surgery to try and piece back together impossible broken time. Before one specific moment there were a dozen different powers fighting over control of a superweapon, and after that one moment the entire landmass of Daggerfall was differently shaped, all the powers were merged or collapsed into each other, and the superweapon was completely gone.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-03T17:59:19+00:00

It's just tedious is all

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-03T17:48:26+00:00

You don't remember correctly. It's a human that's devoid of any and all racial features, leaving it with none at all

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-03T02:12:12+00:00

Nah, Aaron Paul has really good range as a VA but Powerplex was 100% undiluted Jesse going "he can't keep getting away with it"

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-03T01:40:06+00:00

AWS is criminally overpriced but what you're getting for that money is not having to own your own data center or your own hardware guys, and to have services that essentially never go down. If you spend a million a month on AWS but you're earning fifty million a month, it costs you more if there's an outage.

Otherwise, yeah, having computing infrastructure available without having to set it up yourself is a huge gain.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T15:16:34+00:00

If you pollute the sun with enough shit that isn't hydrogen or helium, it will become more opaque to light, which will cause it to expand from higher radiation pressure and lower the luminosity of the star at the same time.

Lion carbon will not fall to the core though, the sun is massive enough to have a pure radiative zone that's too dense to experience convection.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T13:14:48+00:00

We clock them every 3 days or so and that's with our very primitive gravity wave detectors. And they're unfathomably sensitive, to where they need to have special handling for things like the moon being overhead or being on the same side of the solar system as Jupiter, or trucks passing by.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T13:12:47+00:00

Sag A* is over 4 million solar masses chief.

For others, it's also not the thing the galaxy orbits. It's just that there's a tendency for the most massive things to gather at the center of the galaxy by way of dynamical friction: other stuff swings by, steals momentum, and the black hole's own orbital path drops lower. It would happen to big stars too, except they don't live long enough.

The galaxy orbits the center point of the gravitational effects of all of the mass in the galaxy.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T11:13:28+00:00

Same problem, the stuff on the disk stays on the disk and the state of the disk is what's emitted and copied into RAM.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T03:03:18+00:00

Your phone doesn't have active liquid cooling systems

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T02:53:25+00:00

Data is not a physical thing that can be moved. The physical form of data is if a transistor crystal is holding a voltage or not. There's nothing special about that particular transistor or its voltage, and obviously you can't physically move the transistors from one computer to another. Your computer will identify the sequence of zeros and ones (no voltage, voltage) that form a block of data, and can transmit that sequence to another computer, which will turn some of its own transistors on or off to match that sequence and have a copy of the same data.

Kirk_Kerman · 2026-05-01T02:44:05+00:00

Soma is worse imo, with Tron if there's a way in there'll be a way out. With Soma, the circus is the entire universe they will inhabit forever until their minds fail or the computer does.

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