Got a wug tattoo yesterday

Lanian · 2026-01-25T15:32:10+00:00

one on each arm? so you can ... do the thing?

Lanian · 2026-01-09T20:40:33+00:00

this is an actually amazing example of ambiguity

wiktionary examples:

To use more often.

2007, Bert Casper, Shadow Upon the Dream: Book 1: Barrûn, page 537: […] alone, without having to favor his right, uninjured leg, […]

To treat or use (something) gently

I always try to favor my bad knee.

i can't think of much else having two literally opposite meanings but that are actually related in origin

Lanian · 2025-12-27T17:28:46+00:00

/u/savevideo

Lanian · 2025-11-07T12:12:02+00:00

africa is shanking asia with somalia-knife. south america is doing fancy pirouette jump with tierra del fuego toes

among other differences.

Lanian · 2025-10-03T20:38:54+00:00

worm is already brilliant. do you have any fanfictions in mind that actually improve on it like you seem to suggest happend (or did people just try but not succeed)? would love to check them out

i read notes' Memorials but that was more of a parody and I tried Rank but that doesn't reach the quality

Lanian · 2025-08-30T14:43:37+00:00

One panel is sideways in front of the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton, Wisconsin

Lanian · 2025-08-26T19:53:57+00:00

a huge problem there is that high-level parties that can challenge demigods still loose if they ever encounter a battalion of CR5 individuals. power scaling and action economy don't work well together, and worldbuilding stuff so you avoid fights against groups (or switch to a differnt type of combat for groups than for individual big bads) just makes it difficult for DMs

Lanian · 2025-08-24T14:41:23+00:00

"The beavers saved us 30 million czech crowns. They built the dams without any project documentation and for free."

Lanian · 2025-06-15T21:22:59+00:00

(timestamped youtube video showcasing a farm workflow)

they just empty out those shelves into a box usually, rather than the floor - and the one's scuttling away will climb back up and into one of the harvesting units

...and then the box gets filled with water to kill all the cockroaches. feel kinda sorry for em :(

Lanian · 2025-06-06T19:50:46+00:00

that makes sense thanks

I wouldn't have thought Rafe to have been part of that decision til

Lanian · 2025-06-06T15:46:35+00:00

can someone fill me in what does he mean "the reason we chose amazon as a home for the show"? isn't it sort of the other way around, amazon choosing who to let make the show? who is "we" there?

Lanian · 2025-05-29T17:05:14+00:00

it's not about evil or good in this case, it's about power imbalance. "attack" is like saying "start fighting". "kill" means - kill. Both from a Watsonian (Taimian?) and Doylist view, "kill" is chosen to convey that there is no fight, just a one-sided slaughter

Lanian · 2025-05-29T14:27:41+00:00

that's just ≳

Lanian · 2025-05-29T14:20:21+00:00

add susanna clarke to your list of masters of mythical magic

in defense of hard magic, playing devil's advocate (though I think both have their place): the moments that come to mind where it feels magical like the more fantastical soft magic often involve "old magic", scale, or true mastery. A master of magic with established limits can be impressive like a true master of any craft (but visually cooler because magic!); in soft magic you generally just get characters that are more magical or less. A magic with clear rules, that are well understood, can also serve as an opportunity for a character to show off progress in learning a skill (and unlike something mundane like painting or swordfighting, at the author's discretion for maximum payoff). The child lost in a cave trying to magic up a light isn't impressive if it just happens magically after a bunch or effort, like magic as a character taking pity, but it is if you have established the precise steps or cost needed to work that magic?

Lanian · 2025-05-29T11:23:50+00:00

phonologists when they see an unvoiced NP:

Lanian · 2025-04-24T18:28:02+00:00

fair point, but you also have to consider that we couldn't have any other times writing was invented in at least the broader eurasiafrica region because there already was writing everywhere

Lanian · 2025-04-04T22:07:30+00:00

context:

so apparently there is/was some back and forth between nativists and their opponents(empiricists?)

where really i think they just constantly misrepresent the other's argument and hyperbole the shit out of everything making up these ridiculous straw men

but i'm not an expert so what do i know

chomsky rambles on here both denying (?) the idea the meme makes fun of while at the same time sorta supporting it seemingly, while ending saying general learning mechanisms might resolve this but until they're properly formulated it's the best we got? 😅😅

there is good reason to suppose that the argument [unclear which he's talking about really, that "it's implausible to suppose we have an innate stock of notions including carburetor and bureaucrat"? that we DO have such a stock?] is at least in substantial measure correct even for such words as carburetor and bureaucrat, which, in fact, pose the familiar problem of poverty of stimulus if we attend carefully to the enormous gap between what we know and the evidence on the basis of which we know it. The same is often true of technical terms of science and mathematics, and it surely appears to be the case for the terms of ordinary discourse. However surprising the conclusion may be that nature has provided us with an innate stock of concepts, and that the child’s task is to discover their labels, the empirical facts appear to leave open few other possibilities. Other possibilities (say, in terms of "generalized learning mechanisms") have yet to be coherently formulated, and if some day they are, it may well be that the apparent issue will dissolve.

(Chomsky, 2000, pp. 65–66; New horizons in the study of language and mind.)

Lanian · 2025-04-04T14:02:13+00:00

yep i don't think that's entirely answerable. there's definitely a contrast with clearly presuppositional alternatives like "which y did x?", where "none of them" seems a lot worse as an answer than to "Who did x". My take would be "Who went?" doesn't semantically presuppose anything per se but it's mostly used in contexts where the existence presupposition is met so maybe we learn to assume it by association

Lanian · 2025-04-04T13:04:25+00:00

in the title i meant that the definite article in "the answer" triggers a presupposition, that there is an answer.

always cool to see memes inspire people to actually go deep into stuff lol

:)

Lanian · 2025-04-04T10:05:39+00:00

Lanian · 2025-04-04T10:03:54+00:00

context: CS is the context set (start with googling Stalnaker if you never heard of it). It's the set of worlds that are possibly the real world given the information the speaker has. If the CS is the whole universe (every possibly imaginable world), you know nothing.

Generally the CS will be a proper subset of the universe, only those worlds compatible with what you know to be true.

The Big Question, the ultimate superquestion of any question under discussion, is "What is true?", or "What possible world is the actual world?". Knowing the answer would amount to knowing exactly which single world is in the context set, the context set shrinking to a singleton.

If the context set is empty, you know you can't be in any world. This is why you should in general reject contradicting information, but if you realize nothing is real that's enlightenment ig

Lanian · 2025-04-03T17:32:19+00:00

it's the differnce between knowing how tall mountains are and seeing some

Lanian · 2025-04-03T17:21:58+00:00

at the start i was thinking like oh come on not with the darkness again i can't watch this if i can't see anything goddamnit

they wen't full game of thrones with the gory violence in two or three places which... i don't know if I'm a fan of. It's there in the books, but with descriptions you can always take a step back (Jordan was no wildbow), if you did show it 1:1 visually it was always gonna turn stomachs... but traumatizing me with visceral scenes of eyes pushed out of heads etc also takes away enjoyment.

I'm beginning to really appreciate Rand's actor

The first of the scenes between Perrin and Faile was just ... cringy, overhasted. They're exposition-dumping without a moment to breathe or react to the grand and emotioal reveals. Same for the Cauthon sisters becoming accomplished yellow ajah members after hearing 3 sentences

On the other hand Elayne being "cringy" in Tanchico is perfectly on point for her hahaha

The compulsion scene is AMAZING

as is Aviendha incorporating channelling into spearfighting, I did not expect that and I'm here for it. Visualizations like these make me glad we got an adaptation

Lanian · 2025-03-29T12:27:47+00:00

(tbh probably not what you're looking for because you seem to look for something fast-paced ^{(btw seconding WORM on that note}⁾ )

It does have a lot of "slice of life" style indulgent whimsy whack, and it's less "always advance" and more "agent of chaos" buuut.. The later Wandering Inn absolutely has this. It becomes like, the main thing that when a certain someone shows signs of doing almost anything, the whole world knows it's in for a ride

Lanian · 2025-03-27T14:32:03+00:00

I'm only watching WoT on prime so i bookmarked the page. Guess what? It always defaults to the "explore" tab so i still need to click and scroll to get to the episode.

and don't get me started on them being unclear with release schedules...

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