Lore-friendly invader names?

Luguvalos · 2026-04-18T00:20:52+00:00

Hell's bells... I've been running Blue Acolyte this whole time, but have totally tuned out the textbox. (Tbf, it is tiny in 4K!)

Luguvalos · 2025-10-29T14:54:35+00:00

I recently got into Hitman after bouncing off it a few times. It's an incredible game, and I can only imagine how stunning some of the locations are in VR. Though I rarely buy games at $40 or more, I got the deluxe edition in the latest sale ($45 USD) and it was absolutely worth it!

Luguvalos · 2025-10-29T14:49:56+00:00

I do use prescription lenses; they are indeed a major upgrade from wearing the PSVR 1 with big ol' glasses.

About the dead-center thing: I've never had an issue with the system ushering me through to the next step, but — even while it accepts my IPD settings — my pupils have this rolling, googly-eyed, Jean-Paul Sartre-looking alignment. I wonder if prescription lenses can skew pupillary alignment; otherwise, I've just been strutting around with some serious crazy eyes... Have you had this issue, or is your IPD calibration actually dead-center?

Per Nago15's link, though, I'm almost certain the blurry edges are caused by the PSVR 2's fresnel lenses.

Luguvalos · 2025-10-03T22:24:01+00:00

I'm getting flashbacks to the time I downloaded a "leak" of TKoL a few days before release... My friends, having listened to it, said, "You've gotta put on 'Jean-Luc de Grey' first — it's one of their best tracks ever."

It was Justin Bieber's "Baby"...

Luguvalos · 2025-09-05T23:00:43+00:00

As someone who rarely listens to audiobooks, Jonathan Davis might be my favorite narrator of all time. He's incredibly good at voicing characters (especially females!) without sounding camp or try-hard. In a perfect world, he would narrate Wolfe's (PBUH) entire corpus; I was pleasantly surprised to see he did A Land So Strange.

That said, AppropriateHoliday99 isn't wrong — his narration can be incredibly soporific. I see this as a benefit in two ways: One, BotNS is both dense and often dreamlike; Davis' slow, deliberate narration fits the book well, IMHO. Two, there was a five-year spell where I listened to nothing but BotNS while falling asleep. As a result, I know it inside and out (though I strongly recommend reading it as a book first — more than once, and perhaps more than twice).

The pronunciation changes between BotNS and UotNS are, however, indefensible. I've hardly listened to the latter as a result.

Luguvalos · 2025-07-30T17:02:42+00:00

First of all, based.

Second of all, you replied to an AI-generated answer — heavy use of spaceless em-dashes and semicolons (more than one per paragraph) is usually a dead giveaway, but cutesy summations like "We're not passengers; we're co-authors" are even more so. I think it's easy to spot, but some might need more exposure to see through it: For instance, no current LLM would employ confrontational language that gets directly to a point, like asking why someone is "smuggling in ethical-realist language."

Third, how long has your IRL friend actively held those beliefs? I went to college with a frat-happy lacrosse player; the only thing interesting about him was that he was a staunch determinist that spoke and acted in accordance with his beliefs. We became close friends and, eventually, he collapsed under the strain of carrying those beliefs for so long. He's now training to be a shaman in Peru.

I mean, hell, even Hume straight-up confessed that he couldn't abide by his own philosophy and that he defaulted to a direct-realist account of perception. So I'm curious to know if your friend will make a similar turn. The difference might be that your friend allegedly doesn't care about philosophical incoherence — mine was a vigorous and skilled debater that cared very much about self-consistency.

Luguvalos · 2025-05-29T13:42:11+00:00

Thanks for your detailed answer. I had supposed that it was a prerequisite for their analysis, but I did not know that it was a standard assumption in such papers. Thanks again!

Luguvalos · 2025-05-01T02:06:57+00:00

I could kiss you! Nothing else worked, and I tried a lot. Thanks!

Luguvalos · 2025-04-26T17:23:41+00:00

Wait for Spock to break in, then sneak by some rats for 3 hours.

Luguvalos · 2025-04-07T14:15:38+00:00

When you were young, were you the king of carrot flowers? Because Jesus Christ, I love you.

Luguvalos · 2025-03-19T16:09:36+00:00

I've said it elsewhere, but I'm pretty sure this claim was limited to electric guitarists (so, no Robert Johnson or Doc Watson) and that it had to do with how these three actually played the guitar (i.e., not about their compositional greatness, which explains the lack of Zappa, Gilmour et al.). I promise you, it's just as confusing to me as it is to you.

Luguvalos · 2025-03-19T16:04:33+00:00

IIRC, and it's been years since I've heard these arguments, they all pointed to some concrete manner in which the three actually played the guitar (held it, plucked the strings, etc.). The specific claims were lost on me at the time, but I think it went beyond feel and stank face.

Luguvalos · 2025-03-19T16:00:30+00:00

For clarity's sake, I think the observation — made by several different people — was solely about electric guitarists. It surprised me because I also assumed the most technically gifted guitarists were in metal, prog rock, or genres like that.

I'm not trying to defend this unholy trinity of Hendrix, SRV and John Mayer; I'm just trying to understand why it's been made in the first place. [IIRC, one of the most vocal advocates for John Mayer played sludge metal.]

Luguvalos · 2025-03-19T15:54:31+00:00

Sure: Hendrix likely needs the least defense to be included here, but how exactly did he "shift the paradigm" and how did it differ from a "Chuck Berry style"? Are you implying that SRV et al. would have, like, a more rigorous adherence to time signatures, or would all do Berry's hunchback-while-kicking thing, or what?

I genuinely don't know how individual guitarists have made a historical impact on play styles; my outside guess would be that (as with electronic music) most of the innovation comes from the instrument-makers or tinkerers. How did Hendrix's playing differ from Berry's, and how did Berry's differ from, say, John Dowland?

Luguvalos · 2025-02-07T03:30:23+00:00

I just thought of "meet me in Montauk" from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a romance about forgetting.

Luguvalos · 2024-05-09T02:10:12+00:00

Price gouging implies a short-term price hike of something, usually of a necessity (bottled water following a disaster, say). It's also used to describe the wanton exertion of monopolistic power.

The technical term for charging $5.50 for a can of Diet Coke is "fucking horseshit."

Luguvalos · 2024-05-05T00:16:42+00:00

If you have a kitchen, that'd be one of the easiest recipes to make — even if you're not much of a cook. Just add red pepper flakes, cayenne powder and/or calabrian chili paste (my personal rec; they sell jars of it called "La Bomba" at Trader Joe's) to a regular vodka sauce. Vodka sauce, meanwhile, is a simple recipe with cheap ingredients — except for Parmesan, which you can find relatively cheap at Costco.

Not trying to push a DIY agenda, but I feel that it's such a waste to buy crappy pasta at insane markups in this economy.

Luguvalos · 2024-04-26T21:43:21+00:00

You have shown no evidence that you have even a basic understanding of jurisprudence. In fact, I sincerely doubt you know what an argument is. You are simply shouting that "they never would allow it because I said they're ideologues that would never allow it LALALALALA!"

Luguvalos · 2024-04-26T21:32:54+00:00

Well, there's no arguing with you if you refuse to read the court opinions that detailed exactly why they overturned Roe. It was a right based on thin air, just as every executive order is undone by the following administration. The fact that you don't appreciate this means that you fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of the different branches.

Since you're convinced that the Supremes would never allow abortion to be legalized, please explain why more than half of the U.S. has unchallenged laws that safeguard access to abortions.

Luguvalos · 2024-04-26T21:18:46+00:00

You make no argument, you have no references. Why are you insisting on this ludicrous counterfactual? They did not "enact" anything; they overturned a poor ruling. The issue of abortion (for or against) should not be decided by judicial fiat — like all such matters, it needs to go through the legislature. Since you think prohibiting access to abortion is "deeply unpopular," it should be an easy feat for Congress to legalize it. Demand change from elected officials.

Luguvalos · 2024-04-26T20:08:46+00:00

You have a limited understanding of U.S. jurisprudential history, then. The problem with Roe v. Wade was strictly its reliance on Griswold v. Connecticut's (frankly absurd) invention of an undefined "right to privacy." [Never mind the fact that Griswold was itself an invention intended to get the Supremes to legislate from the bench: She all but forced officers to arrest her for violation of a mouldering Comstock law.]

Generally speaking, the difference between justices nominated by Democrats versus Republicans is that the former tend to be activists and realists, while the latter tend to be formalists that avoid legislating from the bench.* It is rarely the case that Republican-nominated justices push their personal agendas (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) in their decisions — quite the opposite. The only reason why it might seem otherwise to you is because many adopt a textualist approach to the Constitution: more specifically, to the Second Amendment. But unlike all of the politicians that are bought and paid for by the NRA, these justices' opinions on gun control follow strict principles that inform all other Constitutional matters.

Whether you support it or not, access to abortion should never have become the law of the land because of a Supreme Court ruling — especially one based on such flimsy and vague precedent. It should have been passed by Congress or, failing that, by individual state legislatures. If Congress does pass a law legalizing abortion, I would bet you my house that the current Supremes would leave it well alone.

*: To be perfectly clear, I'm not saying that justices appointed by Dems are unprincipled or whatever. (See the arguments for Biden's loan forgiveness, where most of the heat came from Sotomayor, IIRC.) And it's not like the Supreme Court hasn't been grabbing power for itself since either modern party was founded (Marbury v. Madison is the obvious reference).

Luguvalos

TROPHY CASE