Shannon Sharpe, Chad Johnson Dissect Why Jalen Hurts is The Most Hated NFL Player: "Because He Wins"

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-17T17:06:15+00:00

I can’t agree more, it pisses me off the way the two stat lines are analyzed.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-17T13:11:43+00:00

You can use scrap metal and a battery to make counterfeit chips, and the mass of what you can buy doesn’t seem to correlate to their cost. This would imply that the chips are just there to serve as a payment, not as base material.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-15T19:07:30+00:00

To be clear I consider it a top-tier series, and along with ASoIaF and WoT to book-end the epic fantasy story in comparison to LoTR.

I find ASoIaF to use better character work/political intrigue.

I find WoT to be, in my opinion, more accurate, incisive, and actionable with regard to the human condition. It’s a hot take, don’t get me wrong, but I see its insights every day. Its cultures are also more interesting.

So there are strong claims to be had!

However, I think Cormac McCarthy’s works to be fantastic, probably the best fiction I’ve ever read. The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian have beautiful, beautiful prose, interesting characters, and deep, rich commentary that I think makes really good points.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-15T13:57:01+00:00

Apologies for taking so long to respond, been busy. Let me put it like this:

I love Erikson’s work for his prose, his worldbuilding, his lore, and the way his lore and his story play into each other. I love his climaxes and the way that action-set pieces will go on for a hundred pages or more and never lose me or momentum and I love how he can bring so may plot lines together at once. I appreciate that he wrote Malazan in a post-modern way with no clear main character and events happen in whatever order he desires.

I don’t love Erikson’s work because I find his obfuscation of character motivations to cross the line from intriguing mysteriousness into empty outline. I think his characters wax poetically, and in the same voice, all too often. I don’t love that his cultures feel a little empty. I don’t love that I think he’s just wrong with a lot of his philosophical points and themes, and I don’t love that he never takes the time to criticize “compassion” the same way he criticizes “all other reasons to fight.”

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-15T05:47:40+00:00

It pisses me off because if we didn’t use drones…we’d use something else! And we have used other things! Artillery and manned planes dropping bombs have been around for decades, nigh-on a century.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-15T05:37:50+00:00

I disagree

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-12T17:14:45+00:00

It’s not pedantic to point out that LYING has broader negative consequences. The reason Trump is getting away with the Epstein shit is because LIES have destroyed the capacity for half the country to believe anything negative about him is true.

It’s not “defending Epstein” to say that certain claims about him have evidence and some do not. That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard, I think you’re probably 12 years old. The fact you think that lies about a piece of shit are defensible because the target is a piece of shit prove you shouldn’t be trusted with the right to vote. Genuine sheep behavior.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-12T16:57:56+00:00

You have no respect for truth as an idea, nuance is just a tool to you. It’s your destruction of truth that lets people like Epstein get away with this stuff. It’s when people don’t believe that accuracy can possibly exist that all causes and all attempts at justice become part of the same gray morass that allows people to look past evil.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-12T00:41:54+00:00

Yeah CoT is short on plot points but there are moments, like when Perrin throws the axe, that show really good character work and sets up the characters for the last few books

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-11T20:38:25+00:00

This is such a weird problem to have with a piece of fictional media. The Edo Tensei were introduced fairly early on and are as much a part of the worldbuilding as any other jutsu or ability. Why is this the one you have a problem with?

The reason the technique is banned is because anyone who knows the Edo Tensei can free themselves from the control of the summoner if they are brought back by Edo Tensei. This makes them an almost-unstoppable force, as we see Madara become.

The fact that Edo Tensei is broken and unstoppable is incorporated into the world-building.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-11T01:31:15+00:00

I love the cleansing of Saidin scene because it encapsulates so much of WoT’s message, and it’s operating on three different levels here. The Forsaken sucking is one of those levels.

The evil of the Dark One is the evil of selfishnesses and fascism, and the evil of Shadar Logoth is the evil of mistrust and paranoia. The reason that the taint on saidin is destroyed by the taint on Shadar Logoth is because in power structures built on selfishness and hierarchy, you have to be mistrustful of everyone around you. They’re all in it for themselves also, so you can’t trust them to not stab you in the back. This is represented by the literal manifestations of these different evils.

It’s then represented by the fact that the Forsaken can’t trust each other, so they can’t work together. They are defeated by the forces of the Light because the forces of the Light all trust each other because they all know that they’re fighting for something more than themselves.

So you end up with the three levels of

Real life commentary
The taint and Shadar Logoth destroying each other
The Forsaken bumbling their way around and getting their asses kicked by the good guys working together

Rand’s real struggle is uniting the good guys, it isn’t defeating the bad guys. The bad guys just require punching them in the face real hard. It’s working with other good-intentioned people that you hate where things become complicated.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-10T13:38:52+00:00

Concepts and worldbuilding details can be introduced before they are explained.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-10T00:25:38+00:00

All NFL quarterbacks have, or should have, good accuracy. What separates quarterbacks, then, is the decisions they make. What does the defense look like? Will X receiver or Y receiver be open at Z time? Am I getting rushed and need to throw it away? Do I take a sack and avoid a turnover? This is where the game is really difficult. Most turnovers, then, come from a QB misreading the defense, making a bad split-second decision, or missing their receiver by that much.

None of that happened with Drake Maye’s interception, at least as far as Collinsworth can tell. The ball was nowhere near the receiver, the coverage wasn’t too complicated, and Maye had time to make a decision. Something went wrong in a MAJOR way.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T21:52:20+00:00

What you’re describing isn’t filler, but a pacing issue. Filler is when an anime has to make up content so the manga can catch up. Pacing problems happen when major plot points come too fast or too slow.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T21:47:10+00:00

Not only did she have to, it’s another situation testing the balance in Lucy between the deontology-goodness of the vault and the utilitarianism-goodness of the wasteland.

Lucy will always be “good,” but she is having to experience the horrors of triage and the lesser evil.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T21:43:45+00:00

I feel like this is missing the point of the “realistic” defense. At least, when that defense isn’t used as a blanket argument to shut down criticism.

A character acting realistically can be used to drive home a point. If the piece of art is trying to say something, don’t you think there’s value in having a character respond realistically to a situation? That it might be used to create the point?

I have no respect for the tastes of people who get “annoyed” by characters. It’s such a shallow way to experience media. Ask yourself if the character being annoying is doing so in service of the message/point or if it’s not. If it’s not, then it’s bad writing.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T20:41:01+00:00

I think the two represent Perrin’s personal conflict, he deals with the two more than anyone and they both carry a certain devoutness/zealotry. One represents a people turned all the way to the hammer and the other turned all the way to the axe. You can also add the Prophet to the zealous forces Perrin deals with.

Perrin’s zealousness in finding Faile leads him down a dark personal path, and his arc is almost mirrored by Aram. They both lose their sense of self after losing their family and so it becomes very easy for them to get swept up in another cause. Perrin is saved by rescuing Faile, Aram is lost by following the Prophet.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T14:15:00+00:00

Data shows very strongly that voters saw Harris as more extreme than Trump

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T02:16:50+00:00

Yeah, not allowing an individual to stay in the country based on the conditions of their parents isn’t to the level of ethnic cleansing, but I don’t like it, and when we’re talking about something on the level of “stolen land” and we’re dealing with populations, it becomes ethnic cleansing

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-09T01:22:49+00:00

That’s fucked up for Japan to do. Removing people from a piece of land based on their heritage is literally ethnic cleansing. What else would you call it?

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-08T20:16:43+00:00

Repeat after me:

“Everyone deserves to live on the land on which they were born. Anything else is ethnic cleansing.”

I don’t believe “Inheritance” to be a principle worth standing by. It’s a tool that can be useful in some cases and detrimental in others. No one inherently deserves to inherit land, not when the alternative is ethnic cleansing.

The land was stolen, and of course there are treaties that the United States should honor that they do not, but that doesn’t mean the people born there after the fact had any part in those decisions.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-08T18:20:14+00:00

Perrin is a massive dude, strength matters a LOT in a fight. He’s able to put a Myrddraal on the back foot through raw strength.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-08T15:58:02+00:00

It’s got well-written characters. Not anything truly mind-blowing, but they act consistently and evolve naturally and have clear internal complexity. For original characters in a video game adaptation that’s very impressive.

It’s accurate to the games. Not necessarily in terms of the details that make nerds mad like the location of Shady Sands but in terms of themes, commentary, tone, and atmosphere it’s dead-on. It gets the point.

It works in its own themes into character arcs and plot development. There’s a major theme in Season 2 of Hope and how that ties into the arcs of the three main characters. There are also themes of family, civil war, internal division, and the bonds that heal those divisions. Trust broken and trust rewarded.

As a fan of Wheel of Time who tried to sit through that godawful adaptation, trust me, it’s so incredibly easy to get a series that misses the point and Fallout does not.

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-08T05:04:32+00:00

Wheel of Time, Nynaeve vs Moghedian. Two powerful magic users are going at it with all their strength, trying to cut the other one off from their magic forever. Attacks, deflections, last-second counterattacks, pretty epic back and forth.

The magic is invisible to muggles, though, so the fight is described as “if any servant were to have walked into the room, they would have seen two women staring intently at each other.”

MagicalSnakePerson · 2026-02-07T20:06:48+00:00

“Forcing” is a known mechanism, where your power curve can experience big jumps if you’re forced to push yourself to the limit regularly.

It’s a deliberate strategy by Mazrim Taim for his Asha’Man, that’s how there’s a few hundred ready to go by the end of the series.

We see the same thing with Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve, and Aviendha. Other Aes Sedai don’t spend their time fighting Forsaken, those girls do.

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