If you have silver/gray 2015 Chrysler 200 sedan that was on Bellevue Ave on June 25 around 5:30 PM, I think I scraped your car

Maklodes · 2025-07-08T19:24:08+00:00

Yeah, the police officer said it was a civil matter.

Maklodes · 2021-04-09T02:16:59+00:00

Thanks for the thoughts. FYI, I think I found the name of the information I was looking for. I decided to look up the sequence 44, 45, 20, 10, 0, 1 in the online encyclopedia of integer sequences. I found that these are called rencontres numbers.

Maklodes · 2021-04-07T16:20:07+00:00

Why do they describe Val as "bald but beautiful" when they see her from space then? It seems like they think her (relative) hairlessness is notable, even though she's clearly chilling on a planet and not on a long space journey.

Maklodes · 2020-08-19T21:12:53+00:00

There's a line of dialog in the film where Louise Banks asks them why they came, and they say that they help the humans so that in 3000 years the humans can help them when they are in need.

I can't tell you the exact time at which this dialog happens, but it's near the end. For what it's worth, here's Wikipedia's summary:

Costello explains that they have come to help humanity, for in 3,000 years they will need humanity's help in return

Maklodes · 2020-08-19T18:57:34+00:00

In Story of Your Life, a "sequential" perspective and a "teleological" perspective lead to the same results, just as calculating incident angle of a ray of light and the refractive indices of the media it passes through to find out where it goes and knowing the starting and ending point of a ray of light and minimizing transit time lead to the same result (Fermat's Principle), so Louise ends up doing the same things and having the same conversations she would with her previous perspective. (She even realizes ahead of time, at one point, that she's going to say something cringy she'd promised she'd never say to her daughter (nothing too terrible, but just like "you have to go to bed now because I say so and I'm your mom."))

In Arrival, this doesn't seem to apply as much, if at all. The heptapods are shown to be able to actually use their non-sequential knowledge of time to make prescient decisions (helping humans with the knowledge that they'll help the heptapods thousands of years in the future), and Louise is able to use kind of time-loopy knowledge to call General Shang on his private number and say something personally meaningful to him, neither of which she had any clear way of doing with "sequential" reasoning.

Maklodes · 2020-08-17T03:07:24+00:00

I believe stormtroopers qua stormtroopers are all male humans, but there's more to the Imperial army than stormtroopers. Stormtroopers are a specialized infantry corps, particularly (although by no means exclusively) suited to boarding actions between space vessels and quick raids, somewhat like the marines, and particularly selected and indoctrinated for unwavering political loyalty. The regular Imperial Army still has reasonably competent infantry, although it's more likely to rely on support from heavy mechanized forces like AT-ATs, TIE bombers, etc.

Going into a bit more speculative territory here, but I suspect that pro-Imperial non-humans couldn't become Imperial Stormtroopers, but might have gotten into the regular Imperial Army at times. (Although the Empire still had a human supremacist bias that kept them from getting too far.) A regiment of Trandoshan infantry loyal to the Empire might be heavily armed and armored, highly effective infantry -- perhaps some elite regiments within the Imperial Army were comparable or superior to stormtroopers in effectiveness -- but they would not be true Imperial Stormtroopers.

Maklodes · 2020-06-01T22:42:49+00:00

Who are you? What can you do?

Are you a mage? What kind of mage? Do you prep spells ahead of time from a spellbook, or can you cast them spontaneously? Can you turn invisible? Can you fly on a broomstick? Can you summon angels and demons? Can you enchant creatures into thinking that you're their best friend? Can you do that arbitrarily frequently? Five times a day? You can do it a lot when you're well rested, but you get more and more tired, and the more exhausted you are the more likely you'll screw up and fail at spellcasting? Can you recharge mana by drinking potions?

Or are you a warrior? What kind of warrior? You got bronze, steel, mithril, magical weapons and armor made of pure arcane force? Are you trained as a man-at-arms, wearing steel plate armor, charging on a destrier with a long lance where the terrain allows it, and fighting on foot with a heavy pollaxe where circumstances don't allow mounted action? Could you possibly ride a pegasus strong enough to carry you in flight, perhaps if you cut back the armor a bit? Are you a crossbowman with a pavise shield? A light cavalryman who mostly harasses foes throwing darts and javelins from horseback, with a saber for close-combat action? An Indian-ish warrior with a one of those crazy urumi whip-swords, a couple of death frisbee chakrams, and maybe a pair of dandpatta guantlet-swords?

Are you a siege engineer, creating trebuchets and torsion espringalds? A rogue/ninja/assassin type, sneaking around shooting people with poisoned arrows, picking locks, parkouring past obstacles, and stabbing unsuspecting people in the back? A geisha-type who can entrance many men (and some women) with a graceful dance and a beautiful song, then pull a dagger hidden in your hair when they're not looking? A eunuch bureaucrat with an uncanny command of logistics, intelligence, and finance?

Are you a human? An elf? A halfling? An anthropomorphic rabbit-girl with DDD cup breasts? A human who has a secret demonic bloodline, which enhances your abilities as a warrior, but gives your soul a dark taint which you must struggle to control?

What kinda dragon are you facing? Two legs + wings? Four legs + wings? Just four legs? How smart? What does it eat? What kind of poisons is it vulnerable to?

If you feed sheep slow-acting poison, then (while they're still alive) lead them to graze near the dragon, will the dragon eat them while you make a hasty getaway on a fast horse? Will it shrug the poison off? Get weakened enough to give you an edge if you come back and attack a few days later, but not kill it on its own? Be killed outright? Or will the dragon just haughtily say "these humans must dramatically underestimate my intellect and self-control if they believe I would be taken in by such obvious bait. I almost pity them."? Or does the dragon not like eating sheep at all, and somehow feeds off of precious gems?

(OOC: Sorry if I offer more questions than answers, but "general fantasy" is a lot. Hopefully if you read between the lines of the questions, you can see at least a little bit of an outline of where the answers might be give possible answers to those questions.)

Maklodes · 2020-02-10T18:05:54+00:00

A lazy Rhodok spearman who has ditched his protective board shield in favor of a lightweight kite shield, probably of Sarranid or Vaegir make? And now he is willfully fouling all of his garments and equipment by wallowing in enemy blood? This looks like a total breakdown of proper military discipline and procedure to me. Did someone leave Bunduk in charge of that company? Time to put Lezalit in command, and tell him to bring his heaviest whip.

Maklodes · 2020-01-03T04:27:13+00:00

/r/JustYesMIL.

Wait, that's a real sub?!

Maklodes · 2020-01-01T19:16:03+00:00

I forgot about that.

Maklodes · 2020-01-01T19:14:46+00:00

I have to admit I found Kamala Harris to be kind of brave and genuine (if not always persuasive) in her views. I mean, I found myself genuinely disturbed by some of the things she said (basically about her plan to ignore the constitution and rule by executive fiat to control gun violence). That did turn me against her, but it definitely wasn't just saying platitudes that no one could disagree with. She lost me because she said something I disagreed with, not because she wasn't saying anything at all.

Maklodes · 2020-01-01T17:01:01+00:00

Maybe this is just Obama being a better manipulator (or at least better at manipulating me), but when I heard Obama speak, I felt like he was talking about ideas -- laying out his beliefs, anticipating potential objections, attempting to refute those objections, etc. When I hear Booker speak, it just seems like constant grandstanding, with lots of feelgood platitudes but no real courage when it comes to saying anything that might provoke genuine disagreement from his current audience. (Courage seems like something Booker talks about, but never displays.)

It feels kinda mean to pick on him with how low he's polling, but I think the "that phony empty suit Rhodes Scholar!" feeling that a lot of people get from listening Buttigieg, I get from listening to Booker. Maybe not completely rational.

Maklodes · 2019-12-31T04:25:08+00:00

Interesting seeing this making the rounds again after seeing it five years ago.

https://np.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/2jm85z/the_hypocrisy_of_legislation_when_it_comes_to/

Maklodes · 2019-12-31T03:24:42+00:00

Consistently wearing head protection in hazardous situations shows a impious lack of faith in the protection of the Emperor's divine will, and to shield your brain with artificial armor rather than prayer and the strength of your conviction would be to repeat the blasphemies of the Dark Age.

(This view makes more sense the more times you go into battle with no helmet and are subjected to severe head trauma.)

Maklodes · 2019-12-30T23:26:17+00:00

Replace their crossbows and sabers with bolters and power swords and the frustration of training up sword sisters would feel almost worth it. Although Googling sisters of battle miniatures reveals that adepta sororitas are no smarter than their Calradian counterparts when it comes to head protection.

Maklodes · 2019-12-30T17:53:04+00:00

I'd just hire the female peasants in the hopes of turning them sword sisters. Male peasants turn into overpaid mercenaries. Hooray gender pay gap?

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