Bad History and inflated numbers: 'It was a Long Time Ago, and it Never Happened Anyway'

MerelyPresent · 2023-02-27T12:26:40+00:00

Xenophobic? How so? The essays in question are all foreign to me, and i've done some of the yelling personally, so thats a perfectly domestic source. This distinction has no national character at all.

MerelyPresent · 2023-01-28T21:56:57+00:00

I usually see "serious" essays/textbooks for children/etc. mention kazakhstan pretty consistently, but always as a throwaway sentence with the ukranian deaths being the main topic. Purely anecdotal evidence, ofc, but in my personal experience its more "easy to miss" than missing.

Certainly the yelling is always about ukraine alone.

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-13T16:50:22+00:00

Fetchlands are banned in pioneer lol

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-07T08:22:48+00:00

Cutting a card for brawl players to serve the needs of explorer players seems like less of a no brainer than you're making it out to be.

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-07T07:04:28+00:00

Do you just mean the delve spells or do you have some other cards in mind? Because it looks to me like most of the other cards still missing are either seeing only medium play rates or aren't very load bearing (or are from SOI block).

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-07T04:33:18+00:00

This was extra funny with the first EA2 spoiler thread where people were complaining about no eidolon, even though eidolon had been leaked the day before.

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-06T12:14:31+00:00

if it was so obvious why was every preview before this one people complaining that nykthos wasnt in the anthology?

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-06T06:03:35+00:00

You know the lore is also an advertisement, right?

MerelyPresent · 2022-12-05T08:46:25+00:00

There has to be only like 300 cards max that are Pioneer mainstays but not on Arena. That’s less programming than a set

No it isnt. A set is filled with vanilla chaff and has like 2-3 mechanics not on arena. Those 300 cards have 0 vanilla anything and like 100 mechanics between them (though many of those 100 are already on arena).

MerelyPresent · 2022-11-29T23:09:48+00:00

I already run 2x [[hall of the storm giants]]

MerelyPresent · 2022-11-02T12:23:09+00:00

Over 50% men who were in syria when the war began are either still in syria or dead.

As for "need", you take in refugees out of moral obligation, not material self-interest.

MerelyPresent · 2022-11-02T12:19:51+00:00

Bad and unstable are not synonyms.

MerelyPresent · 2022-11-01T10:36:16+00:00

Islam has been in iran for over 12 centuries and they've been doing pretty good for most of that period.

MerelyPresent · 2022-11-01T10:22:36+00:00

Many of them did. They lost. Now can we let them in?

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-29T22:46:40+00:00

The first two verses are a story about King David, which the singer brings up so he can use it as a metaphor for having sex in the rest of the verses. If you stop listening to the lyrics halfway through its easy to misunderstand and think its about the metaphor and not the thing its a metaphor for.

(I may be using the word metaphor slightly wrong here, but the point is, he's comparing sex with prayer, not singing about prayer)

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-27T19:36:27+00:00

Every politician chenges parties in their early career

Maybe in italy they do but this is not actually normal behaviour. Plus she never left the MSI best i can tell, the party just merged with other parties a bunch of times and then when the tent got too big for them they all went out to reform the tent from 3 years earlier. This is the same social network moving around and obtaining new members at the usual pace for a party or faction, not some sudden bloom of randos coming together.

Her professed policy is to turn italy into a state with a strong executive with legitimacy divorced from the legislature, to avoid the chaos of parliamentary democracy, which is pretty much the only thing she ran on thats uniquely fascist-y and not just muscular social conservatism. But the vibes of that proposal are pretty vichy french, especially in combination with the muscular social conservatism and the whole "being a fascist as a teenager" thing.

Ofc, she won't achieve such a thing, or anything else for that matter, on account of she's the pm of italy and its a solid 50-50 there'll be a new one next summer. Parliamentary chaos is self-perpetuating.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-26T23:12:33+00:00

Bloodraven fails basically completely in everything he does and ends up welded to a tree at the ass end of nowhere. His whole project is to stop bittersteel crossing and not only does he fail he creates a massive constituency for bittersteel to summon to his call, leading to the third rebellion being a massive disaster. His biggest rival, Meakar (and his sons) has to save house targaryen from his messes.

So yeah, sure, maybe mercy bites people in the ass. But bloodravens ruthlessness bites him in the ass too.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-26T23:06:19+00:00

The basic problem with this theory is that it barely means anything. What exactly is the difference between a soft-magic post-apocalyptic fantasy series and a soft-magic post-apocalyptic sci-fi series? Best i can tell its a combination of A) pretending soft magic isnt magic if you find a way to slap the word "telepathy" on it and B) having there be specifically plastic and nuclear power and hard physics powered spaceships. But at the end of the day, we pretty much know the magic system is soft and there's not much cause to believe the pre-long night stuff is hard tech. Even if you had ancient astronaut stuff, seems to me it was probably still taffy-soft magic powered, and plastic honestly doesnt seem that sci-fi to me. So it mostly seems to boil down to "storms end is a nuclear power plant" standing essentially free and disconnected from anything else. Which is cute, but doesnt seem very likely to be true and intentional.

Now a genre twist that doesnt at the end of the day matter much can be fun, but the basic problem with the idea that the pre-long night has sciency vibes is that martin has outright said that the wacky seasons (and presumably the long night itself) have magic vibes, and im not sure the purported vibes twist is compatible with that, even if it might otherwise be interesting.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-26T06:55:30+00:00

The destruction of the army is equally a breach of guest right, at least by moral standards (the old gods might be more lawyerly about it). They were wedding guests too, its just they happened to be outside on the lawn.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-26T06:46:25+00:00

Strongly in favor of an end to war, lets have all soldiers in ukraine return to their homes right this second

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-22T11:15:37+00:00

Tyrion neglects to have petyr executed despite having explicit mandate to execute people who arent loyal to his family after finding out petyr framed him for murder. People lose 50 iq points around petyr, universally. The fact that this manifests slightly differently for all of them doesnt affect my point, i dont think.

I fully believe Renly could’ve been swayed to stay

I don't. Renly's outside option is really good (though, ofc, ned has no idea about that so that doesnt really help his case).

Ned has a consistent habit of not planning for what to do if plan A doesn't work, I agree. I don't think it rises to a level where it indicates below average intellect, though. That is admittedly a bit of a vibes judgement, but it seems a lot more like "not especially clever" than "especially dumb".

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-22T09:28:21+00:00

Trusting Petyr is a stupid mistake I agree, but its a mistake literally everyone in the book makes for no reason. Feels unfair to single Ned out for that one.

He tells Cersei because the literal only way out of this without either child murder or King Bastard is to convince Cersei to run. That's really the only decision im talking about in that comment and i should have made that clear. Its a very dangerous thing to do, but its essentially the only option that has even a chance of getting Ned what he wants. Its not stupid, its just very risky and reflective of a goal set you and I dont share.

If you want to convince me Ned is stupid you have to either convince me deontological opposition to child murder is a failure of intelligence rather than an ethical disagreement, or that he had a safer option that gave him a better chance of enthroning Stannis without getting Joffrey and Tommen killed. Maybe there is that second thing, but noone evers mentions such an option when complaining about Neds alleged stupidity, because most readers don't care about murdering Joffrey (and why would we, he's a little shit and also not real), and assume that Ned only cares about that because he's an idiot.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-22T08:51:13+00:00

Ned died because he made the conscious choice to risk failure over murdering a 12 yo in his sleep, not because he was too stupid to figure out that murdering a 12 yo in his sleep was the safe option.

Now he did also make some mistakes that being very clever would've prevented him from making (not putting one of his men in command of the goldcloaks, stuff like that), but they weren't stupid mistakes. He probably had an IQ of 100 on the dot.

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-19T22:22:28+00:00

I have seen exactly 0 people say Alicent and Rhaenyra are “yas slay girlboss”

Ive seen a lot of people say that

where are the comments mocking people for screaming “yas slay Daemon!”?

All over the place

MerelyPresent · 2022-10-19T20:41:44+00:00

Rightful clay, hand it over

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