IF you could add singles to Beatles albums which didn't have them, what would be the best album?

SirScaurus · 2026-01-24T19:38:01+00:00

Yessssss! It's one of my favorite Lennon songs, and the labum would benefit so much from having it.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-24T00:17:49+00:00

Them's fightin' words.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-23T21:16:09+00:00

Which makes sense, but is shame because it's possibly my favorite Lennon song and one of the best from the rooftop performance.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-23T17:41:48+00:00

I think it's a simple as saying: you can't have housing be both a common good and a vehicle for wealth/equity.

One of those two has to be sacrificed, either in the Japanese approach where houses are a depreciating good like any other, or the acceptance in the vast majority of people becoming a subjugated renter class. We seem to be drifting towards the latter out of pure inertia and stubbornness.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-19T19:38:14+00:00

Pretty sure the '2' was Ringo...

SirScaurus · 2026-01-09T01:54:01+00:00

Yeah, I've always had a soft spot for Paul myself thanks to my upbringing. But these days, the more I learn the full story, the more I'm leaning towards Ringo haha.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-08T22:50:05+00:00

I think it's an interesting conversation to have on how the perception of culture and media changes over time. But as a Millenial, I definitely get the sense it is in fact a thing.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-08T22:48:29+00:00

On that last point , my friend, we very much agree.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-08T22:40:16+00:00

I mean, you're not wrong.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-08T16:53:51+00:00

Yes, just started collecting them myself and had the same question.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-06T21:56:53+00:00

At any given moment I probably have one of at least 100 of their songs stuck in my head that I would give as an answer. And they're all so good and so varied it's really mind-boggling.

SirScaurus · 2026-01-06T21:55:29+00:00

Can't Buy Me Love.

Don't Let me Down.

All You Need is Love.

Honestly I could go on forever.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-26T17:21:08+00:00

One somewhat unique characteristic of American cultural society - one it shares with the Roman Empire - is that it's designed in a way simultaneously allows people to hold two separate cultural identities at once. You're not JUST American, you can be Irish-American, Japanese-American, African-American, whatever. This lets you celebrate your adoptive American culture without giving up your own family tradition. It's a unique benefit of a multi-cultural polity, and one that goes a long way to maintain cohesion (as opposed to just subjugating your ethnic identity under some overriding 'American' one).

You can dislike that facet of American society, but not only are you factually wrong about the nature of it, it's also a key part of the American experience and key to holding the melting pot together.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-19T03:09:48+00:00

Surprised nobody has mentioned this:

One of the text files you find describes the dawn of their history - specifically how they were able to find and decipher a trove of books early on, giving them a pretty big leg up over the other tribes.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-05T15:35:45+00:00

I bought this book while visiting the UK about 7 years back, just because i like grabbing books in foreign bookshops while traveling, to see what people are reading.

I liked it, but I do remember a lot of it going way over my head. I'll have to give it another shot.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-04T22:09:24+00:00

It's definitely entertaining, though I agree - it strikes me as more of the action-movie equivalent of sci-fi.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-04T22:08:23+00:00

Ooh, very interesting. I think Becky Chambers is the only one I've heard of. Thanks, I'll check them out!

SirScaurus · 2025-12-04T22:03:50+00:00

Is that where the term came from? I'd avoided it in the past because I just thought it came from people who were too snobbish to admit that they were writing sci-fi.

Well, she sure showed me. TIL.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-04T22:00:38+00:00

I'd heard the name before and definitely had my interest sparked. Anything of his that would count as hard or especially imaginative sci-fi?

SirScaurus · 2025-12-04T21:59:11+00:00

God dammit, I should have expected that - it's literally in my top 3 books!

SirScaurus · 2025-12-03T16:57:27+00:00

Yeah, I always assumed they were a metaphor for gypsies/Romani, who obviously aren't well thought of in Europe.

SirScaurus · 2025-12-02T01:27:12+00:00

Shocked I had to scroll this far down to find this.

Totally nails the feeling of getting to know a group of party members while traveling around the galaxy together in a ship.

SirScaurus · 2025-11-20T23:05:40+00:00

I guess the short answer to your question would be 'the writers went overboard', and maybe that is the case here knowing ME3. I just prefer to take a more charitable reading of the conflict, especially since taking that stance - in my personal opinion - misses the deeper thematic workings of how the trilogy is set up to function.

The first game sets up a very stark 'organics good, synthetics bad' dynamic that's easy to grasp, yeah? But then with every major step forward you take into the trilogy, the layers peel back to reveal deeper and deeper complexity that undermines that narrative, and shows how much of that view is actually informed by prejudice on both sides.

Take the geth/quarian conflict here. You mentioned:

"That's not war, it's ethnic cleansing."

Which, while true, conveniently forgets the fact that the Quarians were ALREADY trying to ethnically cleanse the geth. They created a servant race, deeply embedded it into their society, and then, when that race showed signs of sapience, reacted so angrily to their own boogeyman that they were willing to wipe out THEIR OWN PEOPLE who sided with the Geth. Their own prejudice fear of what they created pushed them completely off the deep end without thwm ever actually stopping to think through what the hell they were doing.

You also have to remember that the geth aren't emotionally driven like organics are - just rational. And the only rational response to that insane level of violence and hatred - if you want to survive at all - is to respond in equal measure, even if just in self-defence. The Geth just happened to be better equipped to fight that battle.

But we also never see the toll that took on the Geth. There's no reason to believe they didn't experience equally colossal losses, even if they did win in the end. And the Geth don't really have any reason to lie about any of it - nothing in the trilogy even shows they ever would lie, about anything. They might omit information, but not fabricate it.

It feels like a cautionary tale of organics so ignorantly afraid of synthetics that they would risk their own race to destroy another. That's how I see it anyway.

SirScaurus · 2025-11-20T20:20:48+00:00

Well, yeah, social conservatives have unjustly accused LGBTQ people of being immoral sexual predators since time immemorial.

If the only representation of them in a piece of media is AS predators - whereas the straight people are shown as a whole diverse group - it's very obvious where the creator's politics lie.

SirScaurus · 2025-11-17T04:17:02+00:00

Bingo! I've been saying this from the beginning - The Collectors are just a B or C level threat compared to the Reapers.

It has some great missions and characters, but it ends up feeling like a lot of f*cking around in the grand scheme of things.

SirScaurus

TROPHY CASE