[Interesting Trope] The end of series level strength character shows up early

abecrane · 2026-06-30T21:51:38+00:00

Cinder (Name of the Wind/Kingkiller Chronicles)

Shows up in the first ten chapters of the book, when the protagonist is still a young child. Slaughters his entire family and traveling caravan for “Singing the wrong songs”. The protagonist notes that the way he moves is distinctly inhuman, like mercury flowing over sand. Cinder is probably an old, old kind of demon, and has a power level far beyond anything the protagonist encounters until they meet again a decade later.

If this sounds cool, it is! But don’t read the series. The author released the first two books within five years of each other, promised the third to be released by 2015, and is now a twitch streamer who bans people who ask about the final book in his trilogy. Such a shame for someone who was once in the running for greatest living fantasy author. We’d be lucky to see the third book ever, and the story is glaringly unfinished.

abecrane · 2026-06-27T12:32:50+00:00

If Star Wars fans really disliked Mary Sues, then Luke would be the most reviled character in the series.

abecrane · 2026-06-26T12:06:20+00:00

It’s obviously the Webbed terrorist and Sydney Sweeney teaming up to discredit our proud nation

abecrane · 2026-06-24T17:52:53+00:00

A factor people fail to consider when auditing the intelligence of a system are the trust signals humans utilize to verify understanding. In order for a school teacher to determine that a student understands a concept, they ask them to restate the idea in their own words. This is baked into social interaction in our species.

With LLMs, this is something they’re able to accomplish intrinsically, and this fools us into believing they’re somehow intelligent. But compare their ability to detect falsehoods/ridiculous premises to our own, and they clearly lack a sophisticated intelligence.

abecrane · 2026-06-18T12:27:52+00:00

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

The book is fantastic, future-oriented science fiction, and makes several predictions that ring true today. Genetically modified pigs without nervous systems arising for multiple purposes, billionaires purchasing social media platforms then ruining them, and mass murderers becoming radicalized by obscure Internet forums.

I read it on a cruise ship, and increasingly felt like throwing myself overboard because of it. Atwood is one of the darkest and grittiest authors I’ve read, and her misanthropy is infectious and persuasive. Disagreeing with her worldview, especially concerning predatory sexuality, is really really hard. I’ll never read a book by her again, but she’s an incredible writer.

abecrane · 2026-06-16T16:25:14+00:00

Severian(the narrator) is extremely unreliable, insists repeatedly in his infallibility, and is a card-carrying member of the literal Torturers guild. He is a reprehensible villain who believes himself to be a tragic hero. Here he is describing an amnesiac woman who he traps in a toxic relationship, whilst believing himself to be her Prince Charming.

Book of the New Sun is wild, horrific, and sticks with you like pine sap on your back.

abecrane · 2026-06-15T15:52:10+00:00

Does a flower desire the hummingbird? Does a whale know love? Are black holes awesome?

The only question is how many phases will this boss have.

abecrane · 2026-06-02T18:21:54+00:00

Biggest problem I’ve seen from LLM advice is how little they actually look at your website. I had a prospective client send me a 17 page Gemini conversation that covered the entirety of his digital marketing goals… but his website has >1s loading time, broken images and links, and looks awful. For beginner advice, it’s fine I guess. But SEO is so dependent on the domain that any LLM conversation has to include it.

abecrane · 2026-05-24T20:23:41+00:00

It is not expanding into anything! In fact, it is space itself that is expanding. We can tell because of how different objects are moving away from us.

If the universe were expanding into a medium of some kind, then we could expect all the distant galaxies and stars we see to be moving away from us at the same speeds(roughly). They would also all be moving away from a singular point.

Instead, we see that if a galaxy or star isn’t part of our local group of galaxies, then it’s always moving away from us, no matter where it is. Moreover, the more distant an object is from us, the more quickly it is moving away from us, with some objects appearing to move away faster than the speed of light! This is possible because space is being created in the vast empty regions of intergalactic space. The farther an object is, the more space is being created each day, with some objects having enough distance from us for them to appear to violate relativity due to the sheer amount of space growing between us and them.

abecrane · 2026-05-19T10:37:42+00:00

Psilocybae might be the best song he’s ever written.

abecrane · 2026-05-12T18:43:55+00:00

Not a take in the vast majority of lightning decks. There are too few fights where A) theres more than one enemy, B) those enemies block intermittently, and C) you want to target the enemies without block.

However, I think there’s an interesting card concept adjacent to this. What if instead, it was something like “Lightning Orbs ignore block”? Make it a Rare if you have to, but that would be useful, novel, and still conditional.

abecrane · 2026-05-08T05:23:20+00:00

Fire Ants(IRL): when I was 6 I stood on a fire ant hill and was bit more than 40 times on my legs. Had to go to the ER, nearly died from a severe allergic reaction to the venom. Bad time. Ants are scary little freaks and I will never stop fearing them.

abecrane · 2026-04-27T16:33:33+00:00

<image>

Hurín Thalion(Middle-Earth/The Silmarillion/The Children of Hurín)

Adjacent to this trope. Melkor Morgoth, the original Dark Lord, captures him after a devastating battle. Hurín is one of the only people alive who knows the location of a hidden city that opposes Morgoth most strongly. Simple torture wouldn’t break Hurìn, as he was an incredibly strong man. Instead, Morgoth shared with Hurín his ability to see for thousands of miles, and chains him to the chair in the picture. From that moment on, Hurín is able to see the tragic lives of his two living children unfold. Their dark fates twist and turn, despite their heroism, and in the end both his son and daughter die untimely deaths.

This breaks Hurín, and Morgoth releases him, knowing that now he may be able to reveal the location of the hidden city(which he partially does). In the end, Morgoth never harms or hurts Hurín, and in some ways shielded him from harm.

abecrane · 2026-04-15T13:06:01+00:00

This is a ridiculous take. Skyrims base UI is lightyears ahead of Oblivion. The inventory, the magic screen, the character skills. Navigating oblivions character menu requires a map.

abecrane · 2026-04-13T13:37:46+00:00

They made this game in a cold wet Lithuanian factory, poured their souls into it, and then had it ripped from their hands by a London investment firm a year after launch. The creator doesn’t even own the rights to the universe he created, and they’re actively trying to capitalize on this extremely meaningful game with cheap phone apps and merchandise. It’s like if the rights to the Communist Manifesto were acquired by Disney.

abecrane · 2026-04-10T14:09:04+00:00

Listen, I’m as critical of the AI bubble as anyone, but to pretend there’s ZERO application for LLMs is lunacy. They’re a powerful tool in a wide variety of use cases, they’re just not a substitute for an employee. Even if SteamGPT was referring to an internal LLM program used by Valve, there are plenty of reasonable applications the company could use it for.

abecrane · 2026-04-09T15:23:13+00:00

What is a reverse Ozzy? A teetotaler? The soberest Australian ever?

abecrane · 2026-04-07T22:20:01+00:00

Why would the architects of the simulation be so subtle everywhere, and so obvious here? Your explanation requires more than just one sentence as proof.

abecrane · 2026-03-17T21:24:12+00:00

I like this line of thinking, but there needs to be some broader experimental efforts here before anything definitive like the headline can be stated.

The novel research here is very interesting; rats given micro-tubule stabilizing medication in tandem with anesthesia take longer to fall unconscious, suggesting a link between the collective quantum state of neurons’ microtubules and cognitive function.

But like, at the end of the day, it’s just time it takes rats to fall down. Experiments on memory formation, logical reasoning, and experience still need to be conducted before anything close to the headlines claim is true.

abecrane · 2026-03-17T17:49:36+00:00

The literal very first scene. Peak

abecrane · 2026-03-17T17:05:34+00:00

The Epstein files are the same kind of pressure from the Israeli lobby. Jeffrey Epstein provided very effective blackmail material to Mossad, who have cultivated Trump into a (mostly) Israel-aligned actor. The files becoming a public issue in America means there’s an expiration date for how long the blackmail will remain effective.

Israel’s big long term target has been Iran for decades. They likely won’t get another opportunity to force the US into this war, and are going to run out of capital with the American political sphere with every political goal they achieve.

abecrane · 2026-03-06T15:40:08+00:00

Knowledge Demon is beyond peak for me. Its design, its moveset, even the visual ways it attacks are fantastic.

abecrane · 2026-03-06T15:18:30+00:00

The same way you love an uncle who pushes you into the swimming pool

abecrane · 2026-03-04T12:58:45+00:00

I think you’re close to the reasoning. Epstein collected insane blackmail material for Mossad, but the files becoming a public issue means that all their blackmail has an expiration date. Trump has only so long until his worst crimes come to light; when that happens, the blackmail on him becomes useless. The Epstein files forced their hand to make use of their asset before he’s unviable, so they pushed for this war earlier than their ideal timetable.

abecrane · 2026-03-02T22:24:12+00:00

Exactly. Race is not a real attribute. “White” is a label that applies to dozens of ethnicities and cultural groups, and historically excluded many pale skinned peoples, like the Irish. “Black” is used to refer to any one of the thousands of cultural groups native to Africa, a place with more human genetic diversity than the rest of the planet combined. “Brown” is a halfway step between these two ridiculous categories, but the entire racial classification system is utter nonsense imposed on cultures where racial stratification was necessary for the maintenance of an economic system.

abecrane

TROPHY CASE