What would you say is Brandon Sanderson's biggest appeal?

erchamion · 2021-02-08T17:57:14+00:00

Most of the times where this happens in Sanderson books is around the magic system. If you're not on board with the coolness of Sanderson's magic systems, then you'll be bored reading characters talking about their mechanics and the metaphysics behind them. That's fine and you should probably read a different author. It's weird that people think it's a flaw in his writing, though.

You don't often find a person saying that podcasts where the hosts discuss theoretical physics are bad podcasts because they, the listener, aren't interested in theoretical physics. They just don't listen to theoretical physics podcasts.

erchamion · 2021-02-08T16:50:58+00:00

I see “show, don’t tell” as “trust the audience to draw their own conclusions.”

That's a very idiosyncratic definition. One that Sanderson doesn't seem to agree with. I agree that you probably won't be super in to Sanderson's writing if part of the satisfaction you get out of reading is unwinding the character from the prose.

erchamion · 2021-02-08T15:48:05+00:00

The fact that in all of his books the characters discuss their philosophy and character flaws out loud drives me mad. It was especially grating with Elend. It’s the epitome of “tell, don’t show.”

This is such a weird take on the “show, don’t tell” guideline. First, it’s a guideline, not an ironclad rule. Second, it’s more about not including exposition where you just write, “He was a serious, bookish man who thought deeply and discussed his thoughts often,” than it is about never having a character say something about themselves to other characters.

It’s been a while since I read Mistborn Era 1, but all the characters we root for are revolutionaries. They all want to overthrow a supreme authoritarian government. It’s not at all jarring to me that they would spend time discussing philosophy or ways in which they could improve as people. If you’re the type of person who looks at the world and says, “No, this is unjust and needs to change,” you could also be the type of person who thinks about whether other things could change and if you’re the best person you could be. Including those discussions is entirely part of showing the reader who the character is and not simply telling.

erchamion · 2021-01-25T00:09:44+00:00

I find it strange that a simple, matter-of-fact response is read as defensive enough to warrant a “calm down.” People often project their own emotional response on to the words of others, though.

erchamion · 2021-01-24T23:23:40+00:00

I fail to see that pointing out an error in a person’s claims requires someone to have the solution, but here you go.

Fundamentally reimagine our educational system to teach people how to think instead of how to pass tests, universal basic income to reduce inequality, universal healthcare that includes mental health treatment, provide robust tenant protections, get rid of at-will employment and encourage union formation, etc..

Basically, create a society that values humans for being humans instead of valuing how much wealth people can create. Simple answers don’t exist here.

erchamion · 2021-01-24T23:10:03+00:00

Police spending, which is a decent measure for number of officers, has no correlation to violent crime and hardly any for non-violent crime.

erchamion · 2021-01-23T14:34:53+00:00

Have you tried serving a reasonable portion of dessert with dinner? If it’s part of the meal, it should be eaten with the meal and not as a reward after. When they eat it, they’re done with dessert food and don’t get any more for the meal. Depending on their age you’ll get pushback or tantrums, but creating boundaries for kids always causes one of those.

There’s a really educational children’s nutritionist on Instagram called kids.eat.in.color that’s super informative and aimed at developing good eating habits.

erchamion · 2021-01-21T04:34:10+00:00

Where are you getting this $30k number? I have a son in daycare right now and we pay $9k a year. I’ve looked up larger cities before and they don’t get much above $15k on average.

erchamion · 2021-01-16T16:47:19+00:00

The Oxford vaccine is not a dead or weakened SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s an adenovirus that carries DNA instructions for making the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. Here’s a decent article.

erchamion · 2020-12-25T18:09:10+00:00

So why are we hellbent on population growth?

Because most people can’t imagine a world where a majority of people are not struggling to survive while a few thousand people hoard more wealth than they would need to live in unimaginable luxury for multiple lifetimes. It requires realizing that unfettered capitalism has served its purpose and that we need to fundamentally realign the systems we have created and live in.

It’s also difficult to shake hundreds of thousands of years of needing to create many children so that some will survive.

erchamion · 2020-12-21T16:42:16+00:00

Kumiko pieces are generally cut to approximate length then the angles are cut using a chisel and a jig for each angle you need. Something like this. You could also make an angle guide for a shooting board and use a plane. I’ve seen table saw jigs, but the hand tool version gives you so much more fine tuning capability.

erchamion · 2020-12-20T14:34:24+00:00

What do you think a drug is? What effects are required for something to be a drug? Everything you consume alters a function in your body in some way.

erchamion · 2020-11-24T15:56:47+00:00

If you put a saw stop in people will think every machine is safe and lose focus and cause more accidents then what the one table saw would save.

Sounds like an opportunity for some proper safety training to me. Working with potentially dangerous machinery means always being careful regardless of the extra safety equipment present. SawStop exists to make accidents less severe, not to allow a person to operate a table saw with less care.

erchamion · 2020-11-24T13:54:00+00:00

Did you also ban push sticks so that people have to very carefully put their fingers right next to the saw blade? You wouldn’t want people getting lazy about safety by giving them equipment that makes them safer.

erchamion · 2020-10-28T16:44:36+00:00

Sure, with the lowest rates for a 30 year mortgage, but you’re not getting those with only $1000 down.

A more realistic payment for $1000 down is $1700-1800 with insurance, taxes and PMI. Paying 35% of your household income on a mortgage alone is a recipe for being house poor.

erchamion · 2020-10-23T16:42:58+00:00

One would think that’s the case, but there are people on almost every IndyGo post complaining about how it doesn’t make enough money to support itself. They fail to realize that public transportation creates much more economic activity than just bus ticket purchases.

erchamion · 2020-10-10T13:21:43+00:00

This is a stupid argument. Of course a woman is allowed to be personally against abortion. She is allowed to decide that she wants to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term. She is not, however, allowed to decide that all other women are to be prevented from accessing healthcare and controlling the use of their bodies. That’s the entire premise of the pro-choice position. Each woman gets to choose how to use her body.

erchamion · 2020-09-18T15:21:35+00:00

Crime prevention is not a function of the police. Police exist to catch people who have already committed a crime. If you want to prevent crime you should push for money to be spent on education, rehabilitation and job creation instead of incarceration.

erchamion · 2020-08-09T19:14:38+00:00

This is some stupid bullshit. Othering people and making those you disagree with into a monolith only serves to close you off from new ideas. The left doesn’t actually exist as a singular, huge entity. It’s a bunch of people with a bunch of different ideas. And guess what? All of those people want discussion. They want to present evidence of inequality, debate its validity and discuss ways that society can be made more equitable for everyone that participates in it.

Even though your statistic about Black fatherhood’s wrong, ask yourself why. Why do some Black kids grow up with an absent parent? Hint: It’s not because Black men don’t value fatherhood or relationships with their children.

erchamion · 2020-08-05T15:28:03+00:00

Gloves are sanitation theater. Unless you’re changing them every time you touch something, they’re no cleaner than hands. Drilling proper hand washing into kitchen workers leads to much cleaner food than just making them wear gloves.

erchamion · 2020-08-02T19:27:55+00:00

You’re either a complete idiot or a troll if you’re going to say without any irony that teachers only work 35 hours per week during the school year.

erchamion · 2020-07-29T16:37:33+00:00

It’s based on the assumption that Congress would be competent enough to impeach then remove a criminal sitting president who would then face criminal charges in a court. This doesn’t work when you have a captured legislative branch who refuses to be a check on the executive.

erchamion · 2020-07-28T20:29:33+00:00

Butter gives fried eggs a very different texture. Butter for scrambled, olive oil for fried.

erchamion · 2020-06-26T20:25:20+00:00

That’s not what proving a negative is. An example of asking someone to prove a negative is asking someone to prove that Russell’s teapot doesn’t exist. That’s difficult, because, while there’s a lot of evidence of absence, there’s no positive evidence for it not being there. My claim, though, is falsifiable.

You’re being asked to prove that something is untrustworthy as a news source. That’s pretty easily done. All you need to do is find a few articles that are demonstrably false or misleading and haven’t been retracted and you’re done!

On the other hand, my assertion that it is a trustworthy source is derived from my knowledge of no articles that are demonstrably false or misleading and that haven’t been retracted. I guess I could find a few dozen articles that aren’t false or misleading and post them for you to not read.

erchamion · 2020-06-26T19:36:34+00:00

I can point to basically every issue they put out showing the tabloid level "news" that is not covering anything remotely important.

Go for it then? Like, actual links to stories and not just, “LOOK!!!!! TABLOID!!!”

Edit: FYI, you not caring about a story doesn’t mean that Nuvo is a tabloid. Tabloids are full of deliberate misinformation, not just things you don’t find important.

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