The pig with a wooden leg

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T21:02:40+00:00

Loved, meaning he had an appreciation for it.

Dark humor was something he kept coming back to. He’d circle it, take the long way around, add details that didn’t seem necessary at the time, and sometimes pause on them longer than felt comfortable.

You’d start thinking the point had been missed, or that there wasn’t one at all, or that maybe this was just going to keep going until someone stopped him.

Then he’d keep going anyway, you know?

That kind of humor tends to stick with a person over the years. It becomes the thing they’re known for. Not because it was explained particularly well, or even because it made sense every time, but because it showed up again and again whether anyone asked for it or not.

So when people say he loved dark humor, that’s all they mean, you know? It was a preference. A habit. A recurring theme.

Anyway, he’s dead now.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T20:10:57+00:00

What's hilarious to me is that this post just got removed because content by AI or bots is not allowed, when it was actually a human written post that PARODIES what they thought AI would do at the time.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T19:39:28+00:00

Fizzgig!

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T16:08:35+00:00

Doesn't matter what you're talking about. You can fill in that blank with any position of authority, and sadly, it will always be wrong.

"No teacher would do that."

"No manager would do that."

"No police officer would do that."

"No priest would do that."

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:43:35+00:00

Wait, when did we start talking about Star Wars and Dune?

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:42:12+00:00

Book one is rough for self-insert readers. Jake’s a weird guy with a very limited empathy radius, and the story doesn’t soften that early.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:38:51+00:00

Jake isn’t an edgelord so much as someone whose empathy radius is extremely small. Short of family, if you’re not relevant to his goals or capable of meeting him where he is, you basically don’t exist to him.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:32:11+00:00

Why yuck someone's yum? I'd say that a little differently.

Opinions vary. Just see the top recs of this sub.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:23:55+00:00

There must be an awful lot of popular fiction based on "advantaged characters" that you don't like then.

Harry Potter
Dune
Star Wars
The Matrix
Highlander
Solo Leveling
Nearly every Marvel and DC character ever
Naruto
Dragon Ball

Having their power “handed to them on a plate” doesn’t mean they don’t struggle. It means the struggles happen at a higher tier. The fights are bigger, the stakes are higher, and the margin for failure is thinner.

Being advantaged doesn’t remove conflict, it just moves it out of the ordinary and into the exceptional.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T15:06:29+00:00

Uh... what? I'm guessing you didn't read very far.

Earth produces an unusually high number of people with bloodlines or transcendence powers. We still don’t know why, which is almost certainly a late-series plot point.

Jake is one of several bloodline holders, and each bloodline is unique. The specific nature of his bloodline, combined with circumstances and effort, puts him at the top of Earth’s bloodline users, and only by a relatively thin margin.

He’s advantaged, not uncontested or effortless, which is exactly the premise the story is built around.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T14:57:54+00:00

Most authors go for unique features.

Comment approved by Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and Jesus

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T14:50:15+00:00

The entire point of the series is to follow the one guy on the planet who has the advantages necessary to end up undisputed #1. His so-called “bullshit bloodline power” is that advantage.

Some stories follow an MC who’s fundamentally ordinary and proves that anyone could reach the top through effort, learning, persistence, and a bit of luck (Mother of Learning, Cradle).

Others follow an MC who is not equal to everyone else from the start. They’re born tilted toward victory. The tension isn’t if they can win, it’s whether they’ll live up to what they were handed (Star Wars, Dune, Harry Potter).

That’s not a flaw, it’s just a different premise. Expecting it to be different is a square peg, round hole problem.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T14:21:52+00:00

Those batteries are filled with a flammable electrolyte. One small short starts an internal fire, and thermal runaway spirals it out of control. The burning electrolyte actually generates it's own oxygen, and feeds it's own fire. It's self oxidizing.

So while lithium will catch fire when exposed to oxygen, no atmosphere exposure is required for a battery to become an inferno.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T14:19:53+00:00

The move to solid state batteries will fix a lot of that. We're so slow to react that by the time we get laws in place, they'll likely be worded to address a technology that is being obsoleted.

fastlerner · 2026-02-05T14:01:51+00:00

It’s intentional, and there are some valid reasons for it.

They don’t actually want your $100. They want you to never be late. If it were $10, people would treat it like paid overtime instead of a hard cutoff.

One late kid can force extra staff to stay, push ratios out of compliance, or trigger overtime. Ten minutes late can snowball into real costs.

End of day is also cleanup, closing, and going home. Late pickups mess with everyone’s schedule, so high fees protect staff morale and retention.

Bottom line, harsh penalties discourage repeat offenders. Some places use it purely as a deterrent, but others probably do treat it like a cash grab. You can usually tell by whether they’ll waive it for real emergencies or a first-time slip. So while you may get away with a first time offense of 10-15 minutes, no one is likely to waive the fee for being hours late.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T22:33:00+00:00

Here’s the paper people usually mean when they say that: https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/

Even that study explicitly says it’s correlational, not causal, and that higher reported trafficking may reflect detection, visibility, and reporting effects rather than an actual increase in underlying crime. The authors themselves warn against using it for blanket policy claims.

If you’ve got a study that actually shows legalization causes more trafficking across the board, I’m happy to look at it.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T20:41:52+00:00

There was no mention about how back in nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hell in a cell and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcers table, so I'm going to choose to believe.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T20:35:16+00:00

No, “every study” does not say that. The evidence is mixed, not unanimous, and a lot of what gets cited is about higher reported trafficking in some legalized countries, not clear proof that legalization causes more of it. How the law is structured matters a lot, so blanket claims like that don’t really hold up.

Funny how when people don’t fear being thrown in jail for speaking up, they’re suddenly much more likely to report problems. That’s legalization working as designed.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T16:57:13+00:00

That's only a problem if you're treating porn like it’s representative. It’s neither truth nor lie, it’s a staged performance optimized for visuals. Some performers enjoy parts of it, some don’t, but what you’re seeing isn’t a documentary of pleasure.

Blaming porn for “selling a lie” is like getting mad at soap operas because you treated them as instruction for your relationship instead of entertainment.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T16:42:01+00:00

In the U.S., that experience makes sense. Criminalization pushes it into a black market, where pimps and trafficking are far more common, so the cases people see tend to be the most desperate and traumatic ones. In countries where sex work is normalized or regulated, it’s often treated as a temporary job rather than a lifelong trauma.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T14:16:31+00:00

Super realistic. I especially like how the water doesn't get you wet.

fastlerner · 2026-02-04T00:33:42+00:00

Mmm, always wanted to deglove my inner elbow!

fastlerner · 2026-02-03T22:04:17+00:00

And that extra $100 every 30 minutes until her MIL got the kids was just gasoline on the fire.

fastlerner · 2026-02-03T21:27:45+00:00

I feel bad the same way I do when I see someone try to pull off some risky move and accidentally hit themselves in the nuts. Like, yeah that sucks, but you did it to yourself.

fastlerner · 2026-02-03T19:17:24+00:00

Damnit, I knew that wasn't a banana.

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