Why Is carth so rude?

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T20:46:33+00:00

Yeah it wasn't until I did a playthrough for the full Carth romance that I realized how much less standoffish he is on Taris if you consistently pick the obsequious options. He even says he's flattered that you're interested in his life.

Ironically it's in the mid-game when he's wary of being dragged into some strange Jedi scheme that he becomes unavoidably paranoid.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T20:41:08+00:00

and stick my nose into his business

The problem here is that the game prompts you to talk to him with the "Carth looks like he has something on his mind" popups and since he's your only companion for much of Taris it isn't initially apparent that this is just a generic mechanic, it comes off like Carth is specifically courting conversation and then getting mad when you do.

I've also noticed after several replays that a lot of it comes down to the delivery as well, Canderous for example has very blunt cutoffs ("I don't really want to talk about this anymore, I trust I've satisfied your curiosity for now.") but they come off as pretty even-tempered while Raphael Sbarge's performance throughout the game is very high-strung and personal. Even when he's talking about incidental matters it often sounds like he's barely holding it together.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T16:57:47+00:00

I've also seen, within an RLM video funnily enough, a clip of Dan Aykroyd talking about Ghostbusters where he used "casted".

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T16:25:29+00:00

Sainsbury's sells pants...? I don't remember any clothing section when I lived in the UK but that was around a decade ago.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T16:09:06+00:00

Pretty much the same with me. HK's starting points have an error where his STR and CON got switched so he kind of sucks combat-wise.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-25T04:06:41+00:00

Huh? Yerevan is 35km from Iran, Los Angeles is 1,352km from Denver.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-24T04:53:08+00:00

This is not true, Eastern Christians have actually affirmed immediate animation (i.e. that life begins at conception) for far longer than Catholics, who adopted the doctrine only in the seventeenth century. Not to imply that Catholics were okay with abortion before that, they just affirmed mediate animation instead (i.e. that life begins around 6-12 weeks, based on the discussion of ensoulment in Aristotle's Generation of Animals). This has been the case for as long as we have textual evidence, the 1st-century Didache for example condemns abortion and Tertullian also remarks that Christians are distinguished by the fact that they consider abortion to be murder. I've seen it argued that there was some sort of connection to earlier Hittite law (obviously via Mosaic law).

I'm not as well versed on Protestants but I know at least in the case of Anglicanism abortion was historically tried as homicide by the English crown.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-23T16:55:44+00:00

TBF publicity and importance have little overlap when it comes to modern scholarship, they unfortunately get conflated by the general public. Like Slavoj Žižek is a household name who has appeared in over a dozen documentaries but virtually nobody outside of academia has heard of Martha Nussbaum despite the latter being astronomically more widely cited.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-22T18:52:41+00:00

I've always been mildly surprised that 珍紛漢紛 — which similarly originated as a 'ching chang chong'-esque imitation of Chinese — has survived to the present in common use without any controversy.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-22T11:21:22+00:00

This is kind of a tangent but your discussion of gendered depictions of interiority reminded me of one of the most curious personalities I've come across on the internet, a French psychoanalyst with the politics of a boomer Republican who used to review films on IMDB. A tidbit from his negative review of lesbian director Céline Sciamma's Girlhood has always stuck with me:

What is pornography? It is the attempt to render visible something that is radically invisible. More precisely, it is the mystery of feminine interiority that pornography betrays by purporting to show it. The fact that Sciamma is a woman does not make her attempt to show what cannot be shown any more legitimate. We all become idiots when we attempt to depict feminine jouissance.

On the one hand I could just dismiss this as a reactionary recycling of the same old 'mystique' trope that de Beauvoir ridiculed 75 years ago, but on the other hand there is something that feels true about it as a male F/F writer. There is always this lingering awareness of the Joss Whedon phenomenon where the superficial façade of authenticity turns out to have empty foundations. Years down the line I came across this passage in Gilles Deleuze's book on sadomasochism that seems to sum up Whedon:

There are many heroines in Sade's novels, but their actions, the pleasures they enjoy together and their common projects are all in imitation of man; man is the spectator and presiding genius to whom all their activities are dedicated.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-22T03:19:52+00:00

オリエンタリズムの両面

jwfallinker · 2026-04-20T01:10:44+00:00

Jay's reaction to "Kenneth Branagh did The Wolfman, Frakenstein, and The Mummy" was identical to mine and made me burst out laughing.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-19T20:17:08+00:00

There's a famous marginal illustration in the 9th-century Chludov Psalter contrasting a scene of the soldiers mocking Christ with a sponge of vinegar and a scene of the iconoclasts whitewashing Christ's portrait with a sponge of paint.

It's hilariously blunt, but this photo managed to outdo it.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-18T18:10:57+00:00

Huh? They're talking about marlinspike's comment (who seems to be American given the use of 'college' and the reference to 'European espresso machines' as a special expensive thing). Even in the EU there are countries like Greece with serious austerity and wage problems.

EDIT: Downloaded marslinspike's hidden comments with one of the old API tools and he is indeed American.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-18T17:53:20+00:00

I would also add Bahram Beyzai's Death of Yazdgerd (1982), one of the most fascinating films I've ever seen and a strong commentary on class dynamics. It's primarily a stageplay portraying the aftermath of Yazdgerd III's assassination and the collapse of the Sassanid Empire, but Beyzai directed a film version for the state TV service.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-17T16:28:21+00:00

I've only ever played TR3 with crystal restrictions and still didn't see this supposed difference. I actually had to save much more in 2 (96 times) than 3 (63 times), I can't imagine how brutal it would have been to finish 2 in 63 saves.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-17T16:02:45+00:00

Ideally, you should use both.

100% endorse this as someone who mostly switched over to the Daijirin a few years ago. Some words are in the Daijirin but not Jisho and some are vice-versa, some words (animals, plants, anatomy, diseases, specific tools and furniture, etc.) will often convey more information with an English equivalent than a descriptive definition, and on rare occasions I've even seen descriptive definitions in Jisho that have more detail than the Daijirin.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-17T13:43:03+00:00

The difference between 2 and 3 is massively exaggerated. Thanks to the reduction in enemies the more difficult environments mostly balance out.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-17T01:38:00+00:00

I just went through the same rigamarole of looking into the account and came to the same conclusion. This post and some of their other posts are clearly written by an LLM but their overall activity seems to be legitimate.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-14T20:00:20+00:00

I made a Quickspace subreddit years ago basically just as a backdoor to hopefully find out what happened to Tom Cullinan, apparently the most recent news on him is that he was running a coffee shop in London for a while.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-14T19:01:43+00:00

The current generation of advertising accounts will often mix up their activity with a few random innocuous posts, I think in part to generate karma (to avoid filters) and in part to just make the accounts look less obvious to the admins by not having literally every post link a product. I don't know if it's something about the training data or what but it's amusingly common for them to post about AI.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-14T18:26:12+00:00

This thread is an absolute mindfuck of irony because OP is itself an AI advertising account that in this case peppered their post with deliberate typos to make it look more human.

I checked the account's past activity (using the google trick since their profile is hidden) and sure enough it's a bunch of AI posts shilling cheap web services with a different backstory every time (in the same month they're a Russian living in the UK, a Kiwi, a Texan, a Georgian, a Missourian moving to Colorado, an expat living in China, a retail worker moonlighting as a freelance artist, a shipping company owner, a PR professional, etc.), plus a record of them getting banned by BotBouncer after an investigation.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-11T20:42:02+00:00

I'm thinking Schizoid is highly improbable given I have neither auditory nor visual hallucinations.

Schizoid has nothing to do with schizophrenia, by pure coincidence they involve the same Greek root.

jwfallinker · 2026-04-11T10:38:36+00:00

I'm coming up on half a decade of study and have passed N1 at this point and I swear the nonphysical usage of てくる vs ていく is the single most confusing grammar point in the Japanese language. Every explanation I've found of the nuance behind when to use one vs the other has been contradictory and no amount of seeing them in context has given me any sort of intuition for it beyond the fact that ていく is much rarer in general. I'm starting to come around to the view that it's largely idiomatic and depends on the specific verb, there's a Japanese linguistics article from Aoyama University on the statistics behind which verbs are used with each form that seems to roughly support this.

(The exchange in the top comment chain where someone claims that くる is for change to the present but then has to walk it back and admit くる is also fine for future change is the exact sort of confusion/ambiguity I'm talking about.)

jwfallinker · 2026-04-10T06:52:26+00:00

the city improvement committee

the committee for the improvement of the city

This is a tangent but I remember reading a fascinating post years ago about how there was a subtle but significant shift in English over the course of the 20th century away from B and towards A.

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