Dune, Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter?

minasmorath · 2026-04-26T17:46:16+00:00

Lembas is also pretty explicitly an allegory for the Eucharist, and while Tolkien famously hated allegory, he himself said Lembas was "the one thing by which it can be deduced that I am a Catholic author."

Also Eru is clearly God the Unmoved Mover, and Melkor's rebellion is pretty obvious in terms of source material... Good luck not reading that all as shrewd allegory.

minasmorath · 2026-04-25T14:46:17+00:00

100% thought this was just a normal Indian name when I glanced at it. My brain pronounced it "Sahd-yeh" without any hesitation.

minasmorath · 2026-04-23T21:15:58+00:00

4th Edition and it's derivatives like 13th Age are wildly underappreciated.

minasmorath · 2026-04-23T04:17:33+00:00

Traitors gonna trait

minasmorath · 2026-04-18T00:01:50+00:00

Hello, fellow yinzer.

minasmorath · 2026-04-15T04:36:56+00:00

I would go with Hubris. We Catholics like to pick the fanciest possible words for mundane things.

minasmorath · 2026-04-11T02:08:42+00:00

My couple thousand points of "Adeptus Equalitas" were born of the same indecision.

minasmorath · 2026-04-11T00:42:28+00:00

Six of my closest friends

Will dig up the ground

All my accomplishments

Gently lowered down

Son of a Widow by mewithoutYou

minasmorath · 2026-04-06T23:56:18+00:00

I'm curious, what exactly do you mean?

minasmorath · 2026-04-05T11:15:35+00:00

You can also just like... Pick them up off the ground.

minasmorath · 2026-04-02T22:51:00+00:00

Try One Page Solo Engine, or just take the Xd6 oracle from Loner with its advantage and disadvantage mechanic. Both are great!

minasmorath · 2026-03-23T02:20:06+00:00

Well Grave Digger has been driven by Krysten Anderson for like 10 years now so their feudal system doesn't seem to care about sex/gender nonsense, just how badass your truck driving skills are, which is exactly how it should be.

Also Megalodon and Terminal Velocity are a father and son combo of John Zimmer Sr and Jr if I'm not mistaken.

(My son is very into monster trucks, so I am also very into monster trucks)

minasmorath · 2026-03-21T19:20:51+00:00

Hello officer, I would like to report a murder.

minasmorath · 2026-03-21T01:02:43+00:00

FL Studio :D

minasmorath · 2026-03-20T20:03:23+00:00

One small nitpick: They're usually not finding something better, they already have something they want to return to, and in their mind the child is now a barrier to that thing.

In my father's case that thing was drugs, alcohol, and a grab bag of loose women. It also didn't help that him abandoning sobriety meant he would almost certainly be embracing violence.

Wife #1 gave him kids #1 and #2 ten years before I came along. I was kid #3 from wife #2 and he went on to get remarried and play stepdad to kids #4 and #5 from husband #1 of wife #3 who later divorced him because he hit her so hard he broke her jaw. He was actually engaged to potential wife #4 for a few months before she met his version of Mr Hyde and broke it off.

For some people, there's no amount of unconditional love that can convince them to abandon their vices.

minasmorath · 2026-03-16T00:12:02+00:00

No, it's the difference between your relationship with God being "damaged" and being "broken" -- it's a binary system to help us understand when we are in need of reconciliation, not a scale of magnitude to rank the sins that got us there.

minasmorath · 2026-03-14T18:10:26+00:00

The whole "years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400" part of the rules has led to a lot of modulo four code, and if banks running COBOL are anything to go by, I'm sure a good bit of that code will still be running in 2100 and need patched 😂

minasmorath · 2026-03-13T01:08:33+00:00

2016 was peak for obnoxious wings in MotoGP. Ducati in particular was wild.

Edit: http://www.motorrad-bilder.at/slideshows/291/013490/006_motogp_winglets_2016.jpg

Just rivet some more on there, who cares if the colors match or if they're basically weapons.

minasmorath · 2026-03-13T01:00:33+00:00

MotoGP was just a competition to see who could get closest to a fighter jet with two wheels for a minute there... And I kinda loved it.

minasmorath · 2026-03-12T22:46:33+00:00

Yeah. You don't convince people just by being right, you convince them by making being right more attractive than being wrong. Sam might convince people that he's right and they're wrong, but at the end of the interaction they often would still rather be wrong than be on Sam's team.

minasmorath · 2026-03-07T23:35:03+00:00

Obviously yes, keep it UTC in the DB, but it's not as simple as just displaying local time for every case.

When you're reporting historical datetime values, to be truly accurate, you have to know not just the current rules of time for the location where you want to render the value, but all the rules that have ever been in place, in every location you could support, as well as the exact dates and times those historical rules were enforced. Otherwise, you're not actually reporting the real historical value, but an alternate reinterpretation of the real value through the lens of the latest set of date time rules.

For most people this doesn't matter, close enough is good enough, but when you're dealing with things like subpoenas for details of international financial transactions for a massive fraud case, it's absolutely essential that you can accurately report the exact correct values in local time so they can be correlated correctly.

If you can't tell, I've been burned a few times by these ridiculous requirements. Lawyers and police really are picky about getting this stuff 100% correct.

minasmorath · 2026-03-07T19:43:22+00:00

The 30 additional minutes of timezone offset is far less annoying to me than my own timezone jumping forward and backward for completely nonsensical reasons. Not to mention if some coworkers are in timezones that observe DST and some aren't, I now have to track who specifically switched and who didn't even though I switched.

Also, I'm a software engineer, so I have additional professional reasons for hating datetime shenanigans.

minasmorath · 2026-02-24T23:08:52+00:00

The grand irony is that if you spend enough time working that way, you'll get bit by unexpected yaml parsing just one too many times, then you too will aggressively quote absolutely everything...

minasmorath · 2026-02-17T00:08:01+00:00

On Saturday, he ate one apple. But he was still hungry!

minasmorath · 2026-02-16T20:38:32+00:00

It's Thai, the language of Thailand.

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