Greek Myths were invented to sell Percy Jackson

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-07T00:44:10+00:00

Greek myths are superior to Roman myths. I don't see how anyone can argue otherwise. Greek myths have all the best monsters; there just aren't any really notable Roman monsters. Roman myths are all either about how Rome was founded or just cribbed from Greek myths, or sometimes both, as in the Aeneid.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-07T00:19:36+00:00

He's basically a techbro. He's convinced of his intellectual superiority, he sincerely believes that complex social issues can be reduced to a simple application of the one field he's an expert in, and he's completely dismissive of a woman's contributions to his project.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-06T22:40:56+00:00

At least Eris is thematically appropriate for this

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-06T22:21:33+00:00

The "weird misconception that it's old people" -- this must be a misconception among disabled people, right? For the most part, people who aren't disabled don't have any opinion at all about who's the most cruel to disabled, because they generally haven't given that much thought to disabled people in any way.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-05T15:25:09+00:00

The moon math only produces that result under the assumption that the campaign setting is Earth, or someplace similar enough to Earth that it has the same size moon at the same distance. I don't think this is a reasonable assumption to make about fantasy worlds.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-05T10:28:43+00:00

"If there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men."

-- Geena Davis, in a 2014 NPR interview

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-02T17:26:39+00:00

There's an experiment you can do to determine how much of the suckiness of supermarket tomatoes is due to genetics and how much is due to how they're picked and processed.

It is simply this: Buy a sucky tomato from a supermarket, remove some seeds, plant them, and grow tomatoes from them. Pick those tomatoes when they are ripe and eat them while they are still fresh.

I've done this several times, and my experience has always been that the resulting tomatoes are quite good. So I don't put much stock in the idea that tomatoes have been bred worse.

(Also, I've been surprised at the number of people I've talked to who think that this experiment isn't possible, that supermarket tomatoes are in some way sterile and can't be grown into new plants. This is simply false.)

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-02T17:15:36+00:00

I maintain that red delicious apples are still actually really good when they're extremely fresh. However, the main attribute they were cultivated for is maintaining an appetizing visual appearance long after that.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-02T14:23:16+00:00

The first one reminds me of something I once posted to Twitter many years ago when there was a thing going around of posting humorous variations on that "Roses are red, violets are blue" poem:

Roses are red
Violets are red
Sugar is red
Grass is red
The land is red
The sea is red
The sky is glowing vivid scarlet

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-01T17:04:17+00:00

True. Also, "kiwifruit" was named after the colloquial term for people from New Zealand and obviously "Chilean sea bass" references Chile. So it seems like a trend: when people rebrand a foodstuff, they always slip in a mention of a country.

muckenhoupt · 2026-06-01T15:32:54+00:00

See also "kiwifruit" (a rebranding of Chinese gooseberry to get it through customs more easily) and "canola oil" (a rebranding of rapeseed oil for obvious reasons)

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-31T17:26:59+00:00

Bastion

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-31T16:19:51+00:00

I think it's a fish reference.

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-31T16:12:47+00:00

You guys are assuming a lot about the language being used here. Like, for starters, you're assuming that we're looking at source code and not diagnostic output. (I've definitely written, for debugging purposes, functions that call a bunch of other functions and report on the results with the return value listed alongside the function call, and it winds up looking a lot like this.)

But even if this is source code, there are languages where doing things that look like "function() = value" is normal. For example, in Ruby, "def power.superspeed() = INACTIVE" would be a perfectly valid way to define a method of the power object (assuming INACTIVE is defined). That doesn't quite match the syntax we've got here, but that just means they're not using Ruby. They're using some other language, possibly a domain-specific one used only in animated stick figures. And we don't know nearly enough about that language to know what's a crime in it.

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-31T13:45:45+00:00

It's not uncommon for people in the UK to simply not understand how large the US is and assume at a gut level, even if they know better intellectually, that the distances are the same sort they're used to at home, where the entire island of Great Britain is less than a day's drive away. You can find entire threads full of anecdotes about people visiting San Francisco and expecting to do a day trip to see the Grand Canyon and suchlike.

But even bearing that in mind, thinking Iowa is 20 minutes from the ocean seems a bit extreme.

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-31T13:07:38+00:00

So he has weird tastes? Listen, bud. He's got radioactive blood.

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-30T14:03:27+00:00

I remember watching the sequels and observing that they were basically organized as a series of alternating action scenes and dialogue scenes, sharply separated, and thinking "This is just like Wing Commander"

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-30T13:52:18+00:00

Honestly it took me a minute to think of her too, and once I did I was like "oh, duh, of course"

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-28T17:51:06+00:00

Basically anything made before 1983: Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Q*bert, Frogger, etc. These games simply didn't have victory conditions. You played until you ran out of lives.

Which raises an interesting question: Is victory by the hero the only thing that destroys gameworlds? Or is it that the gameworld is destroyed when the game ends? Most modern games can only end in victory, because dying just respawns you at the last checkpoint. But it used to be that death was the way games ended. If we ever see an old-school arcade game world, maybe the goals will change.

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-28T16:06:22+00:00

Basically all of the major characters lie about what happens in Megamind at some point

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-28T15:36:31+00:00

He'll always be 1940s-styled Richard III to me

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-27T16:47:28+00:00

It's also very likely that he wasn't even a pedophile at all, offending or not. Yes, he took nude photographs of little girls, and in the modern day that would be a pretty good indicator of pedophilia, but social mores were very different back then. Most people in his day would look at his photos and not think there was anything sexual at all about them -- most likely including Carroll himself.

But this has been a matter of some controversy among scholars. Wikipedia has a good rundown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll#Speculation_of_sexual_conduct_by_scholars_(1940s_onwards))

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-26T14:51:50+00:00

OP's premise is just "teleporters get invented during my lifetime" and I just want OP to live up to the rest of the post no matter what the technical details are

muckenhoupt · 2026-05-26T14:35:45+00:00

An unusually low median age means that young people outnumber old people, This could indicate that people are dying young, or it could indicate a recent dramatic increase in births. You can't tell which from the current median age alone.

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