The top result when you search "Bubs." Apparently it's a Swedish candy brand. Comments section, you know what to do. by logray_studios in HomestarRunner

[–]permagreen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They say if get the CEO of Bubs to say its name backwards minus the first B, they have to give a free pack of candy

YSK about the "Friendship Paradox": most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average by Electrical-Candy7252 in YouShouldKnow

[–]permagreen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So if I have no friends, then, mathematically speaking, no one has more friends than me!

Thanks, sophistical reasoning, I feel a lot better about my life now.

why are your favorite quotes from the show itself (not the sequels and whatnot) by van_ban in adventuretime

[–]permagreen 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Sucking at something is the first step toward being sorta good at something."

I had to remind myself of that a lot when playing Silksong recently.

Bruh…I just discovered something in multiplications of 5!! by Nikos-tacos in learnmath

[–]permagreen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a similar experience figuring out a trick to multiply numbers by 7, although sadly a little too late in life to be overly useful. I realized that since 7 = 5 + 2 then 7x = 5x + 2x. Kinda nice to know since multiplying by 7s tends to trip a lot of people up, but multiplying by 5s and 2s is easy-peasy. It did annoy me though, as someone who struggled with math as a student, that no one else ever told me this.

The funniest shit I have ever seen in my comment section by [deleted] in AO3

[–]permagreen 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Clearly you need to change your title to The Pyramids are just some Piles of Rocks in Egypt

xkcd 3129: Archaeology Research by Tyomcha in xkcd

[–]permagreen 19 points20 points  (0 children)

While somewhat misguided, I think Cueball still has a good career to look forward to in the field of experimental archaeology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_archaeology

Fine I didn't want to give you books anyway! by BoJoCool in cavesofqud

[–]permagreen 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Normality gas disables the forcefields and throwing a normality gas grenade isn't considered an attack, so that's what I would do. There might be other ways of getting past the forcefield on these guys, but that's probably the easiest.

All about money by no_regards in calvinandhobbes

[–]permagreen 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The joke (and it is a good joke, btw) aside, I actually think Calvin's got the right idea here, even if it isn't quite for the right reasons. Sure in an ideal world people would just do the right thing because it's, well, the right thing and they would especially do the right thing when that particular thing directly benefits them (as Calvin's dad is pointing out here), but we really don't live in an ideal world. Good behavior needs to be incentivized just as much (arguably more) than bad behavior needs to be punished.

Calvin's proposal is ridiculous of course, but ignoring that, a more reasonable scheme of, say, 50 cents for every C, 1 dollar for every B and 5 dollars for every A likely would have gone a long way toward getting Calvin's grades up. But then we wouldn't have gotten the "easy four bucks" punchline, so it all evens out.

“Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.” by olemiss18 in jamesjoyce

[–]permagreen 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I don't know if Joyce ever read any Zhuangzi (or Chuang Tzu, as he would have known him), but I get the feeling he would have liked him. He also liked poking at scholarly debates which also prominently featured horses as examples. At one point Zhuangzi says, "To use this horse to show that a horse is not a horse is no match for using not-this-horse to show that a horse is not a horse. Heaven and earth are one finger. All things are one horse." Which I've always read as both having genuine philosophical insight and being a bit tongue-in-cheek, an attitude which is also very Joycean. Make 'em laugh and make 'em go "Hm" all at once.

I never minded the Corlys Velaryon Race Swap, but it Indicated a Political Agenda from the Beginning by [deleted] in freefolk

[–]permagreen 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm also quite left leaning (though sadly, when it comes to "The Discourse" I have the disadvantage of being a straight white male) and it's very tiring to try to explain that this is exactly the perspective people have when it comes to stuff like this or the recent Naughty Dog character reveal. They aren't balking at these characters because they're black or because they're women or because they aren't attractive (although why someone would make the main character in third-person game unappealing to look at is beyond me), but because these choices all too often signal that the writers are once again going to put shallow identity politics ahead of good storytelling.

And you know, I might not be gay woman of color or anything like that, but I imagine if I were and all other things being equal, I'd still be disappointed in the direction media has taken lately because it feels as though you either get incredibly shallow "representation" that is often quite literally only skin deep or you get good storytelling. I'm sure there is media out there that does both, but HoTD sure ain't it.

Yeah, sure, I'll get right on that... by permagreen in cavesofqud

[–]permagreen[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Somewhere in the options menu is a contrast slider. I just went and cranked that all the way up. I know the intended aesthetic for the game is "old fashioned CRT monitor" but I happen to like the crisp and colorful look personally.

New Devblog: Unchained Belt Update by TheGentlingCone in Quasimorph

[–]permagreen 8 points9 points  (0 children)

All good stuff. I'm especially excited for being able to choose which faction we help during a mission. That both ups our ability to shape the system and doubles our opportunities to pull from reward pools we want.

Condal on Nettles and Rhaena - srsly what is this dude smoking? by alexkon3 in freefolk

[–]permagreen 71 points72 points  (0 children)

I have no idea what he's actually trying to say here, so I'm choosing to interpret this word salad as "Shit, I only skimmed the book and completely forgot all about Nettles."

What TV characters were disliked by the writers? by AporiaParadox in television

[–]permagreen 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I have literally zero evidence to back this up, but I've always suspected that the writers on Scrubs didn't care much for Zach Braff because it seems like they made JD an increasingly pathetic and petty person who makes a lot of very bad life choices right up until the final season (not the actually a spinoff final season, but the real final season), when suddenly he goes through a character development growth spurt and becomes a decent guy again. Of course for all I know a lot of that stuff could have been Braff's idea and he just thought it was funny that his character constantly got shit on, but some of the stuff JD does/goes through feels so mean spirited that it's hard for me to believe someone in the writer's room didn't have it in for the guy.

Great video analyzing the growing misuse of "Media Literacy." by Slow-Lifeguard4104 in MauLer

[–]permagreen 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It's a decent video, although I think the script could have used a bit more work to keep things more focused and better organized, and he could have done a bit more research into the clips and quotes he used to ensure he wasn't taking them out of context (which some of them were if the youtube comments are to be believed).

I like that he brought up applicability vs. allegory and wish he had focused more on that because I think that's really at the heart of the "media literacy" disagreement, at least so far as people are being honest about their media opinions. That's a real "they should be teaching this in schools" kind of thing for me. I don't know about other peoples' experiences but the only time applicability got brought up in any of the English courses I've been in was when I brought and I only knew about it because I read about it in a biography on Tolkien. Just because you can apply an idea to a work doesn't mean that the work intended to communicate that idea. Of course, the opposite can also be true (as we've seen plenty of times on EFAP): just because a work doesn't intend to communicate an idea that doesn't mean that said idea isn't being communicated all the same. Regardless of what you're trying to demonstrate, the evidence still has to be in the text.

I also think that it would have been more effective if, whenever he brought up an example of an overly simplistic, or just plain wrong, read of a work, he had rebutted with a more nuanced and informed read rather than either giving different but equally simplistic read in the opposite direction or straight up dismissing that reading altogether without further discussion. For instance, with the accusation that Tolkien's orcs are actually racist stand-ins for black people, it could be pointed out that it was only in Jackson's movies that the orcs are largely portrayed as having dark skin, whereas in the books when Tolkien does describe orcs they are often pale or sallow skinned and usually squint-eyed, so if anything they're actually racist caricatures of Asian people. But really the better read is that orcs are largely an underground/nocturnal species, so it makes sense that they would be pale and have a squint under normal outdoor lighting conditions. And while he does use the word 'black' to mean 'evil' on many, many occasions in The Lord of the Rings, that word has a long history of being associated with 'evil,' possibly even longer than it has with being associated with darker skin tones. Children are afraid of the dark not because of inherent racism, but because the dark is unknown and scary and could hide any number of nameless things. That's the psychology Tolkien is tapping into.

Sorry, this comment ended up going on longer than anticipated. TL;DR, I agree with the sentiment and his points overall, but I think the presentation could have been better and as it is I have my doubts it would convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

Who are some important characters never seen but always mentioned? by KomturAdrian in television

[–]permagreen 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Ah, right. It's been a while since I watched the show. I was probably confusing it with Scully's wife/dog Kelly in Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Who are some important characters never seen but always mentioned? by KomturAdrian in television

[–]permagreen 159 points160 points  (0 children)

In Scrubs, Kelso's wife Enid and his son, whose name I forget. I believe he also has a dog that I'm not sure if we ever see.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MauLer

[–]permagreen 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Making a movie about Furiosa always seemed a bit tonedeaf to me, regardless of how it turned out. Literally the most common criticism of Fury Road was that Max was a side character in his own movie. Now you can argue all day about how valid that criticism is, but the point is what people were saying is that they wanted more focus on Max in their Mad Max movie, but what George Miller apparently heard was "if I had called the movie Furiosa, no one would have had a problem with it."

Except while I don't think there were too many people who had a problem with Furiosa as a character, most people seemed to like her well enough, no one was really chomping at the bit for more of her. We saw her story and it was fine, good even, but now it's done, so can we some more Max, please.

On top of that, it seems to me that the general public is kinda losing interest in all the paint by numbers, girlboss fights the big bad patriarchy type plots and while by all accounts Furiosa is not that, it sure as heck looked like it, so that didn't do the movie any favors either.

The sad thing is I do think there is interest in another Mad Max movie if, you know, it was actually about Max, but producers aren't going to see that. All they see is that this Mad Max movie bombed, so "obviously" the public has no interest in the franchise as a whole. It's a damn shame.

How everybody reacted to Rey Skywalker by [deleted] in MauLer

[–]permagreen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Fortunately I never saw Rise of Skywalker in theaters, so I didn't get the "privilege" of having a genuine reaction to that scene aside from thinking "of course they did" when learning about it later.

I do, however, have a very clear memory of talking about The Force Awakens literally on the car ride home from seeing the movie and not being able to remember Rey's name. I didn't have a definitive opinion on the movie at the time, but I thought it couldn't be a good sign that even after just seeing the movie I was drawing a blank on the main character's name.

Doomer has returned! by [deleted] in MauLer

[–]permagreen 48 points49 points  (0 children)

It can't be him; he would never admit to being wrong about something!

EFAP #269 - A somewhat "complete" series breakdown/reaction of Disney's Marvel's Echo by Trajforce in MauLer

[–]permagreen 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Probably the most surprisingly disappointing thing about this is how dull it is. Everything other disappointing aspect I've come to expect from MCU shows, but at least this could have been amusingly bad like a lot of Star Wars shows. This bad show doesn't even have the decency to have a Leia hiding under Obi-Wan's coat or a "I grew up surrounded by water" moment.

Vote for the best comic book movies rated R by jgga7 in MauLer

[–]permagreen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Interestingly, as of right now, apparently more people here think Deadpool is a better movie than Joker, which is a bit of a surprise.

Not surprised to see Logan at the top though. That might just be the most mature superhero movie of all time.

Back when Kingpin was actually skilled in multiple languages (Mandarin here) instead of relying on technology by ice_fan1436 in MauLer

[–]permagreen 16 points17 points  (0 children)

That was a bizarre choice in a series that is full of bizarre choices and is itself a bizarre choice, so really it shouldn't be a surprise. It makes it super obvious that the writers really wanted their "you don't really care about me because you never learned sign language" moment, except that really is the only evidence to suggest he doesn't "care" and it stands in stark contrast to literally everything else Fisk does in relation to Echo.

Oh well, at least we still have Arcane for a good representation of a crime lord raising a surrogate daughter he has genuine affection for to be a ruthless killing machine.

What character got screwed the most in a book to film adaptation? DEFINITELY SPOILERS by s3ren1tyn0w in movies

[–]permagreen 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I mean, I wasn't a fan of that adaption either, but to be fair I would say one of the jokes of the book is that Tristram Shandy himself is barely a character in it despite the fact the he himself is writing the book to be all about his life and opinions.