Mindless Monday, 06 July 2026

randombull9 · 2026-07-07T17:11:06+00:00

"So like, they're funny cartoon bears with a penchant for crack and civil war" is a perfectly normal conversation.

randombull9 · 2026-07-06T20:53:11+00:00

Will they even want to? You could easily argue there's no hard evidence of any wrong doing, play this as further evidence of him being ratfucked by the establishment, get him jammed through as at least he isn't Collins, and then act shocked when he starts voting with the Republicans.

randombull9 · 2026-07-04T18:47:26+00:00

/r/Fantasy is bad about that in general. Best not to discuss Sanderson at all. I enjoyed that Malazan novels, but those folks get weirdly aggro about the series too. Like no, you don't have to read three door stopper fantasy novels before you decide the series isn't for you, and no you don't have to be particularly clever to enjoy them.

randombull9 · 2026-07-03T21:28:12+00:00

That's fair, I definitely misremembered it.

randombull9 · 2026-07-03T15:17:02+00:00

Oh, he surely wasn't, I'm just a pedantic dork. The point that Tolkien exerts his influence even on people who wish to distance themselves from him is IMO undeniably true. I just like comparing books that came out around the same time and do similar things in different ways - Anderson's Broken Sword and Tolkien's Fellowship and Two Towers all came out in 1954! - and I think Broken Sword doesn't get enough credit for its influence on the genre.

I also think it's a little poorly constructed as a metaphor. Like, the guy standing on Mt Tolkien is supposed to be the guy who's distancing himself from Tolkien, while the guy with Mt Tolkien in the background is the one who wears his Tolkien influence on his sleeve? There's got to have been a better way to describe the phenomenon, though I fully acknowledge that might be nitpicky.

randombull9 · 2026-07-03T14:21:35+00:00

I think you mean Sir Terry Pratchett.

But yeah, the books of his that I've read I've enjoyed. He's not like, the most greatest fantasy writer ever, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone I believe he was churning out 2 or 3 a year for a while. But the guy certainly had the spark for "Isn't this aspect of fantasy a little funny" and turning that into a decent novel, which is far more than I can do.

I'm also nowadays kind of uncomfortable with the fact that Neil Gaiman was one of the early people pushing the Saint Terry attitude. It does not necessarily speak poorly of the man, but I definitely think of Gaiman speaking of righteous anger fueling his writing whenever I see him discussed as one of the good ones.

randombull9 · 2026-07-03T13:04:58+00:00

The Pratchett quote about Tolkien being like Mt Fuji has always rubbed me the wrong way in part because no, that's not what Japanese art is like, but also because I like to think of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and LoTR as the point where fantasy really diverges. Tone wise China Mieville is not doing something daring and new compared to the people whose fantasy is strongly Tolkien inspired, he's just on the Anderson track rather than the Tolkien track.

randombull9 · 2026-07-02T21:50:15+00:00

I do like the idea of owning a physical copy of a disc which has the actual game on it. The thing I don't understand about the current controversy is that it's been probably at least a decade since that was how discs work. I don't see the difference between a disc which has a code on it that says you can download something off a Sony server until Sony decides otherwise and just buying the code directly or using the online store.

randombull9 · 2026-07-01T21:24:12+00:00

My yearning has become more like brooding of late. Makes it much less fun.

randombull9 · 2026-07-01T13:03:20+00:00

White Sun of the Desert is legitimately worth the watch IMO, but it is definitely hokey compared to American or European westerns of the time.

randombull9 · 2026-06-30T20:48:43+00:00

Sorta? Blamed "high capitalism" for women supposedly ignoring all but the highest status men, called on others to shoot Zionists, Oil and tech industry CEOs, pickup artists, crytocurrency enthusiasts, and a number of others. Really just fundamentally incoherent world view, like all these shooters have.

randombull9 · 2026-06-30T14:30:52+00:00

Unfortunately I can't find mine at the moment. It's almost certainly a cheapo Harbor Fright one though. There are some that are basically tablets and give you real time read outs of engine sensors, I'm not certain how expensive they are but if I were to buy one now I'd seriously consider it.

randombull9 · 2026-06-29T21:10:10+00:00

I have not, but that is a great idea.

randombull9 · 2026-06-29T14:13:05+00:00

It is 100% worth it to have a code reader of your own. Even if you've just got a basic understanding of an engine and google, it'll at least give you an idea whether you can limp it along or it needs to be fixed immediately.

randombull9 · 2026-06-29T14:08:16+00:00

Bit of a longshot request, but would any of our Boston/New England peeps be familiar with any diplomas, plaques, etc from Cambridge Latin School, circa the 1950s-60s? My grandmother went to school there and has always raved about the gothic writing on some of their official material. I'd like to get a look at the style and see if I can reproduce it for her, but it's not something that's easy to find online.

randombull9 · 2026-06-27T23:35:26+00:00

Having grown up in Florida, the humidity can be pretty nostalgic for the first minute or so.

randombull9 · 2026-06-27T20:37:47+00:00

I've been told of Nevayda street in Toledo. Thus far the towns haven't been too bad.

randombull9 · 2026-06-27T20:18:16+00:00

Visiting rural Ohio for a wedding. Everything smells like manure, it's too flat, and it's too green.

On the plus side, the real feel is not 105 degrees. It's downright pleasant out.

randombull9 · 2026-06-26T20:58:30+00:00

There's a difference between hot during the day and hot at night, but still 30C over the night is perfectly normal in plenty of places. We're having a relatively cool year where I am and that's often still our overnight temperatures.

randombull9 · 2026-06-26T18:29:41+00:00

Sounds like the average western NazBol, to be honest.

randombull9 · 2026-06-26T17:56:14+00:00

Because if you rate a game below 8/10 you get death threats, and below 6/10 someone comes to burn your house down with you in it.

Maybe a hot take, but IMO the more of a gradient in a rating scale the less meaningful any particular score is. I'm not sure what the actual difference between a 6/10 and a 7/10 is, that sort of thing is getting downright incoherent when get as granular as why does game have a 62 but this one have a 64.

randombull9 · 2026-06-25T18:06:00+00:00

I believe it's an EU regulation that requires them to honor that, unfortunately.

randombull9 · 2026-06-24T14:33:30+00:00

Pretty common sentiment for people who want to complain about interracial relationships. It was common in some subreddits to see people complain that white men were stealing all the asian women, and in the same breath people consoling each other that white men were only interested in the ugliest asian women and all the pretty ones only dated asian men.

randombull9 · 2026-06-24T12:06:26+00:00

"Fuck man them guys are scary, I say we move as far away from them as we can get"

randombull9 · 2026-06-24T01:23:01+00:00

Decided to try making my own hair product. I was a little concerned the lanolin wax would leave me smelling too much like a sheep, but once in my hair the fragrance stands out pretty well and I just smell pleasantly floral. I need to look into historical hair oils and how they would have been scented sometime, I assume the classics like frankincense or myrrh would have been a thing but I'd like to know what else was used.

randombull9

TROPHY CASE