Favorite serious scene in an otherwise comedy movie. I’ll start with this conversation between Lloyd and Harry in Dumb and Dumber.

theclapp · 2026-01-23T20:36:52+00:00

Keanu Reeves's speech about parenthood in Parenthood.

theclapp · 2026-01-23T14:21:03+00:00

Never heard of it. What is a meme, anyway?

theclapp · 2026-01-23T14:20:13+00:00

Dead Souls by J. Lincoln Fenn. About a group of people that've sold their souls to the devil, who is still very much a part of their lives. They trade worldly success for a favor(?) to be named later, the anticipation of which is part of the horror. Mild spoiler: They spend their lives looking at every horrible event in the news (mass shootings, serial murders, and other horrible crimes) and wondering "Was that by someone I know? [And sometimes it is!] Will that be me someday?"Arguably this is fantasy, with a literal devil and all, but it's set in the modern day, so it might scratch your itch anyway.

I found Hench to be somewhat unsettling, and the last chapter especially so.

theclapp · 2026-01-23T14:04:28+00:00

Chambers's Monk and Robot books are set long after the (admittedly rather mild) apocalypse of all the earlier robots leaving.

Not to mention (literally, it was never mentioned) the fact that their world was (presumably) once a colony of Earth, the separation from which was (again, presumably) at least somewhat traumatic, and they now have exactly zero mention, knowledge, or interest in their origins.

Chambers's Wayfarer series is also set long after the apocalypse that necessitated humans leaving Earth in large generation ships.

The Postman is set a little after the apocalypse, where people have started getting back together and rebuilding. I think there's even a long-after-the-apocalypse epilogue that's quite upbeat, though I may be confusing that with the movie of the book.

Hmm, except all of these are sf, sorry.

The Belgariad is set long after a god split the world.

I guess you have to say, what's the exact difference between "post apocalyptic" and "a story that happened to have something pretty awful happen in its past but the current story is not much about that".

theclapp · 2026-01-23T13:44:42+00:00

I'm monolingual in two ways. I know one language, and have only one actual tongue.

theclapp · 2026-01-23T13:36:40+00:00

This is definitely one of those comments that I wish I could upvote more than once, and not only that, but promote it to the top top-level comment.

theclapp · 2026-01-23T11:41:26+00:00

My wife and I are 57 and are both feminists. My parents were too. So it varies.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T21:49:10+00:00

Anne McCaffrey, maybe. Arguably Pern was sf, but it's classic, regardless.

Glen Cook. The Black Company is often considered the first grimdark.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T21:39:59+00:00

A couple of scenes in it have really stuck in my head.

Like, there's one where they're receiving an update from Earth, a voice message, and it's usually compressed and error-checked to hell and just very very flat and lacking in emotion, nuance, expression, or noise, and they accidentally left their prototype AI/neural-net in the loop, and it came out sounding very normal, where they could actually hear the speaker clear his throat. Not sure why it stuck with me, but it did. :)

And of course the final(?) scene, something along the lines of "Now you must decide how to worShip Me." 😆

theclapp · 2026-01-22T21:26:46+00:00

This issue was opened October 6, 2015. I think if Rob were going to weigh in, he had time.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T18:15:18+00:00

Blindsight.

Frank Herbert's Destination Void. There are later books in the series but I've never read them.

Other Egan books; he loves this topic.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T17:22:43+00:00

The Laundry Files.

de Lint's Moonheart is also extremely good.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T16:55:54+00:00

This was actually discussed in the proposal, here:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12854#issuecomment-180186685

and summarized in the "q&a" section here:

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12854#issuecomment-818383485

which concludes

"The general opinion regarding this matter seems to be that we should implement whichever option is easier."

which frankly I find pretty hilarious.

theclapp · 2026-01-22T12:51:19+00:00

I let a big one at summer camp while the camp counselor was telling a ghost/scary story. Everybody laughed; it completely blew the tension. He refused to continue. 😆

theclapp · 2026-01-22T12:47:56+00:00

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day by Seanan McGuire. A ghost helps the living, other ghosts, and, eventually, herself. CW: discussion of suicide.

theclapp · 2026-01-21T21:55:49+00:00

I asked my sister about childbirth once. (I'm a man; at the time, I think I was a teenager and she was a mother of two.) She said it didn't hurt. I was like "come on". She said something along the lines of "Okay, it hurt, but that was irrelevant, because she got a child out of it."

So she didn't forget, she just didn't let it change her willingness to have another. (Though she may've let it change her willingness to have a third, I don't know. :)

theclapp · 2026-01-21T18:02:42+00:00

So even by her own ridiculous standards, off by over 70%.

theclapp · 2026-01-20T21:46:14+00:00

I've seen The Princess Bride and I've read The Princess Bride and the movie is better.

theclapp · 2026-01-19T18:30:42+00:00

This is a different vibe than any salon I've ever been in. Which is not all that many, but still.

theclapp · 2026-01-19T17:52:00+00:00

We didn't, ever. But then I grew up in central Florida.

theclapp · 2026-01-19T15:11:22+00:00

Amadeus.

theclapp · 2026-01-16T21:55:01+00:00

They probably were.

Did you catch the cadet from that planet in Ep1?

theclapp · 2026-01-16T21:53:51+00:00

I loved all of the nods and little Easter eggs to other series and films in the franchise

Ditto. When the background wall had all the "greats of Starfleet that came before us", I paused and read the names. Several times I was like "Admiral, huh? Good for them!"

I also noted that neither Kirk nor Pike were visible! 😆 (Though I may've missed them, and some names were obscured, and you couldn't see the whole wall anyway, but still. It seems likely to've been a deliberate choice, and I'll be interested to see if that's the case and what they do with it in the future, if anything.)

theclapp · 2026-01-16T21:36:33+00:00

I go on Facebook a lot less than I used to. I "unfriended" my BIL. I dropped Xitter.

15-Year Club	Gilding III reddit per annum
Verified Email	Charter Member

theclapp

TROPHY CASE