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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Scorpius from Farscape is a fantastic villain. He was meant to be a one off villain of the week for a clip show. By the time the episode was finished it was a two parter that had only a few seconds of clips, and instead set up the plot elements that would drive the rest of the series, with Scorpius at the heart of it all.

    He’s one of the rare genius villains that’s actually written well enough to seem smart. He’s ruthless but not unreasonable. He’s horrific, but also charming. He’s a bottomless pit of hatred and vengeance, and yet he is cold and calculating, perpetually in control. I’ve heard him described as mirror universe spock turned up to 11 and I kind of agree.

    Plus, we also get Harvey.

    See also: David Xanatos. Imagine if Bruce Wayne put all that effort and planning into villainy, mad science and sorcery, theoretically for money but really just for the fun of it. Now give him an Iron Man suit and the voice of Jonathan Frakes. He’s an evil genius that’s so good at what he does that his name is literally synonymous with plans can only end in a win.


  • This is why my games always run on the silver standard. Each unit of currency is 100 times the value of the previous unit Instead of 10, and the listed prices that would have been gold are now in silver.

    This makes it a lot less weird when dropping coin on watered down ale, stale bread, and a cot. And it also makes finding gold coins for the first time a lot more exciting. And when your characters start getting wealthy enough to actually carry gold and buy big ticket items with it, it actually feels like you’re getting rich.

    And then there’s platinum. A single platinum coin becomes an event, the kind of thing that causes the greedy to become reckless and the experienced to become paranoid. It’s the perfect schmuck bait, a massive fortune in a single coin, all you have to do is pick it up. [Cue evil laugh]



  • The majority of eligible voters already don’t vote. Low voter turnout does not embarrass the rich and powerful, it just makes the system easier to control. Fewer voters means fewer people to answer to, fewer people to influence, and fewer people to shuffle around through gerrymandering.

    For fuck sake, they are consistently trying to make it harder for people to vote. They want lower turnout. They know their most loyal supporters will still vote. They’d much rather have their base be the only ones bothering to show up to the polls. They don’t care about legitimacy, they care about winning.




  • Real people don’t have scripts to read from.

    But seriously, listen to the way people talk. It’s chaotic, messy, often unclear and very inefficient. Conversations meander wildly, with dangling threads that are never concluded and often times with people talking past each other as much as to each other. If you wrote dialogue that way it would just be harder for audiences to follow and waste precious screentime.

    Realistic sounding dialogue is about writing what a real person would say if they stopped to think for a minute between each statement.





  • Have to make a few assumptions to make this workable. Im assuming we’re only allowing things that were made as a TV series, so not counting specials or anything that jumped from another medium like radio or theatrical releases. And we’re only including fiction, so news and the like wouldn’t count. And we only include things that have ended and only count the original run of a series.

    With all those caveats, my best guess is I Love Lucy. Started in 1951 and the actor that played their kid is still alive, though he didn’t join the cast until 1955.


  • As opposed to being too hot all over and desperate for anything that gives the slightest momentary relief. Not being able stand any activity because movement just makes you hotter and the heat has sapped your will to live. Being sweaty all over no matter what you do because it’s all your body can do to keep you alive.

    Our bodies generate heat. When trying to warm up, physics is on our side. When trying to cool down, we are fighting a losing battle. You’re worrying about typing in gloves while I’m trying to figure how to waterproof my whole system so I can work from my shower.





  • All this effort to communicate the idea of bigger or smaller rolls instead of just giving us the total surface area. But then, this isn’t about informing the consumer it’s about making it seem bigger. If they just gave us a total measurement in sq ft that would make it too easy to compare prices.

    It’s like guys measuring their dick, they aren’t terribly concerned with the validity of the measurement as long as the result sounds good.


  • I’ve seen people object to a 13 month calendar based solely on the idea that you can’t divide the year into quarters. But it’s actually really easy to remember. A quarter is 13 weeks, or 3 months and 1 week. So Q1 ends a week after month three, Q2 ends 2 weeks after month six, Q3 ends 3 weeks after month nine, and q4 ends after month 13 aka the end of the year. And since the calendar doesn’t change, you don’t even need to remember it, just mark the quarter ends once and you’re done forever.

    Just compare that to the unnecessary complexity of the Gregorian calendar and the effort it takes to remember basically anything that changes from year to year, or what day of the week any given date or holiday falls on, or even just which months have 30 days and which have 31.