I don’t attribute a lot of positive things to social media, but I will give it credit for turning me around on spiders. Arachnophobia scared the crap out of me as a kid. For years afterward, I’d never sit down on a toilet without first getting down on my hands and knees to make sure there weren’t any spiders lurking underneath the bowl. Thanks to years of spiderbro memes, now I generally view them as comrades.

Perhaps the Balrog underestimated Gandalf, thinking it could cast him into the abyss, then fly back up to deal with the rest of the Fellowship. Alternatively, maybe it calculated that its best chance of defeating the wizard was to grapple with him at close quarters. Either way, the Balrog falling doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t capable of flight.

Because the apparently straight lines contradict the labels. As drawn, the unlabeled bottom vertices are clearly 90°, not 80° and 100°. We must either conclude that the labels are incorrect, or that the figure is not drawn to scale. Either way, it’s insoluble.

I’m looking forward to the inevitable Flop House episode.

I don’t think that most of the people we might consider evil have that level of self-awareness. Certainly those with a pathological lack of empathy are overrepresented in the highest echelons of power. It doesn’t logically follow that they see themselves as bad.

I saw him spewing garbage on tv at the gym a few months ago; no audio, luckily, but they always have a tv showing fox news, and it was right in my line of sight. The ridiculous shit he was constantly doing with his hands had me cracking up. It was so over-the-top, to the point of parody. I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea that anyone takes the chucklefuck seriously, just based on his moronic gesticulation schtick.

So yeah, let him keep doing insanely stupid shit with his hands.

I really appreciate this take. It’s good-hearted and makes good sense. I’ll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.

I really wish I’d just taken your word for it. That’s depressing.

Can you see that you’re arguing against fictitious strawmen? You seem to be operating under the delusion that for all the dumb normies who have “bought into” the existing two-party system, politics is just a game that they play without understanding. You’ve reduced them all to NPC’s who lack the capacity to reason; obviously their only motivation could be mindless conformity to their “team”.

Is it your contention that it doesn’t matter what party controls the branches of government, because they’re both the same? While this is factually inaccurate, it would at least be in line with the actions you’re advocating. Speaking of which, how exactly do you imagine a “protest” vote would deny the subsequently elected government legitimacy? What force and effect do you foresee that action producing? Because anyone with a working knowledge of our electoral system can tell you that the only discernable result will be the empowerment of the minority party, which in this case seeks a fascist overthrow of our democratic system.

What you’re doing here is applying shallow, childish logic to a complex and nuanced problem, while pretending to have some high-minded motivations which—if they exist at all—clearly haven’t been thought through.

If you’re interested, The Flop House (long running bad movie podcast with three hosts and sometimes a guest; 2/3 hosts are former Daily Show writers [they are three cishet white guys, but not stupid or bigoted]) did an episode with Parker Bennett, one of the screenwriters of the '93 SMB movie. He’s got some pretty great anecdotes about making it!

What does libertarianism have to do with anything? The US health insurance industry is objectively evil. It exists solely to extract profits, while providing no service. It’s just a middleman between you and health care providers. It’s a poster child for regulatory capture and blatant corruption.

Every single article about “gen x” this or “gen z” that is 100% bullshit. Stop reposting this garbage.

I had a science teacher that told us, “If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!”

It’s science.

FWIW, I’m dual-booting windows and mint atm. Separate drives, but just one EFI partition, and this update hasn’t borked things for me.

Literally listening to the author’s podcast as I came across this (Elliott Kalan, and he has a few podcasts, but the OG and my favorite is The Flop House).

I think it’s a RDR2 reference, but I couldn’t be more specific.