Valdemar deals with some serious stuff, but glosses over the worst of it. The torture of one main character, and the brutal burning of another, as two examples, are handled pretty well. I would still go back and read them if I didn’t just remember them all so well because they’re awesome. There is definitely the fantasy trope of orphan/unwanted kids getting their fantasy though, but it’s appropriate for the blue fantasy genre.

…also, you should get crucified for sword of truth :P

Hell yes. I always forget to mention it in these threads, but I absolutely loved the story.

I thought he specifically didn’t out-sex the sex nymph, but as she was about to turn and kill her latest victim (because she used sex and he was used up), it turned out the victim (our heeeero) had an affinity for the ‘supreme’ or actual magic in the series, and he was able to use it to bind her in the old fashioned ‘true-names-let-you-control’ trope… and then she turned him into a god of sex because she couldn’t kill him and he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

I also think your characterization of quothe as not able to talk to girls isn’t quite accurate, just that he was a fool who had decided there was only one girl for him.

None of this is to say the criticisms of rothfuss aren’t accurate. The guy sniffs his own farts and thinks he creates pure oxygen in his bowels. His little vignette about making soap goes on for pages, and he had the temerity to sell it as it being just. so. necessary to do.

Just give a little warning. It’s ‘superpowers’ written in a serial format that brings the brutality of a series like invincible, but while invincible sort of still plays it off in a comic appropriate way, it’s never ‘fixed’ or back to the status quo in worm. While a lot of the brutality is glossed over except when the author is hitting that anvil, and even then more is able to be overlooked because the action and character interactions are just written so alluringly and you’ll be speeding through it, taking a moment to step back and think about what just happened ‘in universe’ can be shocking.

Lol, the whole ‘non-binary’ thing is so weird to me, since I like the lads and the lassies. As long as they tick the attractive boxes, like confident, smart, and being into me, it’s like getting a christmas morning present every time I wake up next to them.

Huh. I just read the first iron druid book and wasn’t real impressed. Are the ink&sigil books better, in your opinion? Also, the culture books are great, totally go for them.

I’m an author! I could make a fictional universe, perfectly tailored to exactly what I want! Pokemon/MLP/furry crossover with immortality, no significant danger or disease, transformation at will, rampant horniness, and Fully Automated Luxury Communism! Let’s fucking go!

And the wheel of time turns again…

On the topic of pokemon, between the various games and the anime, there are a lot of places that are just plain awesome, and I seem to recall plenty of people that live in the wilderness perfectly happily. It seems like a paradise world, with enough space for everyone to have wilderness if they want it, city life if they want that, etc.

in a world with still very few people to compete with

My anthropology knowledge is pretty paltry, but isn’t that the opposite of how humanity spread? One slow expansion at a time, as a tribe grew too big and then split and settled in the next valley over seems to be more in line with how much of it worked. Some expansions may have been quite different, no doubt, like oceania or the east asia -> north america -> south america journey, but on average you would be relatively near other human tribes, right?

I’m not the most familiar with hardware level stuff. With the security disabled as in the article, can a malevolent actor rewrite firmware or leave the equivalent of an undetectable rootkit on your hardware? It would be mildly amusing to see an entire generation of pirates fuck up here, but also reminds me of the arguments regarding the intel cpus having a secondary, unknown firmware in the form of the management thingamajig.

You can’t educate someone out of an addiction. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding about addiction…

I think in my case there may have been some royalties or appearance fees that they could avoid? I just noticed it after a few seconds of the little person breathing weirdly compared to the speech patterns and mouth movement, and then could barely focus on the actual information presented (not that there was much; I could have read a transcript of the bloody thing in a tenth of the time and retained the info better).

My company has started using AI voices/figures in the videos. Like they weren’t bad enough already…

AI watching AI to AI some slop to satisfy the AI the HR is using. Ugh.

Aw, poor geek squaddies.

I don’t know… it’s always seemed that part of the point of the club is that it DOESN’T necessarily excite you.

I’m not comfortable having to type these weird long-winded commands to do everything.

You don’t have to touch the terminal if you don’t want to touch it. The majority of linux distributions have perfectly fine guis. I don’t think I have touched the terminal for anything besides fun for at least the last six months. In installing and setting everything up, it was all gui unless I specifically didn’t want to, and, speaking of…

Best example is setup installation files. One tap, everything is installed automatically. Not the case with Linux.

Absolutely the case with linux. Unless you think opening your distribution’s program manager, searching the name of the program, clicking the install, clicking the ‘yes, install the dependencies’ if you don’t already have them, and then entering your password to let it be installed is any more difficult than opening your browser, searching for the program, hoping you find the real website and not the three scam websites that some dumb search engine lets advertise based on your keywords, finding the download page for the program, downloading the program, double clicking the program, and either clicking the install button or the ‘yes, I want to install this program’ button and then the install button…

Dailies, and other similar grinds, are one of the worst crimes against humanity in mmos. Surely we can move beyond the ‘take twenty hours to level up your character so you can progress’ idea that crystallized in jrpgs and now sits in the center of the late game experience like a giant aragog sucking your enjoyment. Let me just log in and raid, gorramit!

Okay, look, I loved my grandparents, but spending time with them at the end was horrifying and I really would have watched paint dry in preference.

Kids, dogs, and partner could also have some time off my hands by taking care of certain limited tasks. Cooking, cleaning, wiping ass… Don’t tell me you want to cook every breakfast, lunch, and dinner compared to playing a board game with the dog while the android dices your onions and peppers and the partner and kids take a nap on the ceiling.

What kind of engineer? Because while the physical world, with all of its mechanical and civil and aerospace engineers, has its shit figured out with professional standards and very clearly defined responsibilities and duties, the world of social engineers, tire engineers, procurement engineers, supply chain engineers, sandwich engineers, project engineers, lead engineers, and yes, software engineers, definitely is a little too loose with any definition for me to care that these ceos were once ‘engineers.’

Where’s that space jam website?

Yes.