Συγνώμη, δεν μιλάω Αγγλικά

Slowpoke meme, I chose you… like 10 years ago.

I’m not picking a fight, I asked you what you meant by documented and confirmed. A coincidence is not a documented or confirmed case of a prophetic dream, it’s a coincidence.

Like if you said that there was a documented and confirmed case of a human that can fly, and then pointed to that one lady who fell out of an airplane and survived, I would have the same objection.

Right, but did the person have a prophetic vision, or was it simply a coincidental dream?

Customs isn’t the organization that does that. If you’re a target for espionage, someone at the NSA or CIA or somesuch organization will find ways to tap your devices, but they don’t do this to every phone imported to the country. Just consider the sheer volume of data that would produce, and the number of analysts who would need to review it. I wouldn’t assume privacy, though. Act like they are watching everything.

What do you mean “documented and verified”? You mean someone dreamed about something that happened? Or someone consistently had dreams that could predict the future? The law of large numbers would suggest someone would eventually dream about something that ends up happening simply by coincidence. It would be a statistical anomaly if it never happened.

Well, it could be really bad, or it might only be a little bit bad.

Israel has nuclear weapons, Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapons and probably has them, and both sides believe God is on their side.

The hell is a USian?

The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.

Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”

Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).

ChatGPT can’t make a rug as well as a 300 year old loom.

Unless they’re in a riddle guarding a door or something.

Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.

I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.

Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.

But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?

Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. Stupid is a lack of awareness.

That’s not really how statistics work.

Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.

To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.

You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.

I think I still have my google voice number.

It’s kind of weird we don’t have the option to create multiple voicemail boxes. How hard would that be?