domain:betonit.substack.com
hydroacetylene
44m ago
Well yes, college ball is too much like the pros these days. Need something lighthearted and trashy, for to let the chainsmoking wives of America fly their regional prejudices proudly over the most trivial excuses.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
58m ago
afaik, the only effect of getting consistently downvoted here is that the poster will keep winding up in the new user filter, which means we mods have to manually approve their posts. This happened to @guesswho, despite his having been a regular poster for months, and now it's happening to @AhhhTheFrench.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6m ago
I finished the latest installment of Sun Eater the other day.
Unlike a certain infamous fat garden gnome, Ruocchio is a fruitful writer - he puts out a book every 1.5 years or so, with the conclusion of the series planned for next year. I might as well shill it and share some of my impressions here, he well deserves it.
1.Sun Eater is a space opera about a traitor and genocidal murderer to some, hero of mankind to others. Told from his own perspective, as a memoir that he writes at the dusk of his life. From the first pages, Dune and Warhammer influences become apparent, but I quickly forgot about this: don't let anyone say that Ruocchio doesn't have his own creative voice.
2.The quality of writing—the way the books are written word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence—is where Ruocchio really shines, and that's fortunate, since I consider this to be the backbone of any work of fiction. In this regard, Ruocchio mogs...wait, the spell checker is upset with me for using zoomer dialect...I meant to say dramatically outperforms most authors I've ever read, and the vast majority of modern writers overall. He will make you open a dictionary a few times if you want to understand some sentences fully, but the prose is by no means overly ornate. It's elegant, memorable, and quite detached from modern conversational English, fittingly for something presented as the writing of a far-future aristocrat. Maybe there's something to say in favor of the more down-to-earth style most common in modern prose, but my guess is that most other writers don't write as Ruocchio simply because they lack the wits and sufficient command of their language.
3.I find evil/irreconcilably antagonistic aliens to be a much more interesting direction to take than the Star Trek approach, or, god forbid, "humans are the real evil". It's not just that it's terribly overdone and tediously misanthropic in practice, hostile aliens seem inherently more plausible. Finding common ground with beings that share our own nature is challenging enough. Competition for resources might not be the most plausible cause for conflict when interstellar civilizations are concerned, but there are any number of others to explore.
4.I enjoy speculations on alien cultures and theology, and here Ruocchio doesn't disappoint either. We humans can observe our flaws and some of the worst animal inclinations in ourselves easily enough.
The Cielcin can as well, and as their condition is more degraded and repulsive, even given their habituation to it, they draw more radical conclusions than most human religions. They remind me of Gnostics, believing this universe to be corrupted and seeking release from it. They also resemble Muslims in their rejection of the visual arts.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
16m ago
The New York courts get to decide the law. They're not impartial. Any appeals would have to go all the way through the New York system (with Trump potentially imprisoned the whole time) before reaching the Supreme Court. Which would most probably simply reject any appeal on the grounds that there is no substantial Federal question.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
43m ago
Russia is currently trying to open another front by crossing the border between Belgorod and Harjkov. It's something I've been expecting for a while: why expend your material advantage on pushing through entrenched Ukrainian defenses in the Donbass when you can use it elsewhere? But the direction of the attack left me puzzled. You can't take over a major city with 50k men, especially one that is an important military hub for the existing frontline: that's not enough neither for a frontal assault nor for an encirclement. Getting closer so that you can reach it with your tube artillery isn't a valid military reason either, unless you want to just punish the locals for self-identifying as Ukrainians. I would've tried to threaten Sumy or even the Konotop-Bahmach-Baturin triangle.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
30m ago
Second the Three Kingdoms recommendation for historical TW. @cjet79 mentioned he doesn't like the powerful lords and heroes in Warhammer, which 3K does have kinda... but you can play in "records mode" which is more realistic. And I think that 3K just plain nails the gameplay more than any other game, even Warhammer. The campaign layer is the best in the series, with the diplomacy/espionage/family relationship systems. And the battles feel great too. The terrain can be interacted with (like you can set forests on fire), the cavalry feels super satisfying to use, and the leader duels are super cool and thematic.
I think it's a shame that CA dropped 3K like a hot potato, because it's some of their best work by far.
2rafa
44m ago
Could you not just manipulate vote totals so they go +20 when they fall too far below 0.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
55m ago
Speaking of magical thinking. To quote Who's Line is it Anyway? "Everything's made up and the points don't matter". Debt is just a human construct. When you see people wax on about there being 200 trillion in ghost credit default swaps ready to doom the world economy when a butterfly in China's housing market flaps its wings it is hard not to just dismiss it all out of hand. MMT is, I think, a result of some institutions evolving to understand and use this concept. If we have the raw resources and the might to decide how they get divvied up, the rest is just semantics.
Just this week I was joking that it looked like a forbidden snack.
I've got some old .303 British cartridges in the safe, but I will not be testing this.
More options
Context Copy link