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IJBMer Updates

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Comments

  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    So, then: https://lichess.org/study/FukUzoAc

    It's been years since your grandma's favourite TV series had a chess scene, but memes keep flowing. I'm borderline amazed by this phenomenon.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2023-01-29 17:25:53
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    random interesting page i just found on the internet

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance

    Somehow I'd never heard of this author before.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I have a feeling he's nowadays best known for getting ripped off by the D&D guy, who took the idea of preparing spell slots directly from his works.

    I don't remember ever reading anything by this guy, save perhaps a short story in that one compilation book I read that one time. He's one of these fellows who are a classic of American/Anglophone SF&F, except barely anything of their works trickled down to here, so nobody knows about them save for a handful of uber-nerds and those who spend too much time in English-language web communities, possibly devoted to cataloguing recurring motifs in fiction. A rising star of Anglophone spec-fic is going to get published here as well now, but classics either got lucky back in the day, or remain obscure. Although recently there have been publishing series aimed specifically at bringing such classics into the light, so there's chance. (TBH I don't know, perhaps he already got this treatment, but for sure he isn't widely known.)
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    OHHHH HE'S THE VANCIAN MAGIC GUY
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    lol all i could think of was that he shared a surname with J.D. Vance, another author and more recently a U.S. senator from Ohio
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    edited 2023-02-01 08:50:38
    IJBM: spell slots aren't much of a thing anymore in video game RPGs. I always thought it was interesting that in Final Fantasy I and III while trecking through a dungeon you had to manage which spells to use on random encounters and which ones to save for later instead of always using the most powerful one, as is usually the case otherwise.
    Speaking of that, TIL there was a FFVI stream with Sakaguchi plus some of its other creators (or is it just Kazuko Shibuya?). Highlights.
    Edit: Whoa after all these years I just now realized one of the weapons during the airship boss (Air Force or something like that) is not supposed to be attached to the boss's nose.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    From playing D&D I noticed that it seemed more typical for D&D to have a smaller number of bigger encounters than a larger number of smaller encounters.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Yep, it's pretty much a D&D thing, making sense only in D&D, and even then only when all you play is generic dungeoncrawling, because it becomes an integral part of general resource management thing these games used to depend on. But D&D is to role-playing what MS Office is to, uh, office work.

    Anyways, my introductory RPG was Warhammer 1ed., D&D only gets those nostalgia points for being the system the classic video games ran on.
    lol all i could think of was that he shared a surname with J.D. Vance, another author and more recently a U.S. senator from Ohio
    Oooh the hillbilly guy who became a trumpist tradcatholic?
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2023-02-02 03:31:21
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    yeah that guy

    rest of this post moved to the tabletop thread if i can find it
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    oh fuck i just learned it is friday today

    whole day of living in a lie
  • fourteenwingsfourteenwings
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    ...

  • StormtroperStormtroper
    Apparently everybody started hating Penny Arcade sometime while I wasn't looking. Time hasn't been nice towards webcomics I guess, although xkcd is still going strong.
    Also, it occurs to me that if the phrase "don't judge a book by its cover" were invented today you'd have Twitter arguing that it's important for society to be judgmental on a surface level and that covers are typically chosen by the publisher with a purpose and thus okay to base your ideas of the book on.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Thought of the day: people can't use you for their own purposes if you are useless.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    TIL there was a Hellenistic leader named Ptolemy Ceraunus ("the Lightning" or "the Thunderbolt"). A second-rate figure, but he sure had A+ grade nickname. And it wasn't even a compliment.
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    We shouldn't have stopped the practice of referring to leaders by nicknames, imagine all the memey titles we could come up with nowadays.
    It occurred to me that we now have the technology to do that thing where you have creepy videos with replicas of deceased loved ones made of face/voice AI reproductions (with some input), to "keep them around forever" like in some movie that probably exists.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    like in some movie that probably exists
    For a given value of "exists", yeah. There was an episode of Black Mirror with a very similar premise.
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    So I got a new job.
    I'm nervous.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    congratulations on your new job, at least!
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    That's good to hear. You wanna tell what kind of job it is?
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    Thanks guys!
    You wanna tell what kind of job it is?
    Nothing too fancy, just a remote data entry job.
    Also I learned how dumb/bizarre listings at online stores come to be, there are thousands upon thousands to do in a single sitting, something has to slip through the cracks.
  • fourteenwingsfourteenwings
    There is love everywhere, I already know
    "don't judge a book by its cover"

    Kind of hilarious that this is what every visit to a book store is about.

    Also basically the reason Kiera Cass is successful.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Now you got me thinking Recently my book buying looks like this: either by internet, where I can have a description of the book so I know if it's worth of my time, by internet but it's classics I wanted to have, or by that big box in a supermarket where they dump a bunch of surprisingly interesting titles.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    edited 2023-03-05 23:02:31
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    fourteenwings wrote: »
    "don't judge a book by its cover"

    Kind of hilarious that this is what every visit to a book store is about.

    Also basically the reason Kiera Cass is successful.
    Makes me think of basically every LN ever lol.

    Also, I guess technically reading the synopsis on the back cover counts as judging a book by its cover.
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Come to think of it, there are actually a number of products in a bookstore that aren't purchased the...usual way, wherein I mean the archetypal "buy before you know what's inside" thing. Also, arguably, that's more true of online purchases of books than physical purchases, because physical bookstores generally don't seal up the books, so people can in fact read what's inside before purchasing.

    But yeah there are many not-a-published-book products, such as stationery and various other trinkets. Then there's instances of people just being required by circumstance to purchase specific books. These can range from buying books to avoid having to borrow them (e.g. those times I got extra credit in my high school class for having my own copy of a novel, as well as other times when I'd read half a book but the book was due) to needing a specific TTRPG rulebook. I guess these can fall under the overall umbrella of having made use of a book already in some capacity.

    Sidenote: I wonder how fast different kinds of products move in a given bookstore. For example, how fast does the average famous-person-nonfiction-commentary-book-that's-not-the-talk-of-the-town move compared to, say, the average test prep book, or the average manga, or the average baby-book-with-attached-toys.
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    those times I got extra credit in my high school class for having my own copy of a novel,
    Is this some kind of racket scheme?
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    Stormtroper wrote: »
    those times I got extra credit in my high school class for having my own copy of a novel,
    Is this some kind of racket scheme?
    Hey at least it's less unscrupulous than my high school debate class making fundraising part of the curriculum!
  • glennmagusharveyglennmagusharvey
    Creature - Florida Dragon Turtle Human
    oh speaking of bugs

    can't post emojis on IJBM

    that's yet another bug currently happening here
  • StormtroperStormtroper
    I thought that was a feature, or at least something UE never got around to implementing.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    I'm wondering if it belongs here or in some other thread.

    Namely, some smartsie put a Nazi march to a funny video and now I have the tune stuck in my head. This is also how I learned what was the title of that nice song from that WWII strategy game I used to play as a kid.
  • lrdgcklrdgck
    "you duck spawn, refined creature, you try to be cynical, yokel, but all that comes out of it is that you're a dunce!!!!! you duck plug!"
    Fun observation I just had: the Rational Wiki has an entry on "atheist professor myth". One of the variants presented there involves a US Marine and an anonymous professor. The fun comes from that I had seen a version of this specific variant where the US Marine and anonymous professor are replaced with "a worker" (the exact word meant a physical laborer or a factory worker, all in all a working-class fellow) and a specific literary figure of the interwar period. The specificity of the version I've encountered makes me curious what was the earliest recorded instance of the myth. I'm not claiming it's originally Polish, far from it, but I'm wondering where and when it came to be. And, when it came to Poland, since the Einstein version probably got going only after he became a household name in the United States, and the cultural exchange between us and the US was rather limited for a good while. So, was it a separate tradition, or did it come over via Polish diaspora or some other channel? Certainly some of the sillier ideas held by religious fundies have been tracked to the Eighties-era gift packages, so it's not out of the question.

    (For what it's worth, it's also on Snopes.)
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