It’s not a major headache for smartphone and tablet manufacturers. It does mean that they’ll have to design their shit, moving forward, to have removable batteries, JUST LIKE THEY USED TO DO. If they bitch about it, they are lying.
people use their blinkers at the last second as if it lets you parry a hit like street fighter
Hi I’m so sorry I don’t mean to call you out but this is SO not what blinkers are for 🅱️lease anyone who does this (and that is a set of people which includes my father so I am intimately familiar with this phenomenon) this is actually very dangerous I’m begging you to signal lane changes properly
There’s this strange phenomenon that if you put your blinker on to lane change even if you can’t physically maneuver the car into the lane you want yet, someone will see what you want to do and let you in. Crazy, I know.
Bad: Spending hundreds of pages carefully explaining your meticulously planned worldbuilding.
Also bad: Doing no worldbuilding at all.
Good: Putting in the work of doing the worldbuilding, then refusing to explain or justify any of it, simply mentioning pertinent details briefly and in passing, allowing the reader to glimpse the outline of something vast gliding beneath their narrative point of view’s tiny boat.
Not posting this as a reblog because I don’t want to screw with somebody else’s notes, but the whole “theological implications of Tolkien’s orcs” business has some interesting history behind it.
In brief, a big part of why the Lord of the Rings Extended Universe™ is so cagey about what orcs are and where they come from is that later in his life, Tolkien came to believe that orcs as he’d depicted them were problematic – albeit not because of, you know, all the grotesque racial caricature.
Rather, he’d come to the conclusion that the idea of an inherently evil sapient species – a species that’s incapable of seeking salvation – was incompatible with Christian ethics. Basically, it’s one of those “used the wrong formula and got the right answer” situations.
In his notes and letters, Tolkien played around with several potential solutions to this problem. (Though contrary to the assertions of certain self-proclaimed Tolkien scholars, there’s no evidence that he ever seriously planned to re-write his previous works to incorporate these ideas.) In one proposal, orcs are incarnated demons, and “killing” them simply returns them to their naturally immaterial state; in another, orcs are a sort of fleshy automaton remotely operated by the will of Sauron, essentially anticipating the idea of drone warfare.
Of course, this is all just historical trivia; any criticism of The Lord of the Rings must be directed at the books that were actually published, not the books we imagine might have been published if Tolkien had spent a few more years thinking through the implications of what he was writing. However, the direction of his thoughts on the matter is striking for two reasons:
Tolkien’s orc conundrum is very nearly word for the word the problem that many contemporary fantasy authors are grappling with fifty years later. They want epic battles with morally clean heroes, and they’re running up against exactly the same difficulty that Tolkien himself did – i.e., that describing a human-like species who are ontologically okay to kill is an impossible task.
After all the work he put into solving this impossible problem, one of Tolkien’s proposals was literally just “what if they’re not really killing the orcs, they’re just sending them to the Shadow Realm?”
