Utter_Karate [he/him, comrade/them]

Look at Estonia and Latvia being on the right side of history! This is not a sentence you get to use very often, so make sure to use it now before they make any other decisions.

Silent reading is actually a shockingly recent invention. Because the letters “make sounds”, the natural way to process a phonetic alphabet is to make the sounds of the letters as you read them and listen to yourself speaking the text. This goes on way later than many people realize. Being able to do silent reading at all was still a pretty remarkable skill in the time of Shakespeare. Being unable to read something without speaking the words was common probably well into the 19th century. Actually, as someone who works in education I can tell you that I will still recommend kids to read things out loud if they find something difficult. It’s what phonetic writing languages were designed for, and it increases accuracy and comprehension.

Did they actually move him to the North Pole or are they having fun with the word “Arctic”?

The Toungue map.

The idea that different parts of the tongue are responsible for feeling different tastes. This blatantly false idea was made up in 1901 out of thin air and then made its way into biology classrooms somehow. It was taught to schoolchildren (including me) for about 100 years as a biological fact, even though every human being in that time proved it false by experiment thousands of times by eating things and tasting them with the “wrong” parts of the tongue. It doesn’t quite count as an example of this happening today, because we finally realized that it simply wasn’t true and have stopped teaching it, but still: 100 years is a long time to realize that something is false when every human being in the world is confronted with physical evidence several times every day.

…Wait, why did they bring the Swedish flags out for this? Denying that our schools have masturbation rooms makes sense, making it a point of national pride that they don’t is really, really weird.

I think the first series he wrote may have a bit of a slow start. The one I’m hate reading is his latter work about the knight Sparhawk. I was convinced the plot of the first book would revolve around stopping the nefarious plot that he - I swear to god - just happened to overhear a villain just explain to an entire room in an inn. Like 8 or so chapters later and he is on a different continent, kidnapping an ambassador after having completely stopped the evil plot, fought in two major battles, adopted a child, commited arson, survived a shipwreck and infiltrated a cultist meeting. It’s remarkable how fast things can happen if none of the characters have any personality you have to write around.

He got into writing fantasy because he thought the people who read fantasy would read absolutely anything. He wanted to get as much money as possible for as little effort as possible, and since he didn’t consider fantasy to be real literature he figured it would be easier than adventure books about rock climbing, which he had written before, because he had to do literally no research. Reading them as an adult it is obvious that they are very lazily written. Every character has a personality that can be boiled down to a single adjective like “grumpy”, “sneaky”, “funny”, or in one very annoying case “having an axe”. This lazy writing however means that because the characters never really have much to say about anything things can move at an incredibly fast pace. This is what I liked as a child.

The Powder Mage trilogy is kind of fun. The setting is more late 18th/early 19th century than medieval, and it is far from perfect, but a bit of French revolution era fantasy with magic and gods and stuff never hurt anyone.

China Miéville’s New Crobuzon series must qualify as fantasy somehow. It’s New Weird, but you have weird magic and grotesquely weird fantasy races living in a fantasy world, so it must count. Also, because Miéville is some flavor of trotskyist you get a fantasy world written from some kind of Marxist perspective, but because it is a fictional world where Stalin never existed you don’t have to read 50 pages about how every successful socialist revolution was never real.

What I’ve read of Robin Hobb has been fun, but it’s been more than a decade so take that recommendation with a pinch of salt.

You could also hate read David Eddings, a child abusing drunk of a hack author who hated the genre of fantasy and all of its readers. That’s what I’m doing, because I want to examine my childhood idol more closely. This is a bad idea and will not improve your life in any way, but it is something you could do.

It’s surreal that she managed to get on national television and say this. Aren’t there whole departments of the government/military dedicated to making sure that that doesn’t happen?

A LOT. If those fuckers could chuck wood I would even go so far as to say probably all of it.

If the Chinese help China build this Chinese infrastructure, it may reduce Chinese dependence on Chinese chips, since China will be able to produce its own chips instead of buying them from China. This may hurt China economically long term, since China is the largest buyer of Chinese chips by far and if they start buying chips produced in China instead of Chinese chips China’s economy might shrink.

Then again this is probably not that big a deal. Just more anti-Chinese propaganda by the US, pushing for Chinese independence from China, without quite going all the way and recognizing China as its own country, since that would go against the long standing policy that China is one country and China is part of that country.

I’m gonna sound like a fringe conspiracy theorist here, but you guys, What if this was no random accident? What if someone intentionally made the plane crash? But who? And why?

That bed with its little podium wastes so much space that I’m not even upset. It is genuinely impressive.

I claim user name of Bungiefan. I came up with it, so it’s mine. All posts made under that user name are now my intellectual property.