"[O]ur rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” he said.

Hmm.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

Ephesians 6:5

…and…

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.

Colossians 3:22

Is that the God you want to derive your rights from, Clarence?

[H]owever much all this soothes my vanity, and however much I appreciate being vice-president of Mensa, an organization which bases admission to its membership on IQ, I must, in all honesty, maintain that it means nothing.

What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence. […]

The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own, thus giving them more evidence of “intelligence” and more examples of “intelligent people” and therefore more reason to devise additional tests of the same kind. More circular reasoning!

–Isaac Asimov, “Thinking About Thinking,” 1975

“Plague.”

Might get stuck with a small payout.

“What are the winning numbers for the next lottery drawing with a payout of over $500 million?”

There wasn’t anyone for a leftist to vote for

That’s what primaries are for.

And if you can’t get enough leftists out to vote in the primary… then are you really a meaningful political bloc, or just a bunch of loud people on the internet that are vastly outnumbered by the people in the country who are actually engaged?

It’s not even a matter of powerful enough, it’s a technique that they had to learn. There was a frankly bizarre episode near the end of Clone Wars where Yoda had to go to a planet of jumping puzzles in order to learn how to manifest as a Force ghost, though I’m not sure if Qui Gon had to go there to learn it himself, and Anakin and Luke certainly didn’t.

I’ve always assumed that it involved dying in some state of total acceptance and willingness to let go of one’s physical body and become a purely Force-based being, but that’s more of my interpretation than something explicitly stated in canon.

“Can you get this thing out of me… because the batteries ran out and I need to replace them ASAP! HIYOOOOOOO!!!”

Trump Only Fucks Up

Your stomach thinks all meals are smoothies.

Your tongue always knows what it would feel like to lick any surface you can see in person.

There’s no meaningful difference between eating a pound of crab meat and eating a pound of crickets.

I had garlic ice cream once. It wasn’t horrible, and I’m glad I can say I’ve had it, but I wouldn’t order an entire sundae.

She forgot that butts exist. And feet.

Someone remade Portal as a browser-based side scroller, and I fucking loved that game.

I played through Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, and with how hard every NPC was flirting with Aloy, I wondered “Why isn’t this a post-apocalyptic dating sim?”

In Divinity: Original Sin II, there’s a game-breaking mechanic where you can plant tea plants in pots, grow new tea plants, harvest them, and then use the buffs from drinking tea to get infinite moves during fights. I actually got into the whole management of the tea farm, and I don’t want to totally throw out the RPG combat, but I might like it if farming and then using your crops to win fights was an entire game unto itself, rather than just a broken exploit.

And cliffs! Sheer cliffs seem to be much less geologically common than my childhood led me to believe.

At first I thought the American just couldn’t recognize short-haired flat-chested Scandinavian moms as women.

I became a knife guy. It started when I was visiting a government surplus store and I realized that I could buy knives that had been confiscated at security checkpoints at a steep discount. Then I started developing opinions about grips and blade geometries.

Now I’m wearing a neck knife every day, and I tell people that once you start carrying a knife, you’re amazed to find all the convenient uses you can find for the thing in a given day.

I’ll be honest, I’ve given real thought to the idea of trying to leverage toxic masculinity to get men to take on more domestic responsibilities.

“What kind of real man needs a woman to cook for him?!”

“Bro, are you telling me that a woman can change a diaper but you can’t?!”

“Dude, if you can’t braid your daughter’s hair and get her to dance lessons on time, are you even a real man?!”

Don’t worry, any stuff that doesn’t fit into the universe probably doesn’t matter.

Card is confounding because those first few Ender books are unequivocally about the importance of empathy and recognition of common personhood, even across seeming-impenetrable species boundaries, and how mutual respect and love are the most important quality a person can have. And then… yadda yadda yadda, OSC is a gigantic bigot. The. Fuck?

I still can’t get over how they stretched that short of a book over that long of a trilogy of movies and still managed to not show enough of Beorn. All of the party arriving at Beorn’s house is one of my favorite chapters and it’s just… not there. The. Fuck.

gamma ray baddies