Fizzzzle

Imagine the fucking sick riffs you could play on guitar

The whole bit about "orcs are also gods creatures" is something that Tolkien went back and forth about throughout the writing of middle earth. If orcs are just corrupted Elves, then that means they still have a soul and by definition are not entirely irredeemable, since they are also God's creatures. At one point Tolkien wrote that orcs are basically automatons made from dirt to get around that moral quandary, but he went back on that too. He never really settled on a single origin story for Orcs. Apologies because I know I've said it already in this thread, but he eventually wrote about the War of the Last Alliance that all creatures down to the birds and the beasts were divided that day, save for the Elves, who alone fought under Gil Galad. The implication there being that there were Orcs who fought against Sauron. In fact, one reading you could take from Adar having "killed" Sauron is that he led the Orcs I'm rebellion against him.

Yes, I have. I either don't notice a difference or it's been long enough that I forgot what the differences are at this point. Except LET ME UNPIN CHAT FROM THE TASKBAR YOU TWATS

On the contrary, I actually agreed with Stewart when he was on his "maaaybe COVID came from a lab in Wuhan" tangent because, like... maybe it did? It's not racist or xenophobic to assume that's a possibility. It's more of his general attitude and generally always assuming he's right. Smugness, if you will. I don't actually disagree with him on a lot of things. Maher is a completely different animal. That's why I said I see it to a degree. Maher is so far up his own ass trying to be contrarian that he's kind of actually become a conservative talking head. He's devil's advocated himself into actually kind of fitting on a Fox News segment.

I can't talk enough about how much I LOVE the Orc designs on this show. It's by far my favorite thing.

The writing on Colbert feels lazy to be. Like it's just "so how about those REPUBLICANS, HUH?! AMIRITE?!" all the time. It got really old to me really fast The Daily Show can get that way, too, but over the last few years, it really has grown into its own thing again. And I would agree that Jon Stewart has grown into another Bill Maher to a degree. Though not nearly as bad. Bill Maher is still an insufferable douche. Trevor Noah is none of those things. My favorite segments to watch are the "between the scenes" segments where he's just talking to the audience and you can see how generally eloquent and thoughtful he is. I hope the Daily Show picks someone else again that no one has heard of and starts fresh.

Hell yeah brother, give me some more. I do kind of wish they came up with another name for the "Southlands." Like, surely the people of the Southlands wouldn't have called it that themselves. I do think we'll get a reveal on who Sauron is by the end of the season. I still hope it's someone we haven't met yet.

Something tells me they didn't ask the non-Saudi population of Saudi Arabia

The entirety of modern African infrastructure was built with one thing in mind and one thing only - resource extraction. Everything else is secondary. After the Europeans left, the sad thing is it's one of those things where the only ones with the power to fundamentally change the system are also the ones that benefit from it. All kinds of new dictators come to power saying "we need to establish a country for the people" or whatever and then six months later they're like "oooh, look at all this new, shiny money I have! ... on second thought, things are fine the way they are." Until he gets overthrown and/or assassinated, rinse and repeat.

He wants to focus on his stand-up. I didn't really watch the show all that much when he started, but I've started watching it more bit-by-bit over the last few years. He really turned the show into his own over time.

I'm not sure how much the valuation has changed since they acquired Codemasters, either. I can't remember how much EA paid for them.

13 billion is nowhere near enough for EA, right? Like maybe Square Enix Europe? Or Koei-Tecmo?

I had one friend who killed his wife. That was like... I don't give a shit what you were going through, I don't feel bad for the piece of shit in any way and never have. May he rest in piss. Cheating, on the other hand, you don't know what's going on. Not to say it's excusable, but I don't like to paint everyone who cheats as some irredeemable monster.

Creator of the most popular rap song for white people to sing at karaoke. RIP

This is why the Ned Fulmer thing has me so curious. So many people on the Internet who have never met him are immediately calling him a total scumbag because he cheated, and I'm like... If he was your friend, would you feel the same way? If he was your friend, you would just think "why? What was wrong?" Because it's your friend and you have decades of experience that tells you that your friend is not a bad person, and yet they did a bad thing

I do think cheating is the death of any relationship, as much as people might try to save it. It might take months, it might take years, but that fundamental break if trust is something that can never be fully repaired. And before anyone says "my grandpa cheated on my grandma and they were together for 60 years!" That was when divorcees were shunned from society, it's not really applicable. Relationships require balance. One person can't view themselves as "better" than the other, otherwise that's just called abuse. Cheating and trying to continue the relationship automatically puts one person in the dog house for basically forever, and I don't think you can have a functioning relationship at that point. The power dynamic has shifted too much.

The friend thing is more of what I'm curious about. Like, what if your best friend of 20+ years cheated on their spouse? The tricky thing is that their spouse is probably also someone you consider a good friend by that point.

Certain parts of Reddit and Twitter have been blowing up because it turned out one of the members of the Try Guys, who kind of characterized himself as the "family is everything" guy cheated on his wife with one of his employees. Putting aside the "boss/employee"dynamic which is problematic, what do you think of people who have cheated? I don't mean if someone cheated on YOU. There's an obvious answer to that. But like... What if you found out your best friend of 20 years cheated on their spouse? Would you disown them? Story time: I was cheated on in my last relationship. When I found out, of course I was upset, at first. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I was like "... Yeah, that makes sense." We had been running on fumes for quite some time. We argued a lot. There were plenty of times when I would purposely ignore her calls/texts because I didn't want to see her. We weren't in a good space and hadn't been. After she cheated, we met up and just talked for like 2 hours. It wasn't an argument because I don't think either of us were under the impression that the relationship could be saved at that point, but we just aired out years worth of things we wanted to say but never said. We both cried a lot. In the end, we split amicably. We both agreed we should have broken up a long time ago. Point being, do I think she's a bad person just because she cheated? No.

I love that the first answer to "I'm going to San Jose" leads off with "... so first, you LEAVE San Jose, and then..."

aka San Jose/Santa Clara. I just thought "you know, I haven't been on vacation in a while, you know what would be a neat place to go? ... San Jose! Just kidding, I'm going to visit a friend I haven't seen in a long time. Is there anything I should do in the culturally relevant great city of San Jose while I'm there? I'll just be there for 4 days.

Eating fresh peppers in general is something you should only do if you want pain. Like, I love habaneros as much as the next person, but if I eat one whole, I kind of go delirious for a few minutes. I've eaten a reaper whole and it's like... just don't do it. It will fuck up your day. Whenever you just eat a fresh pepper like that, it's different. I've even had some jalapeños that I just ate like an apple that were more painful than 75% of hot sauces I've ever had. And I've had some of the hottest sauces in the world.

It's very mustardy, so I find it doesn't go on everything. Plus, the sauce is so thick it's almost a pepper mash. I do think it tastes good, but it's not something I would just use for like actually flavoring my food.

I watch a series on YouTube called the Casual Criminalist, and a takeaway from the series is that while we generally have this idea that serial killers are wicked geniuses, most of them are kind of stupid.

Habanero/scotch bonnet is about where I top out in terms of like... enjoying my food. However, I do occasionally like "challenge-level" spicy. I have a few reaper sauces and I have eaten a straight reaper before (do not recommend) I used to eat everything I could as hot as humanly possible, but I've calmed down a bit on that. I love spice, but I usually don't want to actually have tears coming out of my eyes when I'm trying to enjoy a meal. This is the hot sauce I've been putting on everything lately: