xzar_monty

And in other news, the Kadyrov family shines again, as Ramzan's son is filmed beating up a fellow in custody. The Mouth of Putin, i.e. Peskov, has bravely refused to comment on the matter before any questions were even asked. It's interesting that there has been some vocal outrage among Russians who find it unseemly indeed that the Kadyrov family is allowed to break the law like this, apparently without repercussions. Contrast this with the almost complete lack of Russian outrage over the country's attempt to destroy Ukraine as a nation and Ukrainians as living human beings.

I'd never heard of "Zerg rushes" before. Interesting how that kind of terminology spreads. Would chemical weapons sometimes qualify as Horrid Wilting?

Well, surely King's exposure has little to do with how prolific he is, right? I mean, J. D. Salinger has huge exposure and it's all based on just the one book. Your original point was that King's writing discipline is unmatched in this generation. But it's not. He sure is prolific, no question, but he is not unmatched. As for exposure, let us just keep in mind that Barbara Cartland, for instance, has sold more than twice the amount of books that King has. We know very, very little about the life of Shakespeare -- that's why there is, for instance, no definite biography available, or even much of a biography at all. We have no grounds to say just about anything about the reasons Shakespeare wrote any of his stuff; whether there was an attempt to please the crowd or whatever. This stuff surely cannot be deduced from the texts alone.

Indeed. There's a Nobel Peace Prize winner from that country who made a fairly well constructed and impassioned speech on this very topic, asking the world to remember what a vast quantity of rare earth metals (and, consequently, technological pleasure) the country provides to the modern consumer, thanks to some rather special circumstances related to geology and plate tectonics. The speech had just as much effect as you'd expect, i.e. none. [Off-topic but somewhat relevant: The superb NZ writer Eleanor Catton has managed to include the topic of rare earth metals extremely well in her new novel Birnam Wood; highly recommended.]

Ha! Well remembered indeed. (I certainly didn't remember.)

Thanks for the link! It was interesting, you're quite right. I have to say that towards the end, he was unintentionally being extremely funny, in my view. I mean this: "It’s like the difference between Budweiser and some generic beer. So both of them get you a little bit tingly, but it ain’t the same." If you asked me to name the most generic beer imaginable, my immediate response would be Budweiser, so King sounds hilarious here.

I agree that this is true. However, I don't think that the word "today" is in any way operative. It has always been so, and in fact, for most of history, it has been much more so.

What about Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Cartland, R. L. Stine, Lauran Paine or Ryoki Inoue, for starters, when it comes to being prolific? There is no question that King is prolific, but calling him unmatched is not really justified. (James Patterson doesn't count because he doesn't write his own books.) Which Shakespeare works would you regard as average crowd pleasers? I mean, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not very good, but as it was his first, it wasn't written between the classics. For me, The Taming of the Shrew would definitely qualify, but as you said "quite a bit", I wonder if you could specify at least some of them.

I have never done it and won't, but I suppose I can imagine at least parts of it. One drastic change that has happened since the internet arrived is that previously there used to be a rather widely agreed-upon reality that people had different opinions upon, while right now there is not even a hint of consensus on the reality itself. It is not doing us any good.

Here's an extremely interesting interview that provides quite a lot of fascinating historical context that doesn't disregard, for instance, the manifold failures of the US along the way, particularly in its politics. I'm especially thinking of people like @Gorth and @BruceVC who might be interested to take the time (which I personally took during a work project that allowed it, but only in the listening sense).

There's quite possibly something like this in the picture somewhere, something that isn't easily inferrable from what is seen but might look obvious in the sense you mean if it was visible. (So we may have the riddle explanation here: difficult to get right but obvious in hindsight. Pedo mellon.) As for the location etc., I think Zoraptor countered that side of it pretty well. I thought about that, too, but quickly realized that that side of it probably isn't the reason for the blurring.

The blurring / pixellation is strange. Anyone know the reason for that? Well, let's rephrase it: can anyone come up with a sensible explanation?

Chechen opposition (Abubakar Jangulbajev, to be precise) now reports that Kadyrov is dead. Well, let's see.

Oh, I fully agree, knowing that sometimes the dismissal will turn out to be the wrong choice. Which of course you knew. I suppose one big thing about rumours is that the old idea of there not being smoke without a fire does not hold.

"According to rumours", indeed. This stuff always reminds me of an exchange in The Sandman, the best thing by far that Neil Gaiman's done so far. "Only a fool listens to rumours", says someone. "Only a fool ignores them", another replies. (Can't remember who either of them was, but could have been Morpheus and Odin, in that order.) I believe both sides are equally true, as paradoxical as that is.

I believe it's not widely exported because of its potential to cause olfactory crises. I mean, it's a lot worse than durian, the fruit, which you also cannot bring to places like airports, if I remember correctly. The Mongols also have various foods whose smell will wake you up in a hurry and take some getting accustomed to -- like, a couple of generations, perhaps.

But did you get the million before or after you reached level cap? Probably before, by the way you phrased it. Would be a bummer otherwise -- and you will end up with millions and millions of points above the cap anyway.

Plenty of luxury cars driven by Chechens spotted at a major hospital in Moscow today. Whether that signifies coma, I don't know. So what we apparently have here, in this war, is a dead parrot that only, really, has a flesh wound.

The term "bucket list" is strangely appropriate here, because if you don't heed proper precautions, a bucket is what you'll need. Unless you have an extraordinarily strong constitution, you will vomit if you open the can in the wrong way or remain too close to it for too long. (Plenty of youtube videos on this, by the way, some of them positively Rabelaisian.)

Off topic, by the way, but this statement is always true. And yes, I know what you meant and it was a perfectly good point, one that I agree with, but your formulation is still something that is always true.

Osho is thought-provoking enough to merit some minor delving into. Also highly duplicitous and so on, but worth some attention. Like Ayn Rand, who is also quite poor, is worth some attention.

Apparently the strikes in Sevastopol were very effective. This fellow also has a lovely accent:

Ok, fair enough then! In any case, it's a common phrase these days, generally used in ways and contexts not exactly conducive to gaining more proper information. Check this out, for reference: https://thinkingispower.com/the-problem-with-doing-your-own-research/

There's the joke about how, if the truth tends to be "somewhere in the middle", then it would follow that if a mathematician asserts that 2+2=4 and a fullblown crackpot says that assuming a holistically ample value to the number 2 we get that 2+2=22, then it would actually mean that 2+2=13. This, surprisingly, is how journalism sometimes works, which is a crying shame.

I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but "do your own research" is a very unfortunate turn of phrase because it is generally used by conspiracy theorists and such, i.e. people who tend not to be able to do any kind of proper research and who have a tremendous confirmation bias and tend to confuse things like correlation and causation and may not be able to apply much logic to their thinking, either.