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there is no nuance option because i think everyone would choose it otherwise

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hmm. Andor series finale is kind of just bad?

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Unironically doing tremendous things for my mental health to have a roommate with the correct sort of relationship with that I can use them as a guinea pig/review board for whatever I happen to be cooking and enjoy how much they like it more than their own dinner.

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And a pasta dinner

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Abhari Atlas - An Introduction to the Outer Seas

When the Celestial Host cast down and butchered the Arch-Demons of the lower depths and from them made Creation, they did not do so with a single mind, or in a single effort. The Inner World upon which you and I walk is perfectly formed, and aligned with every principle of True and Beauty - it is for this reason that the Great Gods of Heaven believed it a suitable home for the sublime Order of man and spirit we know as civilization. Make no mistake, I am no Godsemeren pollyanna - the Inner World is replete with heresy and witchcraft, with demons and apostates and every other horror. But it is full, too, of honor and beauty, of loyalty and piety, and of all the countless Glories which obedience to the Chain of Being and true Religion allow. 

But the Inner - or, as I have elsewhere argued it should be more rightly called, the Higher - World was the Celestial Divines’ masterwork, not their first attempt. In ages past, the learned and pious believed that it was built upon the ruins of these previous efforts, and it was from this imperfection that the taint of demology and witchcraft first seeped into the world. I am loathe to contradict such august and ancient sources, but in our modern age this has been proven false - the prototypes and failed attempts at the creation of the World were not destroyed or built over, they were instead cast down and hidden away, or put by the Heavens to some lesser purpose suitable to their failings and what virtues they had. 

There is a great diversity among the nations and the peoples of the Higher World and so the first service provided by a study of the Outer Seas is a contrast by which their similarities might be seen. They are all, for example, human, born imbued with a mortal soul and an honoured place in the Chain of Being. Thus, it is only through sin or tragedy that their form becomes misshapen or corrupted - this is not the case for the greater part of the creatures whose crude facsimiles of government and culture populate most Outer Seas. Not all, of course - some come close to the perfection of the Higher World, their peoples only barely distinguishable from our own. Others are earlier and less finished prototypes, or else abandoned due to some fundamental corruption or flaw, and their natives the same. Yet others were the prisons of great Titans or other fallen Angels, and even if they were once filled with true humanity, ages of capricious interference and corruption have left their descendents weakened or deformed in some manner, either in body or soul. They are not demons, or even goblins, but obvious signs of this inhumanity in visage or bearing, and hereditary tendencies to some particular corruption, abound. It is for these reasons and more that no Outer Sea has produced true Civilization or true Religion on its own, and none have proved capable of equalling the achievements or resisting the arms of the Higher World without the open support of another fully human power (however corrupt it might be). 

It was through just that corruption that the Outer Seas were first discovered - for who but warlocks and apostates would ever cut their way through the skein of the world into the abyss beyond, without any surety that there was a solitary thing to be found? Yet the piety and virtue of the Hierarch then ruling in Imir was soon rewarded with a method of invoking the grace and power of Heaven and its Sublime Will which opened the way for the World-Empire’s own ships. The methods and engines are closely guarded trade secrets of the relevant guilds and orders, but in any case require great ocean-going vessels and occulted prayers and rites that are in every case beyond the means of any lacking the genius of true humanity. 

The methods by which Outer Seas are charted are occulted, but their organization is obvious and clear, arranged in harmonious alignment such that their cosmic distance to the Higher World and the ease with which they can be reached mirrors the severity of their flaws and corruption. Thus the Pearl Sea, one of the nearest and first-charted, is almost indistinguishable from the heartlands of the Empire, and its populace - once winnowed in the Crusade that won it - so close to full humanity to be as worthy of the name as a great many peasants along the Empire’s other marches and borderlands. Thus also, though less happily, the Onyx Sea where the Celmean League’s colonies and daughter-cities have recruited from and interbred with the existing populace so eagerly with no loss of skill or vigor - and where under the Lord Regent’s Tyranny the Empire’s own holdings were lost entirely in one disastrous war after another.

Most Seas are not so blessed of course. Arrayed in an astral orrery, they spiral out, descending from the Higher World and growing more unfinished and flawed in perfect sequence. The remainder that are so close to true reality that a layman would not notice the difference are so small and marginal as to not be worth contesting the claims other principalities have made on them. The next great prizes are middling seas, obviously unfinished and dangerous to both body and soul to sail, yet full of riches and opportunity for glory that explain why the Gods Above allowed mortal eyes to chart the course to them. Here are the great prisons and blasphemous ateliers of Titan and Fae, the kingdoms of oxen walking on two hooves and birds conversing wholly through the fractured words of their long-dead trainers. This, then, is the land where legends and fortunes are made, and where treasure fleets and privateer squadrons sail for under every flag. They are also, as a whole, the theaters within which civilized powers now compete to outdo each other in colonial glory, and where each struggles to put the native creatures encountered to their most beneficial purpose. The rare examples where the creatures have not yet been brought to heel by one power or another - the cavern-dwelling clans of the Iron Sea, mostly famously - remain so by the combination of unusually belligerent and untrusting natives and a lack of treasures to justify the cost. 

At an even further remove are the Seas so primitive and distant from the Divine Plan that the dangers yet outweigh the riches and revelations they offer. Thus, the Starlit Sea, where there is neither dawn nor moon nor horizon, and the stars above are reflected by the glittering heralds of ruin beneath the waves. Thus the Whispering Depths, where any wind can be bought only with the sacrifice of a mortal soul whose breath might move it - and whose voice and secrets then taunt any who hear them for a year and a day. Thus, most of all, the Abyss itself, as dark and depthless as any entrance to Perdition, whose waters swallow ship and swimmer alike.

In the remainder of this treatise, then, I shall focus my efforts on those middling seas, and most specifically on the demi- and in-humans creatures which call them home and which must be truly brought to heel for the Empire’s banner to settle itself in their lands…

-A Discourse on the Higher and Lower Seas, by Brother Adrien of the Poor Fellows of the Sacred Pyre. Despite his later censure for Hierocratic sympathies the work remains a standard reference throughout the Holy Illyrin Empire

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The disadvantage here is fifty people lining up to use exactly 3 single-occupancy bathrooms at different corners of the building during the 10-minute intermission.

The overlap in like, general charitable do-gooding-ness and also the need for decent acoustics means I have gotten invited to a surprising number of explicit 'queer choir performances' devoted to raising awareness about food insecurity or something that are hosted in giant old churches downtown.

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The perspective I bring to the early seasons' competence porn is basically 'what if Batman was 2 guys instead of 1' and viewing him as the fighty half of a superhero made it easier to stomach, imo.

my resentment of reese personofinterest for being arbitrarily good at all fights has decreased. he's grown on me and I've accepted it as just a core part of the premise. i still don't think I'll ever like him as much as eliot leverage, my one other reference for "network tv man who is arbitrarily good at fights" but his perpetual smugness and sass is now largely endearing rather than annoying.

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Listening to a friend describe their rebound relationship in a way that makes it increasingly clear the only possible thing holding this together is the sex being good.

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Unlike other African felids, no infanticidal behavior has been observed in the cheetah.[13] Scientists hypothesize that this is because many cheetah litters have cubs from different fathers and males would not want to kill any cubs in case they killed their own.[13] The promiscuity of female cheetahs helps to protect the threatened species not only by preventing infanticide but also by bringing greater genetic diversity.[15] This genetic diversity averts inbreeding from occurring and widens the genetic pool of the species.[15]

im imagining Joe Rogan talking about this in a really excited way

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you kill one journalist with a bonesaw and everybody loses their minds for a decade. you kill 21,000 workers on an obviously ridiculous construction project in the desert and everybody treats it as a factoid, somehow

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Anyway listening to Fallen Fruit by Lorde turned into a canon and set to an organ and an electric guitar is a 10/10 experience.

The overlap in like, general charitable do-gooding-ness and also the need for decent acoustics means I have gotten invited to a surprising number of explicit 'queer choir performances' devoted to raising awareness about food insecurity or something that are hosted in giant old churches downtown.

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The overlap in like, general charitable do-gooding-ness and also the need for decent acoustics means I have gotten invited to a surprising number of explicit 'queer choir performances' devoted to raising awareness about food insecurity or something that are hosted in giant old churches downtown.

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Slap dash but delicious bagels and lox for weekend lunch

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Also I kind of hate the "melting pot myth" thing. "America is not a melting pot, it's a salad bowl"... that might be a thing you want to be true, but I don't really think it's descriptively true. There are of course big cultural differences between different minority communities in America but also everyone is trading culture with everyone else here, descriptively speaking. Everyone is of course assimilating to some degree to white American culture, pretty much everyone is picking up significant parts of black culture, everyone has been influenced by other smaller minority groups to some degree. It doesn't make it false just because you label it appropriation and proscribe it. It's still happening, just, descriptively. Melting pot whether anybody likes it or not, be that for left-wing or right-wing reasons, or whatever. It's just objectively happening.

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god I love Chipdrop. yes, my startup is pioneering WaaS (woodchips as a service)

Or woodchips as a disservice, as the case may be

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A couple of friends are clearly getting kind of legitimately freaked out because the rural cottage they booked for a romantic anniversary weekend has been renovated and furbished with an astonishingly consistent circus theming and it really is taking all my restraint to keep from calling them babies and saying the carousel shadow-casting overhead lightshades and the big top patterns on all the doorways just unironically look really cool.