Laidlaw's Rule
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Linked for the commentary:
(fun fact: judging by the url he links to, we have the same source: the Grammar Girl podcast)
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I approve @Luhmann 's Law.
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@Luhmann said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@Zecc said in Laidlaw's Rule:
I approve @Luhmann 's Law.
And then the boobs come out.
(.)(.)
...... why are you starting at my eyes like that?
.... pervert..
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@Luhmann said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@accalia said in Laidlaw's Rule:
pervert..
And then the murders began.
no, and then the boobs came out.
du-uh.
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@accalia Unless you're watching Game Of Thrones, in which case, both happen
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well, yes, but it's GoT.... they're not so much murders as.... Death, laboring under a far too aggressive quota. Some god messed up when setting up the world and that caused Death to become massively overworked, and it causes everyone who is currently offcamera to be banging like bunnies to keep the population up enough to survive this weeks quota.
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@accalia
At least the Lannister family has an excuse for their... proclivities...
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@accalia ...GoT is another thing I'm going to have to add to The List, isn't it?
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@RaceProUK said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@accalia ...GoT is another thing I'm going to have to add to The List, isn't it?
i dunno. you dropped the name first, i just abreviated it.
do you need to add it to the list?
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@accalia Well, I've only seen one esipode, and all I hear about it is how good it is (and how violent and full of boobs it is), so... maybe?
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yeah, it's a good one
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@RaceProUK said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@accalia Well, I've only seen one esipode, and all I hear about it is how good it is (and how violent and full of boobs it is), so... maybe?
Pretty much where I am with it.
There doesn't seem to be an easy legal way for me to get the series, so if I do watch it it will probably be from piracy once I've got my OSMC Raspberry Pi actually streaming from my PC. The books I'll probably start once I've read my backlog of Michael G Manning, Brandon Sanderson, H.P. Lovecraft and Robin Hobb, so not for some time
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@RaceProUK said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@accalia Well, I've only seen one esipode, and all I hear about it is how good it is (and how violent and full of boobs it is), so... maybe?
I've only seen a couple episodes (I don't have HBO - I caught them when staying in a motel). I like the books better.
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@dcon The books are definitely better, but...
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@Yamikuronue I figure if I start re-reading all of them now (after finishing my current queue), I'll still finish before the next book is published.
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@dcon
Personally I have "before the last book is published" as my date in the death pool for Mr. Martin.
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@Yamikuronue said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@dcon The books are definitely better, but...
I think YMMV. My ex got me a box set; I struggled valiantly through the first book but gave up after that because I just found George R. R. Martin's writing style so God damn tedious.
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@heterodox said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@Yamikuronue said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@dcon The books are definitely better, but...
I think YMMV. My ex got me a box set; I struggled valiantly through the first book but gave up after that because I just found George R. R. Martin's writing style so God damn tedious.
I kind of agree. Martin has the usual writing style of fantasy authors that want to show you how complex a universe they have built, so he jumps from one character to a totally unrelated one in each chapter, and crams in tons of tedious back story and descriptions. And then you finally get to something new and exciting happening, and... it's the end of the chapter and he moves on to a different character!
OK, it's not as bad as Jordan's Wheel of Time, but still, I wouldn't say he has a great writing style. The story is a lot of fun, but it would in my opinion be miles better if it was at least twice shorter.
But to be honest, and as I said above, this is the weakness of most modern fantasy writers. I feel like they see Tolkien and his rich universe as the absolute model to emulate. SF writers are less affected by that -- not unrelated, I think, to the fact that the great SF writers that set up the genre were not so focused on the background universe and instead just got on with their stories (see Clarke or Asimov, and many others of the same period. OK, Verne was very verbose in his descriptions, but that is also writing from, literally, another century...).
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@boomzilla said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@RaceProUK said in Laidlaw's Rule:
Yeah... no.
Yeah, you gotta go through twitter to get by the WSJ paywall.
That is a bigger than having a paywall.
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@obeselymorbid Meh...I think the outrage over partial measures like this is silly. And then the murders began.
It will generally stop the casual reader, and possibly (in the WSJ's case) convert into a sale. It also allows columnists to promote their columns, which probably doesn't detract too much from overall paywall stuff. I doubt most people interested in reading the WSJ are on twitter to begin with or are willing to use the workaround on a regular basis.
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@boomzilla said in Laidlaw's Rule:
willing to use the workaround on a regular basis
It's easier to just google the headline and get pretty much the same story in a free newspaper.
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@obeselymorbid said in Laidlaw's Rule:
It's easier to just google the headline and get pretty much the same story in a free newspaper.
Well, this one is a regular opinion column written by a WSJ editor.
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@xaade said in Laidlaw's Rule:
@da-Doctah said in Laidlaw's Rule:
Or song lyrics
Amazing Grace and then the murders began.
Cool! Now do the lyrics for the end-credits song from WKRP In Cincinnati!
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Red tooth bartender and then the murders began?
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@boomzilla said in Laidlaw's Rule:
It also allows columnists to promote their columns, which probably doesn't detract too much from overall paywall stuff.
Unless you've got my setup on mobile (third-party Twitter client, somewhat non-standard browser) in which case it doesn't work at all and clicking a link directly from Twitter gets the normal paywalled version. And then the murders begin.
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@heterodox said in Laidlaw's Rule:
I think YMMV. My ex got me a box set; I struggled valiantly through the first book but gave up after that because I just found George R. R. Martin's writing style so God damn tedious.
You got further than me, then. I've tried to get into the series more than once, but I can never make it past the first few chapters.
From what I hear, though, I'm probably not missing much.
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@masonwheeler said in Laidlaw's Rule:
I can never make it past the first few chapters
I had that problem for a long time. There's a good book in there, but he spends the first third or so of the book trying to attract boring people so he can trick them into reading something more interesting than they were expecting, so it's all "yes yes, fantasy religion, fantasy wolves, fantasy knights, big epic quest, chosen children. Snore." The show zooms right past that section in a few episodes, so it's not as tedious. But then it never gets as rich and deep as the books do, for obvious reasons, so once it gets good you miss out on a lot.
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@masonwheeler said in Laidlaw's Rule:
I can never make it past the first few chapters
You're failing out just before the murders begin!
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@Yamikuronue said in Laidlaw's Rule:
fantasy wolves
That part still bugs the crap out of me. Maybe it's just a failing of the show, but it's like.
Grr, I'm Ned Flanders. Oh look, out of fucking no where, he's some dire wolf cubs. Y'all want one each?
Yay!{wolves are never seen again for episodes on end}
oh no i in trouble
(out of nowhere) Grr {bite}
thank u for saving me Super Mega Awesome Wolf, even though it's weird that I'm on screen for hours at a time, and you are never there, almost like the writers forgot we all had these fucking huge wolves by our sides 24/7 and then HBO didn't pay people to animate wolves by our sides 24/7, and you only show up for, like, 15 seconds to bite someone.
bye {poof}
and he's gone again wow, dire wolves, so critical to the plot, yo yo yo.
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Castle Vagon is markedly more quiet than usual, that is since nearly all the knights of the garrison rode east at the Earl's summoning three days ago. And then the murders began.
Not technically a book but not bad actually.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Laidlaw's Rule:
Maybe it's just a failing of the show
yeah, 100%. They just don't want to pay for the wolves every episode.
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What kind of moon is this? Not the bright, gleaming moon of slashing happiness, no indeed. And then the murders begin.
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I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.And then the murders began.
Works with poems too
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@Yamikuronue I admit I haven't seen any of the show since the start of series 2 but so far as I did see it they're not even very good giant wolves. They were quite obviously huskies and most of the time their size was really obvious forced perspective.
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@CarrieVS said in Laidlaw's Rule:
They were quite obviously huskies
THANK YOU I am so sick of "this playful huskie is really a savage wolf!" bs. In later seasons there's a bit where a starved dog eats someone, starting by trotting up all playful and happy and licking him. I'm like... wtf.
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@Yamikuronue I get that casting real wolves is probably many times more difficult and expensive than casting huskies, but I've heard that nearly all "wolves" in film and TV* are dogs and they're usually more convincing.
And if you've seen Lord of the Rings you'll know that forced perspective filming can be pretty damned convincing too.
*Nature documentaries aside, obviously
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@CarrieVS said in Laidlaw's Rule:
*Nature documentaries aside
and then the boobs come out
Oh you really where talking about nature stuff ...
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Dwarf Fortress work orders can have conditions like "number of murdered dwarf corpses is greater than one". But you can apply all modifiers to all item types, so:
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...and then the murders began.
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For those wondering, my custom CSS still works.
But I'm adding a new rule:
body.page-topic-22204 .composer-container button.composer-submit::after { content: ' and Let The Murders Begin'; }
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@Zerosquare said in Tesla Owners Get a Little Surprise:
I wonder if we could write a short story using nothing but quotes from signatures.
- Hi, I'm Tsaukpaetra, I'm an awesome and chill teetotaler!
- lolgf
- Sometimes I wanna bang but...
- Tell it to the one-legged man, so he can bump it off down the road.
- ...the state is controlling my destiny and my penis
- Here come the test results: "You are a horrible person."
- I think I'm much more humble than you could understand.
- Life will never be fair.
- I did punch a baby once.
- We weren't even testing for that!
- Don't give me that look. It made more sense in my head. I am 93% peaceful.
- Obviously something is broken. I hate computers.
- Just assume everything I say is satirical!
- And here's Boomzilla to tell me all my ideas are stupid.
- How do I edit this?
- Fuck you, give me money!(awkward silence)
And then the murders began. If anyone knows how it turned out for the miners in The Expanse, please let me know.