@Terah I actually support that idea. However, now that ELL has developed its own identity, it will need to be a union of equals - it would be unfair and infeasible to unilaterally fold ELL back into ELU.
Coupling this with the policy of some at ELU to down-vote even good answers to discourage answering 'off-topic' questions, I wonder whether we've ever had the following happen: an answer gets down-voted in ELU, migrated with its question to ELL, then gets up-voted by the same people.
@Shafizadeh You keep asking the exact same kind of question. Questions start with "How do I..." or "How can I..." When you start with "How to ..." it is a headline for an article that describes how to do something. It is not a question.
it's double-VIP points at Lego which means I'm going to go shopping this weekend.
I'm dangerously close to developing an addiction to ordering things online.
I think that sums it up.
Oh, I've been spending some time on Bumble, a dating app, doing research into how the app works. My profile says "I'm not here for dating" and my profile pic is Tesla.
You'd be amazed what a good response Tesla gets. The ladies loooove Tesla.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Tesla as in Nikolai Tesla? My first reading nowadays is entirely Tesla Motors, so I was wondering why the ladies are so into electric cars.
@DeltaEscher probably causes nausea and headaches. like everything else, especially if you're a sentient being forced to stare into the bottomless dark beyond dark abyss of ambition personified by the guy next to you taking over the arm rest.
@Mitch I liked the second Matrix. The problem is that it is half a story, and the other half of the story is so dumb it retroactively ruins the first half.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 She isn't sure. She was going to consult with an orthodontist. The problem is that we're not doing anything about some of the cavities because we keep expecting these to fall out. The longer they stay in there, the worse it gets.
@DeltaEscher the mean has the highest probability, but that highest probability isn't all that high and there are many more instances that are not the mean.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I see that now. I also thought you meant Musk. But then you'd probably say, "if I meant the owner of Tesla, I would have said 'My pic is the owner of Tesla'". You sure say a lot for someone who didn't say all these things.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I can't actually remember movie plots much anymore. I just remember my vague impressions. So it allows me to watch again without any spoilers other than vague apprehension.
@Mitch yeah I haven't seen the matrix 2 in years. But I remember enjoying it a lot and not thinking it was dumb whatsoever. No dumber than the first, anyway, which has its dumb moments despite being awesome.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 when reseeing the first movie, I'm surprised how good it is despite your mentioned stupidities, all because association with of the entire stupidities that came later. I can't judge your assessment of II because I haven't wanted to rewatch it. I get aesthetically nauseous even flipping through it on TV.
Which one was the rave in, when they won something?
Because The Matrix is an illusion. He's still inside The Matrix that is the symbolic bullshit that anyone who has smoked dope has thought about before.
OK here's an exercice de style, choose a literary trope at random and write a paragraph where every sentence exhibits that trope. anacoluthon. parataxis. what is the trope about saying you're not gonna talk about something but by doing so you just did?
@KitZ.Fox I wanted to like it by the premise, and it kept me going and wanting to see how it turned out. but at the end was disappointed. I should have stopped at episode n-1. Also the orgy scenes were stupid. I like my orgy scenes to be well reasoned and insightful.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 one could arguably argue that the HP tXotY series of movies were better than the books because they cut out 100's and hundred's of pages of young adult novel whining about feelings.
Not that feelings are intrinsically bad. Just ... Rowling's success made her uneditable (no one had the courage to say 'pages 150 through 650 add nothing, cut them'
@KitZ.Fox I don't think it was the last episode that did it. just know that that was all sort of put out the fire. and really the orgy scene was totally unmotivated
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'm not arguing, but that is the case for all adaptations. novels are too long to fit into a screenplay, and 'inspired-by's are almost separate works of art.
@Mitch yes. well, that's just it though. I think they should have changed the story more to fit the medium, or else changed the medium to fit the story (as they did with book 7: it's two movies)
Just a short list of things I dislike of HP's world: 1. Wizard money is based on prime numbers, which is stupid, which implies wizards can't do math. 2. Wizards are somehow totally incompetent with regards to muggles, despite most of them knowing muggles. Things like telephones render wizards completely incompetent, yet a magical device that had the same UI would not. 3. The wizard world is very very dangerous and nobody realizes it. love potions are roofies. polyjuice potion. memory charms. etc
I mean the make up out of the blue some magical power, and...
...and they go ahead and prescribe it's affect, like time travel or potions,...
but it always seems like if they could do that, if they had the technology to do that, or the magical power to do that, that despite its limitations...
why couldn't you use some other comparable tech or magic power to entirely avoid that situation, or solve the problem facing the protagonist immediately.
You're in a fight with a super powerful wizard and expelliarmus works on them. Why doesn't the wizard apparate to right behind you and punch you in the neck?
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 My rejoinders: 1. It's pretty obvious wizards are math idiots because frankly they don't need it and if they did they could use magic to make the equations come out right.
2. UI? magicians just think it what they want. Telephones... pfft.
3. good point. they should all be besotted, cat-faced, and dead.
And most spells, be they the killing curse (abra cadabra) or the disarming curse seem to shoot from wands like slow bullets from a gun or arrows from a bow. So it's easy to miss... you'd think marksmanship would be a major course in school.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 YOu can't do that because there's a spell, for which the magic-tech allows that there could be some magic spell to undo it in many variations.
@Mitch The trifecta of memory charms (easy enough an advanced school kid can do them), roofie potions, and polyjuice would allow anyone to commit any sex crime whenever.
But also, why would anyone not alter their appearance to make themselves always beautiful. This is a faerie thing, glamour, and that's what they do with it.
I mean, we're talking about a society that enslaves house elves. They'd have no problem with prostitutes.
@KitZ.Fox In fact, Hermione does this exact thing. Her teeth were too large, and a spell made them comically over-sized, so the hospital person restored them to their "right" size, but H- lied about the size so they were smaller (and thus more beautiful) than before.
In later books there is a ret-con that explains that magic can't create food.
There is no justification for this at all, it's just one of the laws of magic.
of course, there's no reason why that should be the case.
in HP:MoR (fan fic) the author tries to impose some rules on the world-building with varying degrees of success. Many of the HP world-buliding rules make no sense and the protagonist just shakes his head at it.
Like, why are all spells weird latin-ish phrases?
What do wizards in China say when disarming someone?
What about non-rhotic British people? "Expelliahmus! Bloddy 'ell, it din' wo'k agin!"
Sometimes spells only work if you do a gesture and a phrase together. Other spells just require the phrase. some spells obviously require a bit of mental work because the same keyword performs varying results depending on what you want, while other spells work even without knowing what they do... just the incantation is enough.
e.g. SectumSempra causes cuts to appear. It's very dangerous. Harry uses it without knowing what it's for.
But the memory charm, Obliviate, is one single word that allows Hermione to change her parents' memories so that they forget they have a daughter and think they're australian.
Avada Kevadra, the killing curse, only works if you're powerful enough and really mean it.
Also, it'd seem that there'd be a zillion ways to kill with magic.
but there's only one "killing curse"
Where's the "apparate an object into a person's brain" curse? The "stop their heart" curse? The "replace all the blood in their body with alcohol" curse?
@Cerberus Sure, I can compare them, but it doesn't mean I can't find one "awesome" for qualities that the other lacks even if it doesn't do as good a job where they overlap.
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Hi @Mitch @DeltaEscher @KitZ.Fox @Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 @Cerberus I came back, lol.