Carl Muckenhoupt @CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social

The church tower is never seen, but its bell signals the passage of time. Thus, the ending symbolizes the theft of time, a ritual that the goose uses to attain immortality

Fortune cookie tells me “REWARD YOURSELF WITH A MUCH-DESERVED GIFT” and I’m like “Hm, tricky. In order to do that, first I’ll have to deserve a gift”

When Ronald Reagan became president, much was made of his advanced age, and the question of whether he was too old to be president. He was 69. Basically all the likely candidates for 2020 -- Trump, Warren, Biden, Sanders -- are in their 70s.

The silicon valley entrepeneur is to society as the miller is to the stream. He doesn't build his elaborate constructions to improve it, or to change where it goes. He isn't really concerned with his effect on it at all. He just sees a source of natural energy and tries to harness it for his personal benefit.

I recall it being pointed out in one of the first story arcs in Sandman that the difference between a story with a happy ending and one with an unhappy ending is simply a matter of where you stop telling it.

Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance makes me think of this. It chooses to end the story at a great victory for the Gelflings, but the audience knows where the story goes after that.

1. Does your preferred programming language support unicode in identifiers?
2. Do your libraries have a constant named "PI"?

Y'know, I remember when some parts of the religious right was openly talking about voting for Trump as really being about voting for Pence, Trump being just a means of getting Pence into office.

You'd think that the people who thought like that would be in favor of impeachment, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way.

I can think of two plausible explanations:

First, although most of the signers of the Declaration were really enthuisiastic about slavery, some of them were against it, and not mentioning it might have been the only way to make a document everyone would be willing to sign.

Second, the worry that slavery might be abolished in the colonies was speculative. The long list I mentioned is a list of offences committed by the King, not offences people were worried that he might commit in the future.

I've seen it mooted lately that one of the motivations for the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery, which had recently been ruled to have no support in English law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart).

I have one question about this (which may sound rhetorical but actually isn't): If so, why isn't it mentioned at all in the Declaration of Independence? There's a long list of the colonists' reasons for rebelling right there, and slavery isn't mentioned even obliquely.

One of my favorite things is the way that multiple characters already have "no goose" signs tucked away, ready to deploy (for all the good it does them). At some point I recognized the implication: that this is not their first encounter with the horrible goose.

Then you get to the ending and it's basically confirmed that you're a recurring problem.

(Explanation for those who need one: Untitled Goose Game is not yet on Steam. I had been playing it via Epic Games.)

Guess I'll play that goose game some more! <opens "Recent" tab on Steam> Wait, where is it? I was just playing it a few hours ago, it should be in my Recent list! <types "goose" into search tab on Steam library, it comes up empty> This is bizarre, I don't understand what happened!

There are at least TWO DISTINCT WAYS to get the boy's glasses off. Makes me wonder what other alternate solutions there are that I'm missing.

I guess it's because "A is like B" often means not just "A and B have attributes in common" but "A has some of B's most prominent attributes", and that's an asymmetric relationship. In particular, it's saying something about A, but not about B.

Is resemblance symmetric? If A is like B, does it necessarily follow that B is like A?

My gut reaction is to say "yes, obviously", but the more specific examples I think of, the more absurd this seems.

OK so obviously Strong Bad's stand is named Limozeen and Strong Sad's is named sloshy but what are their powers?

I frankly think my parents' generation, who grew up before Saturday morning cartoons were much of a thing, tended to underestimate their cultural influence in the world their children inhabited.

I suspect that my own generation is making a similar mistake with videogames.

I genuinely don't understand the stance that there is no objective morality without God. If morality is objective with God, then it's also objective without Him, because that's what objective means. You can't have something that's both objective and dependent on external authority at the same time.

It really seems like what people mean when they say it is "I think there is no objective morality, but I can't say that out loud because it will make me sound wishy-washy".

Has anyone ever tried making a personality test along the lines of Meyers-Briggs or the various "Which Muppet Are You"-type amusements, but for astrological signs? Like figure out what sign you really belong in on the basis of your personality traits, and then you can read that sign's horoscopes from then on instead of the one for your birth date, which probably doesn't fit you as well

Don't Stop Bewildering