Random Dorkiness

The most terrifying part of having memory issues is when you can feel something from 5 seconds ago be thrown out the window and there's an empty hole where it once was. You remember that you forgot something.

Braving the sorceress' tower with sword in hand, but it turns out I've wandered into an Arthurian milieu, so instead of subjecting me to humiliating and vaguely kinky transformations she just exploits a technicality in some long-forgotten oath of honour to send me on an incredibly inconvenient quest. I don't know why I keep swearing those.

#signs unclear if this is still a kink thing

When you're unable to solve an IT problem at work, there really is nothing quite like having it escalated all the way up the ladder. With every step, there is a degree of smugness about how real my problem is, and that yes, I was right to have trouble with this.

You can get a minor version of this if one IT person solves it but they spend a bunch of time repeating things you’ve already tried and when they eventually solve it it’s by doing something you wanted to try but didn’t have the requisite permissions to do

Was in a situation where neither I, nor my boss knew what was causing the problem, so we ended up calling one of the head engineers, and ive never experienced anything quite as validating as the moment where said head engineer, after spending several minutes just staring at the problem, quietly said "what the fuck"

The core appeal of Willy Wonka is that he's a nigh-omnipotent maniac who uses his near limitless powers over reality to trick shitty people into killing themselves. You can't make him the protagonist of a whimsical coming of age tale - you have to treat him like Jason Voorhees, or Dracula, or any other horror icon. Give him some new victims and new interesting kills and set him loose, that's all audiences want.

I feel like I watched a somewhat different movie...

oh i'm going to misusle and straight up fuckle this knowledge so badly

Writing is for communication. Sir Terry knew very well that anything's allowed if it helps you communicate something effectively.

Scooby-Doo is a dog who can talk, which is amazing, and he largely uses his powers of speech to communicate how scared he is of ghosts and monsters, and basically the only thing his owners do is drive him around the country putting him inside various haunted houses and such. I wish I could take Scooby-Doo aside, I want to say to him, these people are not your friends.

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)