What, and take any responsibility for the Commons?

Are the real communists kept around back with the real scotsmen?

I used to have carefully organized folders so I could accurately represent my face when.

It’s been a while since I’ve done kitchen work but I’ve never had an automatic lifter. We just had someone being paid to cook food and watch the fryer. The issues start piling up in places that make the cashier handle front, drive-thru, fryer, whatever else all at once rather than pay an extra $150 in labor for the day.

Individually? Maybe. That’s why worker solidarity is important. Let the bastard replace the whole team while you’re out front protesting shit pay and long hours.

I had a Game Boy, that got a lot of use.

Aliens.

Hey Withers, here’s 100 gold to turn a better character into whatever role I need.

The unintended consequence is genocide. When people need permission to reproduce that introduces a convenient method to keep certain people from having kids.

Normalize calling people fucking idiots to their stupid faces.

A strike means things stop. A protest vote means things go backwards, as if there was an entire workforce of scabs waiting to swoop in when the strike starts. There’s no leverage.

It’s a mutually beneficial relationship now, assuming responsible ownership. And excluding brachycephalic breeds, other predictable and preventable genetic illnesses or predispositions to injury, and other stuff that could reasonably be lumped into “responsible ownership” but deserve special recognition.

But yeah, dogs are happy as shit when they get to do the thing’s we’ve bred them to do.

That only applies to the movie, and anyway it’s easily explained by the The Ring not wanting to switch to Sam in that moment. In the book Sam totally puts on the ring to trick some orcs and it tries to tempt him with the power of gardening really well.

The Ring would reach out and influence people around the bag. The Ring would tempt whichever eagle carried Frodo. It had to be a being that had enough control to keep hold of The Ring but not enough ambition to be controlled by it. And even then IIRC it wasn’t actually possible to destroy it willingly, Eru Ilúvatar stepped in and gave Gollum a tiny nudge off the cliff.

Consciousness being tied to the physical body isn’t “unscientific”, it’s the only option that can be tested and studied.

Pointless regulations? I don’t want a bunch of short-sighted yahoos in the woods diverting water and over-harvesting natural resources with no oversight. That shit affects everyone downstream, literally and metaphorically.

At least they’re hydrating potato chips. Kidney failure is a big problem for cats, sticking to an all-wet diet is already better than average.

Making languages is way harder than just writing a story, and fantasy isn’t trying to be an accurate reflection of real world geo-social stratification. Everyone speaks the same language because it often would be a worse narrative if the characters couldn’t communicate. (Not always, but plot-by-misunderstanding is at least as lazy as writing in one tongue)

There needs to be (imo) a reason beyond realism to make that part of the story. Tolkien was exceptional, but he was using different races and languages to make up a creation mythology for the UK. The history and culture and differences were arguably more important than a ring and some hobbits.

Tad Williams also made up a few languages for his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. There they serve to make the world feel bigger, with far-off exotic lands and ancient mysteries.

Oh and you brought up swearing in your first post. De-modernizing language is way harder than it seems. Taking out “god damn” is easy, but that also links to gosh, darn, dang, “goodbye” is from God be with ye, “gossip” from god-sibling, the days of the week all reference Earth myths and have to go, “knight” doesn’t make sense unless they had a French equivalent language to take words from…

Narrative shorthand is still important. Using existing accents, and leaning somewhat into stereotype, can communicate a great deal of context without spending a ton of time on fictional history. Is it lazy? Often, yes. But it works; just like shape language and color coding are useful tools for visual storytelling.

It’s so established in the way we tell stories that avoiding these tropes is a deliberate subversion that can be thought-provoking or distracting.

“…depopulating is not actually necessary in our journey for sustainability.” Illustrating this point in the comment you replied to.

If we can reach asteroid mining that will solve a lot of scarcity issues.