dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

And knives.

And beans.

I imagine the majority of the current crop of motor vehicle owners are not quite smart enough to realize that the hood even opens to allow access to the engine bay… Nor what parts of it get hot. Or too hot. Or are safe to access, etc. And in our modern litigious society there is simply far too much that can go wrong with this to make it worthwhile for any manufacturer to include as a deliberate feature. Like, rodent infestation in engine bays is already an issue. Imagine adding (potentially forgotten and abandoned!) food to the mix.

Edit: Another wrinkle I thought of is a lack of consistent temperature control. Your engine is designed to move your car, not remain at a consistent temperature.

The utility is also rather limited when you have access to a microwave or a convenience store. Or even a convenience store with a microwave in it, as many do.

So yeah, you can do it to be clever if you like but it’s not cut out to be mainstream activity.

Maybe the rights went cheap. Or maybe you’re right.

For what it’s worth there was an NES game back when the Pizza Cats were originally notionally relevant. It was alright.

All you authors, columnists, and other motherfuckers not using the Oxford comma are now in big trouble.

Precisely that.

I will add that Sheila Broflovski (a.k.a. Kyle’s Mom) through her sheer incessant nagging (and also blame shifting away from herself and the other parents as spelled out in “Blame Canada”) misses the mark so far that she manages to incite a hot war with Canada that gets enough people killed to spill sufficient blood to fulfill an ancient evil prophecy that literally incarnates both Satan himself and Saddam Hussein’s revenant form back onto the face of the Earth.

Note that this not only predated Saddam’s actual real world death, but Matt and Trey also successfully predicted the eruption of the Karen trend, probably a good decade or so before it risen to the height – or sunk to the depths – it’s achieved today. Although senseless moral panics were well known and quite popular in the '80’s and '90’s already, to the extent that they not only managed to accurately predict the response to their own movie, but also parody it within the same movie.

I think the hardest part would be successfully ambushing Voldy

He’s not omniscient, is he? In addition to being quite genre-blind, he’s also never demonstrated to have any clairvoyance or inherent extrasensory capabilities other than knowing when his name is spoken, which is presumably some kind of specific enchantment he uses to terrorize people.

A common rifle bullet travels faster than the speed of sound, and if you fired from a concealed location you could absolutely pop him right in the dome well before the sound of the gunshot even made it to him and before anyone knew you were there. All it would take would be a little scouting to research which graveyard he and his groupies are moping around in and anyone could do him from half a mile off with a $99 surplus Mosin-Nagant.

I suppose it’s possible he walks around with a twenty mile wide circle of detection on himself or some horseshit, but given the aforementioned genre-blindness he’s probably got whatever it is tuned to be looking for other magic users or harmful spells and not, e.g., the Bouncing Betty that some clever asshole left right in front of his crypt.

With Bethesda you can never really tell if it is deliberate malice or simply their typical blistering incompetence. But the end result is the same either way.

I think it’s more that hysterical moral guardians and corporate boobs only see the traditionally casino-like superficial imagery of cards, dice, spades, clubs, slots, etc. and instantly knee-jerk themselves into declaring it “immoral” without actually bothering to take the twelve seconds required to experience the gameplay. At which point they would immediately realize that they are wrong.

This is Kyle’s Mom’s version of only reading the headline, or not bothering to look beyond the dust jacket and only screeching about imaginary content that exists only inside their own assumptions and based purely on the picture on the cover.

That’s really the rub. The notion that magic “knows” what technology is and draws the line at some arbitrary point where it suddenly rearranges the laws of reality around itself so that these devices won’t work specifically in the way that humans expect them to raises the following two horrifying possibilities:

One, whatever force is actually behind magic must be intelligent in and of itself, even if only in a brutish and rudimentary way. It would take a staggering array of quite specific and tailor-made microspells or localized tweaks in physics to make all types of Muggle technology fail to work consistently. Like, it’s not just enough to say “guns jam.” Does magic physically grab the hammer and stop it from falling? Does it block the firing pin? Does it rearrange the laws of chemistry so that oxidation reactions don’t happen? Does it stick its finger in the end of the barrel like Bugs Bunny?

Or, like, fountain pens. They work via exactly the same mechanism as quill pens, it’s just that they contain their own store of ink. Is there any other reason why a quill would work within Hogwarts but a fountain pen wouldn’t? Here in rational space, no. Absolutely not. So if that’s how it is, there must be something more going on behind the scenes and the fact that these bozos either haven’t noticed or worse, that they have noticed and just don’t care enough to investigate in any way whatsoever is equal parts creepy and infuriating.

So point two, given all of the above the force behind magic is also probably actively malevolent. Who knows what its agenda is keeping wizards locked in a kind of medieval stasis, or if it’s even doing so on purpose or just as a byproduct of its natural function, but either way it’s clearly not working in humanity’s best interest.

(There’s a third option as well, which is that it works this way because the author has such a poor grasp on reality that she thinks that guns/electronics/cars/whatever also work via some kind of “magic” which can thus be disrupted, which is possibly likely but also so stupid it makes my right eyebrow twitch just thinking about it. So we’ll leave it at that.)

You can start with his video praising the “freedom convoy” shitshow plus ranting about the usual talking points re: vaccines, masks, etc. which kind of did it for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeYVyhhHY-Y

Honestly, I’m amazed he hasn’t deleted it from his channel by now.

AvE (though I’m pretty sure he’s conservative)

You’re right. AvE went completely off the deep end during the height of Covid, and revealed that his being a scumbag isn’t just doing a bit for the camera.

We have like eight food trucks in the region and they’re all Taco trucks.

Well, we’ll have to ignore the gaping plot-induced stupidity on display by practically everyone throughout the entire story, because without it the books would have been quite short. So setting that aside, because I’m sure it’s been trampled to death already.

The complete unwillingness for the wizarding world to utilize even basic Muggle technologies and knowledge is absolutely baffling. It’s insinuated that they don’t need Muggle things because they can substitute them with magic which is “equivalent.” This is self-evidently hokum.

These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight, don’t use the Internet, and despite having literal magic at their disposal their communication systems (such as they are) are laughably inferior to common Muggle ones even in the context of the time period in which the story is supposedly set. Come on. Owls?

Magic users demonstrate basically no understanding of science and are all demonstrably the worse off for it, still having a nearly medieval understanding of how the world works, and rely on magic as a crutch to weakly compensate. This even when it’s obvious to an outside observer that a basic piece of mundane knowledge or technology would be not only easier and significantly less dangerous than whatever the fuck their homegrown solution is, but also more effective. This is treated in supplementary works by Rowling as if it’s a point of pride by wizards and witches who deliberately eschew anything of Muggle origin – even if this means going to great lengths to shoot themselves in the foot simply to maintain that attitude of aloofness, which only serves to underscore the sheer stupidity apparently heavily ingrained into magical culture.

The fact that neither Harry nor none of the other Muggleborn kids are puzzled by this, nor why they apparently deliberately fail to bring so much as a common yellow #2 pencil with them from the mundane world out of sheer habit makes zero sense. (And yes, this is touched upon in the already recommended Methods of Rationality.)

Magical consumer goods are also seriously customer hostile. Who the fuck thought even half of those things were a desirable marketable product? Is there an evil wizard version of Willy Wonka lurking around someplace? Think of all the pocket change a Muggleborn lad could make by bringing a case of jelly beans with him to school to sell to his classmates where you don’t have a one in twenty chance of one of them tasting like earwax. Or chocolates that can’t hop away from you when you aren’t looking. I mean, for fuck’s sake.

And following from the above, everyone is so concerned about the damage to the karma done by the unforgivable spells, or whatever, which is supposedly why nobody goes to all-out war with the Death Eaters. But then no one gets the brain cells together to realize that Voldemort and especially his goons are surely vulnerable to conventional weapons. All anyone has to do is camp in a corner with a shotgun and then call out they-who-must-not-be-named, enticing them to appear to simply get Swiss Cheesed before having clue one what’s going on. Maybe Voldy can’t be truly killed by any form of physical harm, but the entire premise of the story begins with the observation that he can be put to considerable inconvenience, putting him down for quite some time, and thus buy the protagonists plenty of time to figure out his stupid riddles and find all his horcruxes. Then simply drive over whatever’s left of him with a steamroller.

I am really much more interested in why all the food trucks seem to be taco trucks. It’s like it’s some kind of national conspiracy.

Where is the pasta truck, the stir fry wok truck, the BLT truck, the foie gras truck, etc.?

Especially since in the height of my pirating years during teenagerdom, no amount of cajoling or coercion could get me to pay for whatever it was because I didn’t have any money. Which not at all coincidentally was why I was pirating it in the first place.

These dweebs always operate from the frankly invalid preconception that if the pirate had not pirated the media they would have paid for it and therefore they’re “owed” a sale, but that’s not how it works. I imagine that if the vast majority of people were unable to pirate their thing, they simply would not watch/listen/read/play/consume the thing at all.

Hell, I run a ghost community. I did indeed port it over from reddit, just out of spite. But to be fair, it was pretty ghosty over there, too.

I’m not too worried about it. I just don’t have much to post about just now. It’s not hurting anything.