They look like youtube clickbait thumbnails

I personally subscribe to Asimov’s definition of sci fi:

Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.

While Dune is full of stuff that’s just straight up magic, the story is very much about how humans handle the technology, even when the in-universe basis of the technology is essentially magic. Long before the story ever started, we invented AI, freaked out about it, and then had to figure out how to replace computers in an interstellar society. The main overarching plot of the kwisatz haderach is about the consequences of the “invention” of precognition, even if the means of the invention are very fantastical. Several major factions are basically “what if we did super advanced selective breeding on humans for a thousand years”.

Star Wars, meanwhile, isn’t concerned with that sort of thing. It’s an adventure of good againt evil in the most classic of ways. It’s sword and sorcery. Even when a literal world-destroying superweapon is a major plot point, it doesn’t actually take much of any time to think about what this technology would do to society beyond “be very scary”. The obvious point of comparison is nuclear weapons in real life, and the development of those re-shaped culture enormously. We suddenly had this craze of imagination of all the things nuclear power might do. Humanity conquered the atom and we couldn’t stop dreaming up new ways to wield this power. Most of which were fucking insane. In Star Wars, a power orders of magnitude greater shapes society no more than a particularly big army.

Star Wars is only interested in the characters, whatever technology is present is set dressing to allow for fun visuals. That’s not something I say as a negative either. It’s perfectly valid and reasonable for a story to take more interest in its characters than its setting.

Disclaimer: I’m writing all this thinking only about the nine main series films. Especialy the original three. I’m sure someone has written Asimov-definition sci fi somewhere in the Star Wars canon, “legends” or not. I’ve just never delved into it much at all.

“content warning: bad” is my favourite part about this

It is technically spoilers for Outer Wilds and also the DLC

On Impulse by Animals as Leaders. It’s significantly less intense than a lot of their other work, and while there’s still plenty going on throughout it there is definitely some actual space for a vocalist to work on, rather than just adding another layer atop of an already full soundscape. There is also a video of one of the guitarists playing their song Behaving Badly with a guest appearance from a vocalist, and it’s awesome. I like that she sticks to simpler melodies with notes held for a long time, so that she’s not trying to compete with the business underneath and instead kind of floats gently just above it

I also think that the Last Jedi is one of the better Star Wars films, so I’m quite used to my Star Wars opinions being the subject of definitely very polite disagreement

Star Wars is absolutely fantasy that happens to be set in space

It looks to me like the first one was taken with the front-facing camera of a phone, and those often have a horizontal flip option

Svalbard, according to the photographer. It’s the second image in that gallery, there’s a little “info” button below the bottom right of the image

being too soft or too rough on the clutch is a matter of millimeters is ridiculous

On this point specifically, don’t think of it as millimetres of distance. You act based on how the car responds, not trying to hit a specific distance of pedal movement. You already do the same thing with your other foot - you don’t think “I need to press the accelerator down 55 mm”, you just press it a bit more or a bit less until the car is going the speed you want it to go at. Same deal with the clutch, there just isn’t a dial on the dashboard that tells you where you currently have it.

You’re right that driving involves processing a lot of information at once that nobody is particularly familiar with absorbing when they start. It is difficult and dangerous. That’s why there are tests and licences. But in much the same way that typing was once completely alien to you and is now something you do with little active thought, you’ll get there soon enough with the clutch too. And if you learn it now, you’ll never be caught out in a situation when there isn’t an automatic option available

Not to mention the disingenuousness of leaving out how they lost to Hindenburg and Ludendorff in between those two

Ethnic Russians were the largest proportion of the killed in action by quite a margin, let’s not pretend that they weren’t doing their part. Ukraine was too, of course - the people that pretend Ukraine just jumped ship and shacked up with the Nazis at the first opportunity are doing an unbelievable disservice to the millions of Ukrainians that died fighting the Nazis - but the huge population disparity between Russia and every other Soviet republic does show in the data.

The reason it exists is so bizarre too. It stems from the rivalry between the republics of Venice and Ragusea (modern day Dubrovnik). Venice was gradually asserting control over more and more of the Adriatic coastline and Ragusea didn’t much fancy sharing a land border with its rival, so it just gave up one tiny stretch of land each to its north and south to the Ottoman Empire. Venice would therefore have to come by sea or risk angering the Ottomans. Eventually Austria manages to annex the Dalmatian territory of both Venice and Ragusea, but the Ottomans still held those two tiny strips of land. The Ottomans were not typically on the best of terms with Austria, and they held on to the two tiny bits of Adriatic coast up until the treaty of Berlin in 1879. By this point, Neum (the Bosnian one) had been part of Ottoman Bosnia for 179 years, so the borders were pretty damn entrenched, and they survived through the shifts to Austrian, Yugoslav, and eventually independent Bosnian-Herzegovinan political structures. So a petty but clever move of hiding behind a bigger empire in the 1600s created the tiny bit of Bosnian coastline today.

There might be fan art, but I doubt there’s anything official. Besides how little attention anything Elsweyr generally gets (even the first ESO expansion into Elsweyr mostly had the khajiit as secondary characters), it originated in an unofficial source. Michael Kirkbride (a lead writer for Morrowind and several other important bits of Elder Scrolls stuff) wrote The Pocket Guide to the Empire, 2nd Edition with the input of community members. The Pocket Guide 1st edition came with the manual of Redguard, and the 3rd edition came with Oblivion. The 3rd edition contains a few references to the 2nd edition, which at the time had not actually been written, so Kirkbride decided to fill the gap. The relevant section, with explanatory notes from me that you can ignore if you know that stuff already, is:

So Mane ^1 saw that Khajiit was fighting itself more than usual and donned the hairs of his many littermates and his clan and his guards until he could bear no more and then palanquin-raced throughout the lands to repeat these words: “Woah-ho now, mad cat. You fight and fight but if you will give Mane just one moment, he will show something far better, for the Mane has had many hours and fine sugar to think this over. Come now, Palatiit ^2 ; come now, Ne Quiniit ^3 . Together, just this once, Khajiit will stand tall as Alkosh ^4 , cat upon cat upon cat. And in doing so, it will climb to the moon as it has been told so many times.”

Khajiit saw reason in these words and so it climbed and climbed, cat upon cat, for a hundred days. Much sugar ^5 was brought there to support the climbers and in the end Khajiit climbed high, so very high that it was in fact closer to Jo’Segunda ^6 than to Nirni ^7 below. At that moment, little Alfiq ^8 fell upwards and from there on Khajiit helped Khajiit up, which was down, until all were gathered there. This is where Khajiit intends to stay from now on, for who could know strife when walking sugar and not sand?

1 - The Mane is the religious leader of the khajiit 2 - Pa’alatiin, or Pellitine, is the southern half of Elsweyr. Elsweyr is the region that the khajiit are from, and had only recently been united when the 2nd edition was written in-universe 3 - Ne Quin’al or Anequine is the northern half of Elsweyr 4 - Alkosh is the khajiiti interpretation or version of the god of time and top god of most pantheons, generally known as Akatosh to the empire and therefore in most game material 5 - Moon sugar is a narcotic with great religious significance in khajiiti society. If you’ve come across skooma in the games, it is the heroin to moon sugar’s opium 6 - Jo’Segunda, or Secunda, is one of the two moons 7 - Nirni, or Nirn, is the planet that Tamriel and the games are set on 8 - An alfiq is a type of khajiit that physically resembles a housecat but which is every bit as sapient as any other khajiit. You can actually meet several in ESO, but sadly cannot play as one. The Legends card “Frazzled Alfiq” is probably my all time favourite piece of official Elder Scrolls art

Anyway Kirkbride’s unofficial stuff is not “canon”, for whatever that’s worth, but due to his significance to the setting and the fact that his writing is usually interesting, people often accept it as such. The story does not end there, though! The developers of ESO have a series called Loremaster’s Archive, which is an in-character lore Q&A series. In “Moon Bishop Hunal Answers Your Questions”, someone asked about the “cat upon cat” story.

“Our scribes are currently working on the transcription of the ‘Ri’datta-ssabavezi.’ In this story, your people are climbing ‘cat upon cat’ and finally reach Jone, where they founded something called ‘Lleswer.’ But we failed to understand the meaning of this. Some at the Guild suggest it has to be taken literally, but it seems impossible. Am I right?” – Iszara the Restless, Singer of the Scenarist Guild

Moon Bishop Hunal says, “It is the nature of myth to be true and yet at the same time mere allegory. Are you ‘right’? In this context, the question is without meaning. But do not be offended, hairless one. Many stories are puzzles with more than one solution.”

So, canon? Maybe, maybe not. But it got a nod, and people like it.

it’s heavily suggested that the elder scrolls is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game

I distinctly recall a conversation I had on reddit in which I irritated several Fallout fans by insisting that the Elder Scrolls is simply Europe in the world of Fallout and that the Chinese stealth suits were 100% chameleon enchanted gear from TES IV

I guess that makes most of them gendered but sexless? I mean, sexless in a biological sense, particularly given that they’re not biological beings, but it’s also funny to imply that Vaermina simply never gets laid

Amateur napkin maths time, feel free to point out mistakes I have probably made:

Rice and wheat are humanity’s two biggest food sources by a fair margin, so I’ll take the average of them. Cooked rice has 1300 kcal per kg, and white bread has 2650 kcal per kg (both per USDA), so that’s an average of 1975 kcal/kg. An adult man needs about 2500 kcal per day, and an adult woman about 2000. For the sake of simplicity I’m going to pretend everyone is an adult and call the average 2250 kcal per person per day. That works out to 1.14 kg of our rice/bread per person per day. The UN’s estimate for the world’s population in 2024 is 8,161,972,573, so multiplying that by 1.14 gives us 9,298,449,766 kg, or roughly 9.3 million tonnes per day. Multiplying up to get the value for a year gives us 3.4 billion tonnes. China’s waste food according to this graph would be about 3% of the total requirements, or enough to feed the entire population of Pakistan, the world’s 5th most populous country.

Most Indians do live in the north of the country (or at least, the north is the most densely-populated part, whether it is home to an actual majority of the population or not), but that’s actually the humid subtropical part. Compare this population density map to this climate map. Of course it’s possible that you’re still right that it’s the climate and some other factor pushes India’s rate down regardless, like the massive population density meaning high demand for food or the country being quite poor per capita compared to the others on this list

So what’s going on in Brazil to make the per capita rate so high? I can’t think of any explanation that would make it such an outlier within this set of countries

They definitely exist here, waffles just come across as quite dessert-coded to us. British Chinese cuisine is its own separate adaptation of Chinese cuisine though, rather than just being American Chinese.