Relistening To Wolf 359 Is Weird Because There’s So Much Foreshadowing

i should tell you guys that i woke up in a cold sweat at 2:30 this morning to write something down in notes app

what.

yeah we’re pretty sure he just does it so he can fuck with people who piss him off but he’s weirdly competent so we just let him keep going

fuck it im moving to wizard island

watch as i illegally get there on a raft of skellys while dressed in light clothes and a denim jacket

Unmute !

I want to see an episode of a show maybe superheroes maybe magic or something where there’s a two part episode where on of the characters acts insane the the next they just screaming in joy and it revealed they’ve been stuck in a time loop and went insane And this should be a major status quo change with this character needing rehab and the person responsible which means this would probably work best with the time looper being previously introduced. I don’t know the point of these episodes, maybe show how secretly evil this world is or something I just think this would be cool to see the effects of a time loop or a less graphic episode where one character does all the time loop stud of knowing what your going to say and do and using the other characters to break free

Storage is the defining problem of our age. Two hundred years ago, our ancestors had fifteen or twenty things in their houses, max. And one of them was "bed." Now, we have a lot of clutter. Sure, it's down from the peak of the 1970s, when we needed thirty-six different pieces of electrical equipment just to listen to racist people in our general area, but we still have too much stuff.

Self-storage companies have exploded. Not literally, although that did happen to the one near me from some dude cooking shatter, but they are immensely profitable. If you receive a bunch of heirloom furniture from Crazy Aunt Ethel, you won't have enough room for it in your single bedroom basement apartment. You shove all of it into a self-storage bay, and keep paying the monthly bills, waiting until you can have a house big enough to place some heirloom furniture in.

The storage companies know this. They'll give you a low "sucker" rate at the start, and then start cranking up the fees. And you'll keep paying them. It's cheaper to kick in $5 more a month, than it is to ask your friend Ted to borrow his pickup truck so that you can drive all your shit across town to a competing storage unit, who will do the exact same thing.

How do you fight back, ideally without having to throw away a bunch of coffee tables from 1953 and incurring the eternal wrath of Aunt Ethel's shade? You have to let the storage unit make money for you. The obvious way is electricity. With electricity, you can run all kinds of things, from a seedy cryptocurrency mining operation, to an illegal online betting parlour. And the storage folks know this, which is why they don't provide power to your unit, and wrap the unit's lightbulb in an impenetrable steel cage. They are used to dealing with your average, run-of-the-mill cheap scumbag.

Don't let that stop you: despite what your neurochemistry is telling you, you are an exceptional cheap scumbag. You don't need their electricity; you can generate your own. The answer? Rats love running on little hamster wheels. You can make thirty, forty cents a month, per wheel. That's money in your pocket, and all it will cost you is a bit of expired cheese and a lot of old Subaru blower motors. Sure, it's not going to be great for any couches or clothing that you leave in the unit, but who ever heard of a heirloom sofa bed? Throw that shit out, ideally by leaving it in a unit and no longer paying the bill. You don't need to cling to memories: you're rich now, atop your rodent power empire.

The birth of Snake Venus

Woah

You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.

are either of these stories good? cause they sound really interesting

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!

Elf pet guy?

is that what your parents told you when you woke up and your pet elf was gone