Commentary 3

More random thoughts.

• Turns out I might've been wrong; Arngeir may have simply glitched down to the bottom of the mountain, rather than refusing to see you altogether. Seriously, Bethesda, this is what QA is for.
  
  I haven't, however, confirmed whether he's there or not. Stay tuned.


• Saw the new Conan recently. Not a bad movie, but not Conan. Conan doesn't care about slavery, though he treats his slaves (he'll occasionally buy one on a whim) the way he treats everyone else. Which is to say, curtly, coldly, but not badly. Also, he might threaten to pull a guy's arms off to get him to talk, and might start to do it to give him incentive, but he wouldn't use a torture device. Neither would he do the "I'm gonna have your captives cut this key out of you" thing; it's too complicated, not his style.
  
  More importantly, that movie, even more than the Schwarzenegger ones, is too much sword, not enough sorcery. Conan can't swing a cat without hitting a Great Old One, Howard was in the Lovecraft circle. And Conan never has a truly personal reason to fight anyone; basically he just walks the earth. Like Caine in Kung Fu. Walks from place to place, meets people, gets in adventures. Only, it's Conan, so more like if Caine was Brock Samson.
  
  Also, I was doubtful about them casting Jason Momoa from Atlantis, and I was right. He's too funny, with a twinkle in his eye and a permanent half-smile. Conan's not funny. He's melancholy, moody, introspective—remember, his name's Irish and his country's name is the Latin word for Wales. When he laughs, it's a dry, bitter, complaining laugh, like a Napoleonic corporal of guns after a day's march.


• A bunch of people you can find on the internet claim that the sun isn't yellow, but white. They also claim you wouldn't be able to tell the sun's color was different, if it was an F or K star instead of a G. Only, while atmosphere is almost certainly a bigger factor than the star's emission itself, the sun is, strictly speaking, green. It emits in the c. 530 nm wavelength—the color of a neon-green laser pointer.
  
  Also, as the ane-ue went into here, a little over a year ago, just because the light looks "white" to your eye doesn't mean it is. LED bulbs are blue, fluorescents are a sickly yellow-green (probably roughly the color of sunlight, unfiltered by an atmosphere). Your puny primate brain can tell roughly 2 million colors apart, so yes, you would notice subtle differences in the lighting on an alien world. Also, if a species sees ultraviolet, like most birds and reptiles (and caribou, alone of all mammals), they can tell 20 million colors, so yeah, they'd know the difference.


• Redoing my setting's languages yet again, this time with conlangs. Made one for the elves (just for names) that incorporates the types of sounds we've come to expect from elvish languages; the human one, meanwhile (also just for names) is based on the phonics of Latin, without the endings.
  
  I also decided not to go, as I had been planning to, with copper-stone weapons (i.e., blades made of copper, arrowheads and most hammers from stone). The bending rules for copper just added another layer of complexity. And I still haven't entirely decided what elves use instead of mithril—or in this setting, orichalcum. Didja know many bulletproof glasses contain (synthetic) sapphire? Think my elves'll make equipment out of crystals, sorta like the glass armor in Skyrim. Of which I built a full suit not long ago (I've been following the Light Armor skill-tree—by wearing all light armor, and improving it at worktables, my armor is 252, and it doesn't count against my encumbrance).
  
  Speaking of sapphire and Skyrim, what's with the corundum? Corundum is just aluminum oxide; in its crystalline form we call it sapphires (except when it's red, and we call it rubies). Then again, there are steels with aluminum in them, but it's really odd that those are the ones they use in Tamriel.


• My setting is experiencing an ice age, and several of the demihuman subraces (which are not the hill/mountain/deep dwarves or high/wood/gray elves we've grown used to) are characterized by the fact they chose to adapt to the advancing glaciers, rather than abandoning their homes for warmer climes or lower elevations. I also have evil-aligned societies of elves and dwarves, much like drow and duergar, but they don't look as different from the other races (they just have different eye and hair color, but that's also how the other subraces differ from each other).
  
  I treat goblins and hobgoblins as subraces of each other, and also orcs and ogres. I think 4E actually made a (flailing, halfwitted) gesture in that direction, with the fact orcs' default language is Giant, just like ogres' is. I'm still torn as to whether to have halflings, and treat them as a subrace of humans (something like pygmies—though Hobbits are actually just a very small type of Man, in LotR). It'd be artistically appropriate, since in my setting the elves and dwarves consider humans to be halfway between themselves and the monstrous humanoids...all of whom have one large and one smaller subrace.
  
  Hey, you're basically a hairless plains yeti, 's all I'm sayin'.


• Speaking of ape-men, lots of people are wasting their time by rebutting the "Why I Hate Religion but Love Jesus" video. Only, why? You don't fact-check a Chick tract. The appropriate response to that dimwitted little troll is to point, snicker, say "Isn't that cute? It can mimic human speech!" and then get on with your day.


• Remember how I pointed out that the cowboys in Back to the Future 3 laughing at the idea of walking for pleasure is somewhat ridiculous, given the lyrics of Streets of Laredo? Another example would be, I was assigned a book in a 100-level college English class, where a minor plot-point was that one of the characters (in the 1870s) theorized that ravens could be taught to talk. Only, what? Poe wrote The Raven in 1845, and the narrator in that takes it for granted that ravens can talk—the raven isn't spooky because it can talk, it's spooky because it keeps saying "Nevermore" to a recently bereaved man. Talking ravens were a standard stock-in-trade of the traveling curiosity show, gypsies, peddlers, etc., from at least the 1600s on; I'm not certain but I think there might be reference to ravens' mimicry in medieval and even older sources.


• Lackluster anime season so far, though I haven't been able to see much of Inu X Boku SS (I've read the manga, though, so I know it ain't bad). The only real standout thus far has been Rinne no Lagrange, which is, however, just a solid iteration of a worn formula.
  
  Brave 10 is crap, High School DxD is too damn much fanservice (and remember, I'm a huge fan of DearS and Sora no Otoshimono, so when I say it's too much, it's too damn much), and Aquarion Evol is lackluster. Mirai Nikki...I haven't watched, but while it certainly can't be any worse than the manga, the manga sucked (hence my not watching it). Moretsu Uchuu Kaizoku could've been okay, if they hadn't had "letters of marque": you lose me when your protagonist is a war-criminal, especially when the war-crime is only because you don't have the stones to have her become an actual outlaw.


• The subject of inheritance taxes was brought up by my younger sister (not Pennyfarthing), and an interesting point was made. Much of the argument in favor of inheritance taxes hinges on atomized individualism. Your ancestors' money was theirs, the argument goes, but if you want it, the state gets a cut—and you're damn lucky the property doesn't just revert to the public coffers.
  
  Do you know what Nemesis is? This is the thing I've been saying, about how individualism actually advances the cause of statism—again, if you eliminate all "collectives" beside the state, the individual is left naked before its power, and the individual does not have stealth bombers or armies of attorneys. Also, logically, if you can never be held accountable for the actions of your ancestors, then you don't have the right to inherit from them (or take pride in them), either. Sorry.
  
  Admittedly, the smarter libertarians understand that first part, and thus urge an increase in private "intermediating institutions", as against the power of the state. No, they still don't understand that individualism logically precludes inheritance, but also, and worse, "smart libertarians" are pretty thin on the ground. Like other over-simplifications that are founded on a deceptively "obvious" theory (e.g. Marxism), libertarianism primarily appeals to pseudo-intellectuals.