kryptonianCodeMonkey

I started relistening to the entire series of audiobooks for that reason. I'm a little bit into book 6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, right now. The one with the pokemon/yugioh-like, T'ghee cards system. Book 7 is on deck and Book 8 is already waiting in my library.

So much happens in this story, so many parts moving both on and off the page, particularly in the later books. I really needed the refresher for a lot of stuff I only vaguely remembered or just straight up forgot about (or maybe slept through the first time?).

It's also definitely easier to parse some of the hints/foreshadowing and string together some pieces of lore the second time around. For example, it only registered on this second pass that every third floor takes place on or inside the same volcano. I knew the 3rd, 6th and 9th were related, though I didn't realize they were geographically related. And I didn't realize that relation included the home of the gods (the Halls of Ascendency) on the 12th floor, the home of demons (Sheol) on the 15th floor, or the final 18th floor. The 18th floor will be the lair of Scolopendra, the giant celestial monster centipede, at the heart of this volcano. The same monster whose poison breath killed or transformed 90% of the populations on the other connected floors like Grimaldi and his circus in the Signet side plot in the Over City, and Tina, Kiwi and the other dinos in the Hunting Grounds. And Scolopendra is the final boss of the entire dungeon, which they must defeat to take back Earth. Apparently I just glazed over most of that lore the first time thinking it was set dressing, not plot relevant... cuz it kind of is set dressing but also is relevant.

How has no reporter told him to go fuck himself to his face? Way more restraint than I'd have.

Bigger problem with no belts is bus driving into wall. Or another bus. Or rolling. Or hitting a bump launch kids into the ceiling.

But yes, generally it's safer due to a few things related to their mass. Primarily, conservation of momentum and material strength/crumble physics. A truck or car in motion suddenly transferring that energy to a bus is going to have that energy distributed over a much larger mass, meaning the bus moves much less quickly. It also has more material to crumble and absorb the impact, making the collision more inelastic, distributing kinetic energy into deforming the metal instead of pushing the bus and occupants forward. Accordingly, it doesn't increase acceleration as quickly as you might expect which is what causes injury (the rate of change in acceleration is called 'jerk', btw, which is a pretty accurate name in collisions).

The truck driver also benefits from the crumble of both vehicles reducing the kinetic energy, a bit. But his vehicle has a lot less material to crumble before that material includes his organs. That's also assuming the vehicle isn't short enough to have the front end slip under the bus's bumper leaving their face to absorb the impact.

In all fairness, "determined antisocial genius youth that does detective work (at least ostensibly) and hunts down the other", accurately describes both, so...

But yes the one that uses a mystical item to murder people might surprise you from that picture alone.

Boycotting a company because some stores are unionized is wild. Particularly a company that really tries not to be unionized. They're punishing a company for not cracking down on their employees' rights hard enough, apparently. So weird.

The self serving, backwards, hateful, idiotic, conspiracy theorist wacko isn't a trustworthy political ally. No shit?

Where you need to, and their broken clock happens to align for good, use the anti-Trump Republicans for their votes. But never ever trust them. They're not your friends and they will fuck you at the first opportunity.

Exactly, you can be completely in the right and still end up dead. Goes for driving too. Be predictable and be defensive, follow the rules and assume no one else will. It keeps you alive.

Btw, the phrase is "right of way", not "right away". Just a heads up.

This could be my wife. All of her coworkers and employees constantly give her their life stories in gritty detail. She is always appalled by the amount they tell her, but... she doesn't ask them to stop.

The woman loves drama that she isn't involved in. Internal drama stresses her out, but other people's drama is just her reality tv shows come to life. Everywhere she has ever worked, inevitably her favorite coworker is the grumpiest person in the office who has no filter about everyone else in the office.

Actually, at this very moment, she is scrolling through people posting on a facebook group who are angry that this local doctor just got fired "out of nowhere". In reality, we know the full story. He was fired for harassing and disparaging every woman in the clinic with a bunch of sexist shit, driving at least 3 to quit, and for massively overprescribing pain meds to a ton of people and trying to get other (women) physicians to write his scripts for him to take the liability off of himself. He's a real scumbag. Half of the people in the threads are his patients who have been getting their fix from him, though, so they are talking about what a great doctor his is. She keeps sending me screenshots.

That's fair. A case could be made as such for sure. I'm not aware of any case law for our against that assertion.

That's true. But I'm not sure your average cop in Miami counts as a public figure for the purposes of defamation.

Defamation requires 4 things:

1. An objectively false statement, portrayed as fact, not opinion.
2. Publication to a third party.
3. Negligence on the publisher, i.e. failure to attempt to confirm the truth of the matter.
4. Actual harm to the victim's reputation and business.

So number 2 is clearly covered as they produced and released a film about it. Number 4 would arguably be covered by the defamation per se doctrine which says that accusation of a crime is de fact harmful to one's reputation.

The problem with the suit is that the film makes so claims of fact. It is disclaimed as a dramatization. A fictional story only based on actual events. Essentially it's historical fiction but with contemporary events as the basis of the history. The characters portrayed are neither named as our based on real cops.

Those things don't necessarily protect them in and of itself, though. It really comes down to whether a reasonable person watching the film would come away thinking the events were fictional or a claim of facts. But I think the general audience is aware how accurate "based on a true story" films tend to be. No one reasonable is expecting the film to be a documentary.

Masuka almost certainly has committed some sort of sex crime. There's no way he's clean whether that was shown in the series or not. Dude has sex pest written all over him. No way he wasn't stalking or touching women without consent. Even if only as a joke, I could see him desecrating some victim's corpse. Dude had no chill and no filter or inhibitions