I’ve gotten a lot of value from separating out “explanation” and “excuse” in my head. Excuse to me says that you can’t hold someone responsible for their actions because of X, whereas I think of explanation as X contributed to someone’s actions. It shows me where they are coming from and challenges me to empathize…

You can leave a blank field for the email and it’ll still give you results ;) (Got skeptic. Don’t know if I really put much stock in that.)

I had a friend that I thought would really love Discworld, so I loaned her books that I hand-picked to appeal to her tastes. (This is something we do fairly regularly).

She never read them. Eventually I asked for them back. I gave up hope.

Last year she went on a trip and ended up buying me a first edition of Equal…

Yup, Learned Hand is pretty beloved. I remember seeing his name as a 1L and thinking: “Is this for real? You’ve got to be kidding me. This is some sort of weird hazing, isn’t it?”

Also his first cousin, Judge Augustus Noble Hand (family full of sadists), was famous for (among other things) ruling that contraceptives…

I don’t disagree. Vimes is the primary POV character, more so as the Watch books progress. It’s mostly his story, but it’s also Carrot’s, especially in the ways he acts as a foil to Vimes. Vimes is more or less a bad man by his own definition. Carrot is a good man by Vimes’ definition. Bad cop, good cop (except when…

Yup. Carrot is heroic because he chooses not to be the hero. As the Patrician once said of Vimes’ anti-authoritarian streak, it’s “practically zen.”

Hrm, I agree from a writer’s-level perspective (i.e. the writer should be using a coherent system), but not necessarily from a character’s perspective. I’m bored of universes where they lay out all the unbreakable rules of magic that all the characters have a perfect understanding of... and then never break them. I…

NASA

David and Leigh Eddings certainly had their flaws as writers. Recycling. Archetypes. Stereotypes.

Drat. Not my explanation. I spent half my childhood up a tree. Still haven't figured out echolocation, which puts the average bat well ahead of me :-/

I'd toss Philip IV of France in there, as he was deeply in debt to the Knights Templar, even after having expelled all the Jews from France and seizing their assets. Clement V (of the Avignon Papacy fame) was basically Philip's puppet pope.

Easy solution. Put it in a vaseline glass vase!

Today's xkcd seems quite on point.

I hated this book the first time I read it. Just loathed it. I think I was probably too young to get what Twain was saying.

Just finished a room full of wall-mounted bookshelves. Moving onto reupholstering two upholstered chairs. Right at the moment, I'm trying not to let the fact that I don't know the first thing about upholstering daunt me. Hell, I didn't know how to build shelves until I did that, and they turned out great. (I'd…

Tell me you get at least three syllables into the "here!"

Maybe it doesn't mean "has lots of mass" to you, and maybe that's how you define normal humans. (I'm rarely defined as normal, myself.) But as for the definition of the word "massive," there's usually a component of great weight, which, given our earth-centric understanding of the physical world and the effect of…

Well, yes, but:

Mass and size should not be compared. Not same stuff.
Saturn would float on water. Saturn is not small.

I get your point, but you're tossing density into the mix with those examples, not mass.