Unfortunately, we live in a very sex-negative culture where sex is supposed to be incredibly unimportant… right up until it is. Culturally, when there's a mismatch of libidos in a relationship, we tend to side with the person with the lower sex drive - the one with the higher one is inconveniencing his or her partner…

This is a good point. It's entirely possible he's turning her off in other areas of the relationship by not seeing how they ultimately connect sex.

We had a huge fight one night where we sat in bed and after two years of trying to get her to talk to me she finally broke down and let me in, said she faked all the sex, said I was bad, and now I'm just afraid she's given up and that'll be the end of it.

We recently moved interstate to our own place with nobody else to bother us, and I've been hoping things might pick up a bit, but still nothing. I've asked her about things maybe getting a bit better for us, I tried to get things started the other night but she took the condom from my hand and threw it into the next…

Is this really a mystery to you? If you want to be judgmental and call them dumb for a mistake that you're far too put-together to ever make yourself, just do that.

That's all well and good, but is that specific motivation ever unambiguously stated or even strongly suggested by any language in the book?

It wasn't just undue import, it was a sloppy and dishonest manipulation of the language simply in the interest of shaming someone who made a harmless joke.

Sorry, I accidentally hit "publish" well before finishing that comment, so you've responded to an incomplete version of it here. The finished one is up now.

This is the best, most textually substantial response I've gotten, so thanks for that. I will look into it more whenever I have a copy of The Deathly Hallows on hand again. For now I can only go by what I can find on the Internet.

She also wrote about three to four thousand pages of actual storytelling, but somehow couldn't get around to mentioning it there for some reason. Whispering something behind the scenes and mentioning it in interviews is not writing it.

First laugh of the day for me. Thanks.

Few names in video games are more storied than Thief. The series more or less invented the stealth-simulation genre back in the 90s, and after a decline in quality over the years, felt ripe for a triumphant reboot. When word arrived that a new Thief game was being made by Eidos Montreal, the same studio responsible…

Kat, thank you for this. It's a perfect example of why I love reading you and why I love arguing with you. We do have some fundamentally different base level biases when it comes to engaging reality — I put not the slightest fraction as much faith as you in what's on paper because governments as I know them are…

As a writer of fantasy and speculative alternate history myself, I know that this is far easier said than done. No human work can't be fault found like this, and I've never once thought badly of Rowling for not managing to engage the whole fictional cosmos in her work. That isn't possible in a lifetime, much less…

That's nice of you. Thanks. I don't do much fan fiction, and I'm working on an original fantasy novel, so maybe I can just recommend to you after I get it published? I love taking luck like that for granted in my imagination, heh.

Which would be incredibly interesting to know something about from the canon. But none of that is there. And since it is such rich soil for storytelling and such an intrinsic issue to including the religions in the world, it borders on irresponsible inconsequentialism to insist they were there and then leave it out.…

This is an excellent point. You have to concede that it just isn't present in the writing even slightly, though, and the process by which the wizarding world resolved it would have been insanely fascinating to have in the canonical world.

Definitely wasn't my intended tone, but okay.

Dude, you got seriously serious in several threads already.

All right, and now we're at shitty, angry, personally-offended "me me me" level argumentation, so I guess I'll leave it alone. If you believe the individual has dictatorial power over the swath of reality their life touches, I guess there's an a priori irreconcilable difference between how you and I interact with…