Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

Wonderful!

"So what do we have here, Sergeant?"

"Looks like a eucalyptus deal gone bad, Detective."

"All right. Round up the usual suspects."

Probably the last time I'll bother writing a sincere answer to this kind of question. None of this is deep secret knowledge. Some people may genuinely not understand it, but I think many more pretend ignorance to strike a pose of moral superiority. Maybe my answer will benefit someone. For the lurkers, right?

https://www.quora.com/With-food-prices-so-high-how-do-the-poor-get-so-fat/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

This kind of thing is why I'm still on Quora. I write a lot of satirical answers, but I can only aspire to write one half this good someday.

https://www.quora.com/I-heard-Davy-Jones-from-the-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-was-a-real-person-but-in-the-movie-they-showed-him-to-have-a-squid-or-an-octopus-face-Does-that-have-any-historical-accuracy/answer/Alex-Cooper-81

Says it all, really. #evolution #creationism #transitional #fossil

Rules for telling other people what to #eat and/or how to eat it:

1. Has this person asked you for a recommendation? If so, go ahead. If not, go to step 2.

2. Is this person a small #child under your care? If so, go ahead. If not, go to step 3.

3. Are you a trained and licensed #dietician talking to your patient? If so, go ahead. If not, you should probably stop talking now.

One of these days, if I can ever afford it, I swear there are a bunch of people I'm going to invite to dinner at a fancy #steakhouse and order well-done for the entire table, just to watch their reactions.

Some magnificent sarcasm from #ISW: "#Russian President Vladimir #Putin awarded the 'guards' honorific to the 8th #Artillery Regiment on June 30, which will not help the regiment dislodge the #Ukrainian forces."

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-30-2023

So say we all.

Hah!

@deathhistorian Oh, that's brilliant.

Now I'm hearing the #Belarus deal only applies to #Prigozhin personally, and the #Wagner troops are expected to go back to fighting in #Ukraine. This does not make me any less confused.

Allegedly, #Prighozhin's march on #Moscow has ended in a deal brokered by #Lukashenko, in which #Wagner Group forces will head to #Belarus and ... become Lukashenko's #Varangian Guard, or something? Assuming of course #Putin doesn't wait for them to get strung out on the road and bomb them all to bits.

I can't help but be struck by how antiquated all this feels. The Varangian Guard reference above is deliberate—the whole thing is #Byzantine in both the original and modern senses of that word. Shades of #Belisarius and #Justinian. Yes, I know I'm mixing up periods, and the analogy is inexact in all kinds of ways: history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

#Kings and #emperors and shifting personal loyalties, not cold-blooded calculation of national interests. It's not the way #modern states make #war—even though #Ukraine may well be the first modern war of the twenty-first century, through future eyes. Something older, more visceral, rising from ancient slumber.

Hell of a time to be alive. I suppose that's always true.

Why #statistics is hard, and why you should learn it anyway.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-people-who-are-really-good-at-algebra-terrible-at-statistics-Ive-always-been-surprised-by-this-because-I-would-have-thought-that-statistics-is-the-easier-of-the-two-to-understand-since-it-is-more-real/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

All of this. Like the post says sarcastically:

"One bright, sunny morning around the spring of 1972, this continent that had given us the #slave trade, various flavors of #racial #caste systems in the #Americas, virulent #antisemitism, the ethnic cleansing of millions of people in Eastern Europe, #Nazism and sundry forms of #fascism, and a #racist #colonialist regime in virtually all parts of #Asia and #Africa, decided to bring out the magic wand its denizens had been carrying all along and proclaim, 'Let there be no more #racism on the holy soil of #Europe.' And this mighty spell having been cast, racism was apparently eradicated there."

Is the #US more racist than most European countries? Yes, I think, on the whole. Is there racism in Europe? Without question, a hell of a lot of it. And #white Europeans' reluctance to face up to that means it won't get any better. At least we're *trying* on this side of the #Atlantic.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-Europe-is-more-racist-than-the-USA/answer/Habib-F-2

@Pat The way it worked then, and I assume still does, is that the property owner licenses a publisher to publish franchise books (Pocket Books, at the time) and then authors submit a query to the publisher for any other novel. Our proposal consisted of an outline and maybe a sample chapter—I don't quite remember since it's been thirty-five years!

It didn't hurt that my Dad had already written a couple of other Star Trek novels and worked with the same editor. But with Next Gen novels, Paramount was exerting steadily more creative control, so we had to satisfy the studio too. Before that, it was pretty free-form: as long as the editors and authors were happy, they could do just about anything. There was a lot of innovation in the original series novels of the '70s and '80s.