I’d rather be nuked than starve to death.

A lot of those island colony-states aren’t self-sufficient and will have massive famines when the trade routes stop.

I had a Game Boy, that got a lot of use.

That assumes that interstellar travel is possible. Physically, economically, socially, there’s a lot of boxes to check for near-light extrasolar expansion (let alone FTL, which probably is impossible)

I think the easy solution to the Fermi Paradox is that we’re stuck in our fish bowl and so is everyone else.

Hey Withers, here’s 100 gold to turn a better character into whatever role I need.

Those speculators haven’t met the right cats. (Also, we’ve been living together for thousands of years and have bred some incredibly useless varieties, it’s a ridiculous claim.)

That only applies to the movie, and anyway it’s easily explained by the The Ring not wanting to switch to Sam in that moment. In the book Sam totally puts on the ring to trick some orcs and it tries to tempt him with the power of gardening really well.

The Ring would reach out and influence people around the bag. The Ring would tempt whichever eagle carried Frodo. It had to be a being that had enough control to keep hold of The Ring but not enough ambition to be controlled by it. And even then IIRC it wasn’t actually possible to destroy it willingly, Eru Ilúvatar stepped in and gave Gollum a tiny nudge off the cliff.

Consciousness being tied to the physical body isn’t “unscientific”, it’s the only option that can be tested and studied.

Making languages is way harder than just writing a story, and fantasy isn’t trying to be an accurate reflection of real world geo-social stratification. Everyone speaks the same language because it often would be a worse narrative if the characters couldn’t communicate. (Not always, but plot-by-misunderstanding is at least as lazy as writing in one tongue)

There needs to be (imo) a reason beyond realism to make that part of the story. Tolkien was exceptional, but he was using different races and languages to make up a creation mythology for the UK. The history and culture and differences were arguably more important than a ring and some hobbits.

Tad Williams also made up a few languages for his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. There they serve to make the world feel bigger, with far-off exotic lands and ancient mysteries.

Oh and you brought up swearing in your first post. De-modernizing language is way harder than it seems. Taking out “god damn” is easy, but that also links to gosh, darn, dang, “goodbye” is from God be with ye, “gossip” from god-sibling, the days of the week all reference Earth myths and have to go, “knight” doesn’t make sense unless they had a French equivalent language to take words from…

Narrative shorthand is still important. Using existing accents, and leaning somewhat into stereotype, can communicate a great deal of context without spending a ton of time on fictional history. Is it lazy? Often, yes. But it works; just like shape language and color coding are useful tools for visual storytelling.

It’s so established in the way we tell stories that avoiding these tropes is a deliberate subversion that can be thought-provoking or distracting.

I miss when normies and politicians were scared and confused by it so they left it alone. When computers in general required some skill and knowledge to use so there was a natural barrier to entry.

“A version of” does not inspire confidence in me. I like Salt & Straw, it’s good ice cream. The Choco Taco was not good ice cream. It was a stale sort-of-waffle-cone shell, acceptable vanilla ice cream with fudge swirl, dipped in cheap chocolate with chopped peanuts. And they were perfect. This new thing will probably cost eight dollars and taste great but it will not fill the nostalgic space or my freezer.

And not the crap ones they made a few years ago, the original ones.

Screaming Yellow Zonkers. 3D Doritos. Choco Tacos.

Upgrade to hardened steel key caps so you can use a .22 for extra range.

They like sharing with the right kind of people.

If it helps, I got the joke straight away.

Fairly clever, more bold than the average crow. Not as aggressive as gulls but yes they’ll try to steal from people.

I thought we left the insufferable Internet Italians back on reddit.

Word meanings shift over 500 years, nobody is using “entree” wrong because it means different things in different cultures and has changed several times over the centuries. The way we serve and eat meals has also changed considerably.

https://languageoffood.blogspot.com/2009/08/entree.html?m=1

I like this write-up, it had plenty of historical examples.