Nacarbac

Candle probably does it best, since the cup specifies warm - and if you take an extremely cheesy interpretation of "stress" then it might apply to material stress, for added reality-breaking consequences.

Yes! Thanks, makes sense that it came from the Onion.

I swear something like that exists, I remember watching a few episodes. The host is shown ignoring his family to do his cross country cooking show, leading to divorce and a gradual mental breakdown and maybe murders.

Can't find the damn thing though, search results are clogged with garbage.

Sounds like an excuse to mention spider novels! Children of Time is a cute-but-serious scifi about "what if smol Portia got beeg like dog".

It's a fun read - A Deepness in the Sky is an earlier novel by Vinge about "mature space humans discovering pre-spaceflight arachnid aliens who are Just Like Us (except not really)".

But you'd still need a physical, actually-Real, construction of infinite track to line up infinite people (tied down by infinite effort) with a train capable of doing infinite genocide in one second.

I fully support efforts to construct said train, however I am doubtful as to their success.

Furthermore, Goku could defeat Saitama.

Thanks for reminding me about this one! Another octopus themed book that was quite fun is Children of Ruin, the sequal to Children of Time (post-space-apocalypse, a hubristic uplift experiment on monkeys accidentally creates a species of sapient spider over the course of ten thousand years, while the few surviving humans dip in and out of cryo to deal with their own problems).

A lot of work went into extrapolating a non-human mentality for the animals (the spiders in the first, octopuses and mystery goo in the second).

I think it had a lot of potential, but they were just really bad at consequences, which is what that kind of plot needs to really pay off.

Same with him being assimilated, being tortured, being possessed like four times - it just gets dropped for ages until they do a similar episode and remember to mention it. I don't think he even talks much to Troi about it.

That's fine, there was a lot of great stuff there - as mentioned the casting was really good - it's the same with Altered Carbon and Battle Angel Alita. They managed to make something that was enjoyable, unless you're a particular type who read the source material and can see all the ways they made superfluous or actively inferior choices (though plenty of book readers were still able to enjoy them for what they were, the baarstards).

At least with AC and Alita it seemed to be the understandable error of cramming in cool material they liked from later books because they're afraid of only getting one season, rather than WoT's showrunner having a truly incoherent understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the books and their own ability to correct them.

Larian's character writing has never been very interesting to me - I'm not sure what it is, perhaps there's a showiness to them that feels shallow. It doesn't help that their back stories are almost always "supercool world-shaker who had a More Interesting Adventure than this... Level 1", as that always starts them off on the back foot with me for entirely petty reasons.

By contrast with various other games, perhaps their character backstories and the talk they inspire are less about "the cool things I did and their Dark Consequences that now directly affect you" and more about life events that exist outside the Plot?

Eh, I'm probably remembering things a bit rosily...and, uh, I forgot that I was originally trying to say something about their appeal rather than just rambling.

TNG is so much better and nothing like this

Having just rewatched it, it's honestly worse in a few places, because it tries to have Lwaxana/Crusher/Troi-centered episodes but all they can think of is "Ghost Rape", "Lol Menopause", and "Space Baby Jesus".

TOS almost only ever introduces a woman for her to fall in love with the sexy male villain/god/robot, and while being basically treated as set dressing is bad in itself, at least they spend less time writing them badly.

I guess the difference is that TNG actually has some good representation of women mixed in.

Rrrrr... chaaaaiiiiins.

Send... more... bourgeois...

After a day of Michael Bublebublyboo on repeat I had the "It's beginning to look a lot like fish men" parody stuck in my head all night... it was much better, albeit confusing, to have a song I'd never heard stuck in my head.