ThirdGen

The villain has learned he's special, and wants to please his sort-of mother.

There's a brand new song from that neo-glam band that was a funny joke once:

I doubt you'll be seeing that player at future tourneys.

Huh. Didn't expect that to work. A bunch of partly suicidal and ridiculously overpowered terrorists try to kill the biggest employer of the planet, only to find someone else did it first. They then have to save the world from this person. Hint: The main character used to look up to the villain... or did he?

Quandaries Abound, Zounds! With Sounds, Xiphoid Entertainment Delights Crowds! LETTERECKSDUDDNSKURME

The Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, it's more that we're historically past the era where curses were primarily religious. "Gadzooks," anyone?

When they Snap, they would have to test various metals to find the one the Misting can burn. I would imagine it doesn't kill them.

Well, socks...

If she ever pretends the deadline or conditions are your fault, I'm confident you already know what's up.

Are you aware that you too can learn the advanced skills of being cool in just 20 seconds?

YOU HAVE WIN.

Stepped on a box of thumbtacks. Broke it. Didn't step on any of the actual tacks. Because I'm rusting magic.

- Medical pseudoscience - Academic jargon that covers for a lack of substance - Manipulation being venerated as a skill - Proud ignorance - Agh, why not, let's throw kyriarchy up there

In the words of Agent Smith, "One of these lives has a future. The other does not."

The barest of spoilers for Shadows of Self.

The empty room one is Listen.

I've got Miles Hundredlives cast for sure. Ben Foster is best nutjob.

I think you get much more accurate and thus understandable results by not deriving morals from some kind of first principles or abstract logic, but from being aware of the processes that brought you the concepts. The first place morality derives from is simple practicality. If one person being able to kill another at any time makes a community impossible to have, it's declared immoral very quickly. Being able to kill others, outsiders, that took longer to get fixed, if it ever got fixed at all. Beyond that, morality derives from the parents' voice, the original model of morality as constructed in a child by Because I Said So. Good stuff comes from here, but when nasty rules come from this process they tend to be very hard to remove. Prejudice, limited perspective, and odd personal dislikes of the parents are things to watch out for here. And then there's the social aspect, the fuzzier things that we tend not to personally encounter, but are decided by some combination of state fiat and community acceptance. What's a moral rate to charge someone interest when you lend them money? Ask a random person, and they probably haven't done the math. What constitutes usury has changed over time as we see the damage excessive interest can do or, on the other side, we fail to see the damage when the powerful still benefit from it. Morality being a human-created concept shouldn't bother anyone. There's very little about culture that wasn't created by humans (most of it being the animal instincts we have left over from when our brain hardware needed to work for much dumber, more limited animals). I too detest relativism, and especially sophistry used to justify whatever with dazzling and unquestioned wordplay. If you're a functioning person, for the most part, you have empathy. That empathy brings most of your morality with it. This process that lets us emotionally sync with others allows society to happen at all. It's why you don't die as a feral kid out in the woods scared of every shadow and unable to vocalize beyond grunts. The kinds of tests philosophy classes use to judge morality use such restricted conditions they generally don't describe how your morals, or anyone's, work in the real world. If you had to choose between killing 10 people or killing 5 people and yourself, etc. etc. - Basically, what? If you reached that position in the first place you either made some morally/ethically significant choices getting there or your situation is so random and unusual as to be meaningless. If you saw a serial killer about to murder X, Y, or Z, you would shout for help and not engage the killer yourself. You might chastise yourself afterward for not jumping in and being The Big Hero yourself, but unless you have the specific skills to deal with that situation, you're not going to jump in and attack the dangerous killer who will likely just kill you and then continue on killing whoever. Noone should expect you to. There are specialists for this. The difference between who the victims are is mostly meaningless to you, the observer. If I told you you had to choose between killing X, Y, or Z, you should immediately call me out on the implications of the question, and question those who try to make you OK with theoretically murdering someone. Understand your actions. Understand what the implications are of making your actions what everybody should do, and how you should adjust your expectations as a result. You can basically trust average people's senses of right and wrong, up until the point where they start accepting some external authority as The Real Judge. That way leads to justifying anything. And I include all religions here. Every single religion has aspects that preach peace and being the nicest, best person imaginable. But they also include ancient instructions of when and why war and all sorts of nasty things are acceptable. In many cases, these were written as hidden knowledge readable only by the educated classes in a, let's face it, less advanced society. We advance historically by putting up with less of this. And we regress by surrendering our more refined awareness of what people are like and what they can do to a faceless tradition beholden only to a series of ancient kings. Oh, and, uhh... rape is bad. Duh.

My tears might actually be a warning sign of a warp in spacetime.

Any of us right?

"La trahison de Memes"

<evil grin> The Hobbit is better than Lord of the Rings.