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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I know someone who moved to the USA recently and learned English as a second language as an air and I had to explain this to them when they started playing Baldur’s Gate 3.

    Western Fantasy is nearly entirely based on Dark Age and Medieval Europe, and for English speakers (in particular English speaking Americans) that usually means it’s based on England/UK in particular because it’s the country that speaks English.

    So, a huge majority of fantasy characters have an English accent because it’s the accent associated with the only place in the world that spoke English during the vague target time fantasy is set in or based on.

    Of course English sounded very different at that time in England, but the tie between them is so strong and has continued for so long it’s now the tradition/expectation.

    Like, as an exercise, consider if you were to watch a classical Western-fantasy-type show like Game of Thrones or a Lord of the Rings series. If everyone had modern American accents (general, Southern, etc) wouldn’t you immediately notice and find it odd and out of place?

    PS: the person in question was really quite great at English but had to install a mod to add subtitles in their native language because they struggled greatly with non-American accents.









  • The problem is that there simply can’t be a third party. In our current system a third party is mathematically impossible. I would love for a majority of citizens to suddenly throw caution to the wind magically surge a third party into power. But it’s just not realistic. Again, the most a third party can do is cause a scare, but it’ll never come into power.

    Also for what it’s worth there is an RCV bill for federal congressional elections in the House, which I think has a much better chance of passing than a similar bill in a deeply rural state like Missouri. Once established at a federal level I think it would simply be a matter of time until it made it’s way to even resistant states.



  • It does, but it’s just a big gamble. You’re attempting to scare one of the establishment parties into changing by causing them to lose an election heavily. So, if it works, you’ve necessarily made a material sacrifice in giving control of an office to the opposing party, allowing them to cause whatever real world damage they are capable of causing in that position. Then you have to hope that the message is received and that the party you spoiled actually changes in the way you want, and doesn’t just ignore you. And you also have to hope that they recognize and change quickly or else the damage compounds as more elections pass.

    On top of that, this only works “once”. If the party starts ignoring you again you have to make these real consequential sacrifices again.

    In conclusion, with voting third party the sacrifice is guaranteed, the reward is not.

    I will admit it’s possible that spoiling/scaring is the only way to get RCV (or better) in the first place since the only group it’s not good for is sitting politicians, but I’m not convinced yet.

    But I’m entirely convinced that without an improved voting system we don’t actually have a democracy.

    And for anyone who’s reading this, if you’re a Missourian vote NO on Amendment 7!










  • Thank you so much for saying this! One time there was a Twitter thread that started with someone asking, “What are some things that people believe/accept without having liked into it further.” Someone responded with this “the original phrase is… covenant…womb” and the OP replied with someone like, “yeah people are such sheep”. I wanted to explode.

    But to back your point, you can go and read for yourself the very first instance of this phrase in context as the very old book it comes from has been digitally scanned. It’s old enough to be in middle English, but I still thought it was fairly easy to make out the original phrase as we know it today.