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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My brother is an Air Traffic Controller and we were talking about this earlier. New ATCs have months of training where they get paid terribly and have to live in Oklahoma City. Nowadays they don’t even get to choose exactly where they’ll work afterwards. There are some classes that graduate and then have to pick between something like working in San Juan or Oakland. And then their pay is also shit for a year or two until they fully qualify.

    Could you imagine going to MIT, then saying “yeah I’ll take a job that pays $14 an hour training to live in Oklahoma. Then I’ll let you roll the dice and send me to live in Southern California and try to live off $36,000 a year. Or you know… I can just go take a job wherever the fuck I want as an MIT grad and get paid 6 figures right out the gate.”






  • I love Brandon Sanderson, but his world building and complex magic systems aren’t for most people. I’ve tried to get my wife to read his stuff for years and she just has never gotten into it.

    The reason Harry Potter was so commercially successful is because the vast majority of the public doesn’t want to learn about allomantic properties of 16 different metals and how they have internal/external, physical/mental, enhancement/temporal and pushing/pulling effects.

    They don’t want to learn about adhesion, gravitation, division, abrasion, progression, illumination, transformation, cohesion, and tension surges - and how bonding a spren through oathes increases your ability to surgebind. Their eyes glaze over when talking about the cognitive and physical realms.

    Most people just want to hear “yeah some people are magic and can wave wands, say some magic words and poof magic happens.” That’s why it’s one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time.

    But yeah, I’ve just learned to accept that while I love some Sanderson magic systems, it’s not ever gonna be for everyone. And that’s ok.