Mistake? He came, didn’t he?

Well, the Ninja Turtles were originally an unsubtle Daredevil parody…

(Is “parody” the right word? I think they were part parody and part homage.)

sentient brain

That’s the usual state of brains, isn’t it?

I used to heat with a wood stove, so in the evenings the house was nice and warm and then the fire in the stove would burn out while I slept and by the time I had to get out of bed the house would be ice-cold. Just starting the fire again took a while (I wasn’t very good at it) and then everywhere not right next to the stove warmed up quite slowly.

(Until the house warmed up, my dog would stay so close to the stove that it would scare me. Those old-fashioned stoves get very hot and there’s nothing beyond your own good sense that will prevent you from touching them and instantly being severely burned. He didn’t have much good sense but apparently he had enough never to touch the thing…)

Apparently experienced people can make it so that the embers in the stove stay hot overnight, which makes getting the fire going again much easier, but I never got the hang of it. On the plus side, when you live in a sparsely-populated forested area, burning wood for heat is much cheaper than burning oil or gas. I wonder how much coal would have cost… I did see one house with a furnace that one would have to shovel coal into like an old-fashioned steam-locomotive fireman.

I didn’t mean to imply anything to the contrary of what you’re saying. I’m just reminded of the Simpsons episode where Smithers says

If Mr. Burns ever wants to see a stranger, he will observe him through a powerful telescope.

People are hidden from each other in plain sight.

Posts like this are so weird to me. Clearly this is a common thing that a lot of people are going through, but in real life most people I know have succeeded through integrity (similar to kindness) and hard work. Not just kids from middle-class families, but immigrants, first-generation college students, etc. There must be some sort of filter creating a social bubble around me, like how I have met very few Trump voters (and don’t know any of them well) despite the fact that there are actually quite many of them.

heteronormative assumptions

You could still have a wife yourself, with whichever licensing agreement the two of you negotiate.

This was a big problem in New York. Thieves would put skimmers on top of the card readers at supermarket checkouts and then drain the food stamp accounts of people who went through those checkouts. The state initially refused to compensate victims despite the fact that this wasn’t even a scam that someone could chosen to avoid. The only safety measure was to try and disassemble the card reader to see if there was a skimmer that would come off.

Eventually politicians changed the policy and compensated people after there were so many cases of theft that major newspapers were writing about it. I don’t know if theft is still frequent but less talked-about because victims get compensated, or if the authorities managed to put an end to it. But I’m not surprised that criminals would do such a thing, given that they do so much worse.

Don’t underestimate butlers.

They periodically run out of integers so they have to reuse old ones.

Man, this hits close to home. Just yesterday I decided to get in touch with an old friend from college and I found out that she had died in a car accident years ago, not long after I lost touch with her. Don’t put things off, folks.

Why would you pay to make your Rhino’s bulge smaller?

Also, how is Warframe now? I last played eight years ago and I’m a little surprised that it’s still going strong.

Always remember to wear a steel codpiece.

They better hope they’re not in New York state.

He’s not wrong about the squirrel…

Another thing to consider is that Melkor was never known to show understanding or mercy to his servants who failed him. I would have to think that any balrog who failed to come to his aid would have been killed (or worse as you postulate) as soon as Morgoth was freed.

Hah, now I’m imagining an alternate, sillier Arda where the balrogs had the same conversation as the villain’s abused lackeys did at the end of Disney’s Hercules. (A really underappreciated movie, IMO. Just don’t watch it expecting it to be about the Greek myth.)

He’s not going to be happy when he gets out of there.

You mean if he gets out of there!

If. If is good…

I think you know much more about the legendarium than I do, but I want to nitpick one point:

Also, there were no more than 3 or 7 balrogs ever according to later writings by Tolkien, which indicates that no balrog was weak or cowardly.

I think I should have phrased what I said differently. No balrog was weak or cowardly in an absolute sense. Durin’s Bane attacked and defeated all the dwarves of Khazad Dum at the height of their power. It wasn’t initially afraid of Gandalf. However, Ungoliant was another matter. She had consumed the light of the Two Trees and overcome Melkor himself. She might also have been capable of doing something far worse to a Maia than destroying its body and banishing its spirit. I think that though the balrogs were able to drive her away, their victory was not inevitable and I can imagine even a balrog faltering when called to face such a foe.

That’s true in a trivial sense: there’s no law of nature that enforces verisimilitude in any work of fiction. However, most authors aim for verisimilitude, and the good ones achieve it. I’m not talking about the top speeds of balrogs because I think there’s some objective answer, but rather because I think that Tolkein does achieve verisimilitude (at least in some regards) and therefore there is a foundation for discussing the traits of his fictional beings. He easily could have given balrogs rocket skates, but he didn’t.

But the balrog in Moria was chasing the fellowship. If it had a top speed of 400 mph, it would have caught them immediately. My conclusion is that some balrogs are mightier than others and the balrog in Moria was among the weakest; that’s why it hid deep underground for so long.

My problem with Windows is that when I want to eject a USB drive, Windows refuses to do so, refuses to tell me what program is apparently still using the drive, and certainly refuses to kill that program. I am removing the drive. I can’t just not remove it!