There’s an earlier bit that complements that nicely:

“it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can’t actually deliver is highly transferable.”

There are so many Java libraries that I would probably set on fire if they were physically tangible in any way.

I would not have posted this. The long dick of the law makes an echidna’s look normal.

They’d name it Microsoft Windows Deprecation Maker 2024 Enterprise 11 though.

This is Lemmy.

If you want to do all that performative reddit bullshit for attention, go back there and do it. No one will stop you.

This is some text book projection. Maybe talk to a professional about it. And yeah, you probably should stay away from cartoons and kids until you get these repressed urges figured out.

woah, who the fuck is talking about kids?

Some of the oldest porn is cartoons scratched into rocks, get off your golden age of porn high horse, or get off with it if that’s your thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_erotic_depictions

Battlefield Earth

I don’t know if that’s a typo, but “cheey” is a delightfully terrible name that I am stealing.

Removed by mod

And then, one day, I got in.

BukakkIP

Unless you’ve been DuckTypeCast, in which case you can be anything (this is what happened to Gary Oldman)

What you’ve never put a scissor handled blunt right up your ass before? (Look at the kid top middle in the background)

depends on how cheap the farm was being when they bought insurance

In the U.S., you can build rockets all day long, they cannot be guided.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332g

You’d have to convince the feds it was never designed to be a weapon. Good luck with that.

💀

Exactly, yes! They were self-limited, and the valar trusted them to be so, which is why Saruman turning evil caught Gandalf super off guard!

LotR magic is interesting. Sauron bred all kinds of monsters essentially “hacking the system” to produce something in a world where no one but Illuvatar can create life, and Melkor got around the whole life/sentience thing by convincing lesser spirits to inhabit this creations. Balrogs, werewolves, etc.

Other creations Melkor imbued with his own vast power, essentially spreading his “divine fire” out amongst his thralls, and thereby diminishing himself. Sauron eventually does the same, in creating the One Ring.

So, when Gandalf became Gandalf, his power to affect things was explicitly limited. , The basic difference between The Istari and Sauron: they did not seek to usurp their position in ‘the song of Illuvatar’. In fact the five Istari (Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast and the other unnamed two) were maiar spirits that had until that point stayed out of Arda (Earth) and all its shenanigans on purpose!

So, the staff served as a badge of office mostly. And thought it never stated, it’s kind of implied that some of their power is imbued within it. This is why Gandalf looks totally different when he comes back as the White, he took Saruman’s job as the head of the order, and had some more of his power unlocked as a result. The main strength of the Istari was their wisdom, knowing how the world worked and to a point, how “the song” was supposed to go. They were trusted to do the job (of taking down Sauron) because they wouldn’t use their knowledge and power to ‘hack the system’.

IMHO, Gandalf needed his staff not as a conduit of power here, but as an emblem of his station: He had to show Grima that his boss had just been fired.