And it’s not like you can tell whether or not someone is a Haitian just by looking at them. All you know is they’re black. This is just racism, plain and simple.

Big Penny’s feet, obviously.

Thanks!

I think I have a black thumb.

I admit I haven’t read it in many years, so thanks for correcting me on the details. The way she goes in depth exploring the societies and beings she imagines while still maintaining a plausible plot and believable characters you can empathize with is really incredible. It’s something other writers rarely achieve. Iain M. Banks had similar literary skills.

Having no garden, I’m not fertilizing it with anything’s poo.

You’re really not convincing me to have a pet cow here…

I’ll take your word for it. I clean up enough dog poo out there as it is. And it’s much smaller than cow poo. Generally not as soft too.

Yeah, but I assume your poos go in a toilet and not on the ground.

I’m sure they will do their best to find loopholes, but if we’re lucky, this will at least mitigate the problem.

This will theoretically stop that from being such a hazard as well.

It’s honestly ridiculous that cashiers are ever made to stand. I have weak ankles to the point that one or the other will just give out from under me sometimes when I’m just walking down the street. When I used to go ice skating, the skates were always at a steep angle because my ankles couldn’t keep them upright. I also have really flat feet. It’s limited my job prospects a lot over the years.

The Dispossessed started as a very bad short story, which I didn’t try to finish but couldn’t quite let go. There was a book in it, and I knew it, but the book had to wait for me to learn what I was writing about and how to write about it. I needed to understand my own passionate opposition to the war that we were, endlessly it seemed, waging in Vietnam, and endlessly protesting at home. If I had known then that my country would continue making aggressive wars for the rest of my life, I might have had less energy for protesting that one. But, knowing only that I didn’t want to study war no more,[3] I studied peace. I started by reading a whole mess of utopias and learning something about pacifism and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. This led me to the nonviolent anarchist writers such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. With them I felt a great, immediate affinity. They made sense to me in the way Lao Tzu did. They enabled me to think about war, peace, politics, how we govern one another and ourselves, the value of failure, and the strength of what is weak. So, when I realized that nobody had yet written an anarchist utopia, I finally began to see what my book might be. And I found that its principal character, whom I’d first glimpsed in the original misbegotten story, was alive and well—my guide to Anarres.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed#Background

In general, monarchs no longer claim to rule by divine right. Monarchs are not necessarily running their country as more than just figureheads by reasoning that it’s what a god wants. That’s a big change.

A bit, but I felt like Heinlein’s book was much more ‘hit you over the head with the message’ than her books ever are. I still really like it, don’t get me wrong, but it’s much more heavy-handed in terms of messaging. LeGuin lets you mostly figure it out for yourself. You can certainly read her books and not learn a thing if you don’t want to (many people, especially her male critics over the years, do so), but if you open your mind to what she’s saying…

I have re-read all of the books and short stories a couple of times. They’re really good. The BBC did a radio dramatization of the books a few years ago. It was pretty abridged, but still worth hearing.

Mainly though, I just wanted to point out how Rowling very clearly used LeGuin as a source for her books (along with the Worst Witch books, the first of which came out when she was exactly the right age to have read them).

Possibly, although the article was not clear on that point. That would definitely be a legal issue. I just object to the ROMs part.

Yes, sorry, fixed.

Whoops. The latter.

Maybe we can do a voodoo ritual. I’m told by certain right-wingers that involves eating dogs. I have two myself…