Crash

al aqsa mosque this morning, one of the holiest sites of islam, and during the holiest month

western news sources are calling what took place here “clashes”

tell me - do you see a clash of equal forces? or do you see israeli soldiers pushing elderly grandparents down stairs, beating women unprovoked, firing live ammunition and grenades inside a place of worship, and worshippers ducking for cover as soldiers indiscriminately fire at them?

may the occupation and it’s lies and evils come to an end.

Different Stories Resonate with Different People

to be fair a lot of it is new user who just finished Worm wanting to express their thoughts or having just made a realization and wanting to say it which I’d say is actually nice if a bit stupid

I love r/parahumans so much. "let's get something straight jack slash is NOT that clever" WE KNOW. let's get something straight the sky IS blue circles ARE round. are we going to learn our ABCs next

(x)

Elf pet guy?

is that what your parents told you when you woke up and your pet elf was gone

Yeah I feel Alexandria would probably win if only because she actually knows how to fight and has the whole Thinker thing going on

I enjoy The Boys but one major problem I have with it is that it’s so hard to compare strengths to other settings, like we never see Homelander challenged so we have no clue how’d he fair against others which I get is maybe sorta the point with it being like him as a medium fish on a small pond but it’s still annoying

Ok what’s homestuck, actually do I want to know what homestuck is and if so what is it. This isn’t a joke I’m just confused

i feel like we dont talk enough about how two of the most decorated female hockey players ever, one a former captain for team canada and the other for the usa, fell in love and had a baby together 

are either of these stories good? cause they sound really interesting

On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.

On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.

For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:

Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.

Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.

Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.

Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.

Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.

"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.

Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:

Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.

Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.

Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)

Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.

Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.

You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.

(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)

So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!