Dungeons and (bad) Dragons

Does it turn into a gryphon when it grows up?

And would the fiber from its cocoon be considered fur or silk?

It’s wondering why you are doing that somewhat odd thing you’re doing. It doesn’t matter what exactly you’re doing, it’s mildly curious and concerned about it whatever it is.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

The reason dog food is a no for cats isn’t because it’s harmful if they eat a kibble or two, but because dog food isn’t fortified with an amino acid cats need, taurine, so feeding a cat exclusively on dog food will result in a type of malnutrition in the cat.

https://www.petmd.com/blogs/nutritionnuggets/cat/dr-coates/2014/december/what-taurine-32287

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

Why is it whenever I find a new favorite anything, it’s Finnish? Most of my favorite bands are Finnish, I’m playing Alan Wake II and it’s great, I follow several Finnish comics artists. So much good stuff coming out of Finland.

Anyway, that site is awesome, I’m glad it was shared.

The topographical features of the cave walls could also have inspired the artists’ imagination. Cave dwellers may have experienced pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon of seeing unintentional forms in nature, like seeing shapes in clouds. If a bulge of rock looks a little like a horse’s head, the artist might imagine the complete form, filling in the rest of the details.

For example, one newly discovered horse image measures around 460 x 300mm and is painted in red using variably spaced dots. It depicts the head with the corner of the mouth, an eye, an ear, and the beginning of the cervico-dorsal line. The figure makes use of natural features of the cave wall, with cracks in the rock incorporated into the outlines of the head and chest. The cervical-dorsal line adapts to a concave area of the wall.

I guess previously scientists were looking at the art like how you or I might look at a horse drawn on a piece of paper, but some of the art was more like going up to a funny rock sort of shaped like a horse, and adding onto it/altering it in order to show others how much like a horse (or whatever) the funny looking rock is.

Which kind of crossing between artistic mediums, from 2D painting to something more like sculpture.

Anyway, this is cool. I didn’t really consider that someone might do that with their art before reading this article.

I permanently lured my friend’s cat from sitting on her (warm) laptop power brick by getting the cat a heated cat bed.

Thank you!

(I had to check I didn’t secretly have that one already too–this time I don’t, but it’s going on my wishlist.)

Gah, that’s exactly what I want, I just have no budget for it atm. Going on my wishlist for sure.

I wonder if there’s less-polished tools (FOSS) out there that can do something similar?

Edit: Wow, I’m a dummy, I already own it, I’ve just never installed it. Ha! Thank you!

Is it? What led you to pick up a book from the 1970s? Has it aged well over the past 53 years, or is it one of those books you need to read at the right age for it to stick?

Poul Anderson was pretty prolific–is this a good one to start with?

I’m sorry I have to tell you this–but I think your cat is in a cult.

The gentleman who narrates this video is an actual research scientist (in geology) who researches Mars stuff.

I googled “Muji flashlight” because I had no idea who or what Muji was, and found this:

https://www.spoon-tamago.com/muji-flashlight-redesign/

Scientists say challenge of building moon base on dust could be overcome by heating it with giant lens

Story idea: Villain starts a panic when he builds a giant rock-melting space laser between earth and the moon…but he really just wants it to create a foundation and some roads for his new moon-palace and didn’t intend to turn it on the earth at all.

Ann Leckie, unfortunately, is one of those “separate art from the artist” people for me.

I’ve liked her work a lot, but not her Twitter behavior.

I don’t feel like grabbing the exact details (they might still exist in her Twitter, she left it up for over a year, unless she got rid of it during this more recent Twitter enshittification period), but a few years back she went off on the trans community when Mercedes Lackey won an award.

Basically, the trans community (and their allies) were venting/crying out in pain on Twitter when it broke Mercedes Lackey got an award, as Lackey had said some hurtful stuff in the past and Lackey getting an award prompted renewed talk about Lackey’s works and her past words, and then on the tails of that, in the PRESENT, Lackey’s husband Larry Dixon showed up and freshly doubled down on some of it. (Somewhere along the line, it was said, paraphrased, that nobody was bigger “drama queens” than the trans community. So you can imagine why that’d provoke outrage suddenly streaming across Ann Leckie’s Twitter feed.)

And Ann Leckie seemed to miss some of the context (she responded slow, like a day or so behind) and went off on people who I guess she felt were being mean to Mercedes Lackey in her feed. She basically jumped in and said in this moralizing, fatuous way that it was never okay to say certain things about people. Basically, a big moral finger-wagging, right at trans folks and allies. Complete with some “don’t twist my words” when people who were largely level-headed tried to talk to her.

My belief is that she saw herself in Mercedes Lackey (someone who’d seemingly supported the queer community in her past work, who was now getting criticism from readers in that same community) and that’s why she went charging to her defense like a knight and didn’t stop to consider WHY the trans community was voicing “mean” stuff in Lackey’s direction. And why things maybe weren’t as black-and-white as she was making it.

It left a bad taste in my mouth, because Ann Leckie went to all this trouble enshrining the plight of (for example) tea-picking debt slave workers in poor countries in her books, has a drug addict as a supporting character, and has tons of genderqueer and neurodivergent stuff in her books, but she couldn’t stop for two seconds to think about why someone who is trans, and who might be living in a dangerous situation with their only outlet is books (or might have trans friends who are), might object to an author known for writing about queer issues saying hurtful stuff about people like them and their community. And how it might be more merciful or useful to stop and listen to the pain, even if it’s using harsh words, than to chide them for saying mean things.

I think Ann Leckie felt empathy for Mercedes Lackey as a fellow author, and feared that people online would criticize HER for similar things, and that fear of HER possibly being criticized basically meant she centered herself and her pain when she saw people being upset with Mercedes Lackey, while shrouding it in a moral finger-wagging lesson, instead of stopping to step back and figure out WHY trans people were so upset.

And so, after having seen that play out before my eyes, it just made me question some of the themes in Ann Leckie’s books.

It happened another time too, a few years prior to the Lackey thing, but I remember even less of that one so I’m unwilling to get too much into it. I just remember noting it seemed more a reaction due to an author being piled on/criticized, combined with some big holes in her understanding of the situation.

It’s just really weird to know her books seem to address a lot of important issues about power between different types of people, and culture, and gender–but in the real world with real people, she’ll side with the author if there’s the slightest hint of a “pile on”, even if that’s not actually what’s necessarily what’s going on.

I read these not long after reading the first five Murderbot Diaries books, and I wonder if the Radch books might have been an influence on Wells.

I can’t speak FOR Wells, but in my personal experience, if you want to know an author’s influences, you usually need to look back 20-30+ years ago, or at current science developments and news, not at their contemporaries writing books in the same genre.

Martha Wells is only 2 years older than Ann Leckie, so they likely grew up reading similar SFF books in the 70s/80s/90s, and are now roughly the same age while current events swirl. I know they’ve reviewed each other’s books, but I’d be surprised if they influenced each other that much.

It’s more likely they were both influenced by mutually-read/experienced/loved books and shows from decades past.

“Tomb beverage” sounds like some sort of horrible euphemism involving embalming fluid…or worse.

They took that X away from me a few days later. I’ve switched to Freetube and it’s been pretty smooth.