…human empathy is not a team sport…

…oh, i think you misunderstand me: that’s not impaired driving, that’s skillful navigation through the normal flow of traffic in sàigòn…

…oh, that’s just the vietnam regional setting…

…satellite galaxies != galaxy clusters; andromedia is 2.5 million light-years distant and the cluster in this study is about ten times that size, 23 million light-years across…

…that’s correct: i assumed 0.01c and didn’t adjust for time dilation, which can drastically affect the calculations depending upon how far we push relativistic super-science, although the required energies are commensurately absurd…

…i don’t know if i have very interesting stories about the folks who dug in; mostly that ferraris have a reputation for not keeping up with the group on account of breakdowns when driven hard…more entertaining were the rally-star trailer queens which slowed down to crawl over every cattleguard or fresh roadwork for fear of marring their pristine clearcoats while the exotic road cars flew right through, welcoming the well-earned miles…

…a lot of us drive open-topped in light rain - as long as you keep moving the cabin stays fairly dry - but we’ve been caught in torrential downpours a couple of times and come through soaked to the bone before managing to pull off and raise our various tops and targas…next sunny day, you open everything up, let it dry out completely, and follow-up with a detail if it still bothers you…

…when a group of twenty or thirty high-profile cars pull into a small town fuel station, it can draw a lot of attention, positive and negative, but not so much when we pull into a remote roadhouse since those tend to be more common destinations…

…for folks really into the scene, the real rock stars were cars driven in open road races, not the trailer queens: it’s a modest culture which respects real-world capability and experience more than flashy showmanship…use it or lose it, as they say…

…so what you’re saying is that we should start calling drow shiela and bruce?..

…nope, we installed ours on the full water supply: it’s essential here or plumbing fixtures will fail…a properly designed softener won’t add significant salt to your potable water since the brine flushes clear after each recharge cycle…

…i used to lead a monthly hundred-mile canyon-run which would turn out a broad spectrum of sportcars and exotics, some of which were trailer queens…

…it was always interesting to see how show car owners respond to the opportunity to drive their car the way it was meant to be driven, some of whom embraced the opportunity and others who delicately babied their way around the loop or bailed-out early…

…i don’t think you should drink that; it looks bad for you…

…softeners are essential in aquifer country; our zojirushi served us well for a decade but after our whole-house filter blew out a couple of years ago i’m starting to see iron deposits despite the softener…

…for those distances we’re talking hundreds of millions of years at relativistic velocities, even billions…

…i was thinking bathtub cheese but that’ll do…

…i’ll put my money on a domestic incident first: the administration has more to gain from crushing dissent…

…i’ve worked at a couple of places which offered a floating holiday in lieu of - i think it was thanksgiving friday?..i’ve also worked a few places which only do six: new year, memorial, independence, labor, thanksgiving day only, and christmas…

…most hourly places i’ve worked don’t do any paid holidays; if they’re closed you just don’t get paid…

…i’m down for cancelling f*cking christmas; federal holidays should be secular…

…give us the solstices, equinoxes, and earth day and i’m pretty good; throw in labor day and memorial day if you want to bump it up to the private-sector seven…

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…pretty much this: they’re conformant authoritarians and christian nationalism just happens to be the cultural identity in which they were raised…

“You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range.”

…its only component is verbal, and while it’s not subtle casting it’s fair to characterise as subtle casting; i’d argue for first-round surprise in the context of open dialog and in fact that’s how we’ve played it at my tables…

^{(i actually thought this was ammunition from an old disc gun)}

…all my turntables have included 45RPM adapters for the spindle; never needed anything separate for the records…

…i have a 5" adapter ring for 3" compact discs, though: that has seen legitimate use in all my slot-loading players, although drawer-loading players always included detents for smaller discs, and of course portable players snap directly onto the spindle…