IonAddis

I grew up reading paper books and I don't like how narrow my phone is, or how reading for 8+ hours at a time drains the battery so much so quickly unless I attach a tether to it to charge while I read (I don't like the sensory feeling of that phone charger dragging over my body as I shift in bed). Phones also provide too many "quick gratification" distractions like apps and social media. Also, as I get older, I have to increase text size because my eyes already sucked before aging got to them, then they got worse, and large text on a tiny phone screen is ridiculous.

eReaders have better battery life and a bigger screen and are easier to read in full sun without glare washing it out.

This is when you use the kiteh as your pillow. (It's a massage pillow; it vibrates and kneads.)

Someone said the turtle was alive, and for some reason I immediately thought of Discworld. I think it's totally plausible Discworld could exist in this universe. Probably in some place that was never conquered, like Allison's Earth. I could totally see characters like Granny Weatherwax and Captain Carrot as effortlessly being Royalty. (And double the pun with Carrot, there...)

Anyway--I did a second-take at the liberators after I read somewhere that the turtle is not a dead god but is alive, and I realized the turtle might actually be alive because Jadis is actually in there, in the glass pyramid atop the turtle.

or nail Polish

I didn't read that as you intended initially.

So, caveat: I think the guys in thi sthread trying to put ideals of a no-car society over the reality of what it's like to be poor and commuting every day on bike are full of shit. That said, I have spent most of 20 years biking to work in the vicinity of a big city.

In winter, you have to dress like you're prepared to be lost outside overnight with no shelter. Like, you have to learn to ACTUALLY dress for the cold, for extended periods of time. (And you have to pay attention to the weather report--if it's going to be wet, you need something that can handle being wet.) Most kids who try to bike to school try to do it in the clothing that they'd wear to drive to school. They either do not physically own the winter layers they need to stay warm, or they were never taught to properly layer.

But basically, you need probably 3 layers minimum in Chicago-type weather. Probably more if you're further north. I would regularly wear jeans with two layers of some type of pants underneath, like fleece and some other base layer, and on top I'd have long-sleeve shirt, t-shirt, another long-sleeve shirt or sweatshirt or sweater, and over all of that a heavy duty winter jacket. For my head I'd have a full-face mask with a thick warm hat on top. Sometimes a scarf too. For my hands, I'd have multiple layers, and I'd usually wear mittens rather than gloves because mittens are warmer, and I'd have more than one pair of mittens. When biking, at least one layer of mittens needs to be wind-breakery because that wind is COLD. For shoes, I'd have wool socks, sometimes two pairs, and real heavy-duty winter boots on (not sneakers or whatever).

The thing is, a lot of people who never have had to actually spend significant time out doors won't even OWN sufficient layers to stay truly warm in the cold. Either due to poverty (it costs money to buy really, truly warm clothes of the right material), or lack of knowledge of how to dress for the cold. (I lacked both when I was young!) Or they'll have thin cotton fast fashion when they actually need wool or synthetic warm-weather gear. Or they'll be concerned about looking stupid (because if you dress properly, you look dumpy and not cool.)

Not true.

I haven't owned a car for most of my adult life, and things start to get really difficult in winter with snow (insufficient bus routes in a given area, and sidewalks/bike lanes covered in snow and not able to be transversed).

When job-hunting I had to exclude a lot of places because of how impossible it'd be to do the commute in winter. Given how expensive rent is, plenty of people are forced to live with relatives or live in certain cheaper areas long past when they'd prefer to leave, which means if the roof over your head is in an area without sidewalks/bike lanes/public transit, you rely hardcore on a car to get to work and back. And if you don't have that car, you basically lose your job. Maybe you can sustain it over the summer, but once winter snow kicks in you're pretty fucked the first hard snow or ice that comes through. If you're lucky, it's close enough to walk--but not everyone is lucky like that. Also, if your job has mandatory overtime and you're doing 50-60 hour weeks, walking 2-3 hours one way to work is a no-go.

I say this as someone who regularly biked/used public transit in Chicago winters. Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.

I've biked a lot in my life, and I'm very aware of my surroundings, and I know when to stop riding and start walking the bike.

For some reason...most bikers are NOT like me. I don't know why, they just aren't. They're dumb and clueless and, especially if they're men in athletic spandex, really entitled and do really dangerous shit. They get on bikes with their car-brain still loaded, and make decisions like they have a shell of metal and crumple zones and airbags around them. Even though they're just squishy flesh on a bunch of metal tubes.

Last summer, I was driving through a construction zone, and some 9-5 commuter guy on a bike decided to bike through the construction zone too, right along with all the cars. The road was narrow even just for cars, and the pavement had been ripped up and filled in as they did work to replace water mains underneath the road, and he was trying to bike through it, next to the cars. I was worried for him and kept looking in my rear view after I passed him. Good thing I did. Behind me, a truck pulling a small trailer clipped him accidentally (since the trailers swing back and forth a bit when navigating an uneven, narrow construction zone), and it clipped the front tire of his bike and he fell. It wasn't even purposeful, the guy who clipped him stopped too to make sure he was ok. It was just a dangerous area to bike in. I got to the guy first, so I stopped and called an ambulance for him.

Overall he got away lightly. He was shaken and bruised and had a small gouge on one finger, and was able to refuse the ambulance and have a relative drive him to an urgent care. But when we looked at his helmet, it was cracked, and if he hadn't been wearing a helmet even that light lovetap he got from the trailer might have been much worse. The helmet probably saved him from even more serious harm.

I didn't say it to his face, because I figured he'd learned his lesson, but it was REALLY fucking stupid to try to ride a bicycle through a construction zone like that, helmet or no. He was just a dumb 9-5 commuter guy in a dress shirt and tie trying to save on gas or the environment or whatever--and I guess he just never thought about what he was doing beyond that. He had car-brain, and was trying to ride his bike as if he were still in a car through a zone where it was really dangerous to NOT be in a car.

It doesn't matter if the laws say cars need to share the road with you or whatever--the laws of physics are much more concrete than the laws of mankind, and you need to pay attention to your physical surroundings and get off when you end up in a situation like that.

Anyway. My whole point is--yeah, some areas just aren't safely bike-able.

Pretty sure that plant is trying to mind-control him.

Arcane.

I missed the hype for Arcane season 1, mostly because it didn't really seem up my alley. I figured it'd be boring to me because I wasn't into that specific game, or too juvenile for me, or something.

I was really wrong. Really, really wrong. It stands on its own and season 1 has the strongest storytelling I've seen in anything in a good, long time. You don't need to care about or play League of Legends to watch the show. And it's very much NOT a kid's show even if it starts with kid characters...it touches a lot on crime, poverty, mental illness, etc. It's very honest and truthful and complex and nuanced on these things.

And every aspect of storytelling was strong. EVERY ONE.

What I mean by that is this...in most TV shows, animated or live, you usually have one form of strong(ish) storytelling carrying the entire thing and compensating for other things that are weaker. So a show will have one or two stand-out aspects, and others that are okish to bad, but able to be overlooked because of the other awesome things going on.

Like, you might have a poor script but really good actors who can elevate the poor script with their spoken intonation or physical acting. Or you might have a good script and really good soundtrack but mediocre acting and bland costume/set design. Basically, script, art/costume design, music, and actor ability all play together to deliver a story, and usually you have one or two of those that are strong, and the rest are being carried by the strong parts and ranging from competent-but-not-awesome to mediocre to bad.

Arcane's not like that.

Arcane has top-tier storytelling on the writing level, AND on the art and animation level, and in the choice of songs for the soundtrack. Like, the script itself is fantastic, but then you watch the animation and see they decided not to use common animation shorthand. Instead, they went back to actually LOOK at how humans display emotion and move their bodies and translated THAT into their animation. So you have a strong script AND strong "physical acting". How they frame shots is fantastic too. And if that wasn't enough, all the music is stellar and pertinent to the scenes it's used in. And if THAT wasn't enough, even the design of the characters BEFORE they even move or speak is top-notch. And if THAT isn't enough the voice actors are phenomenal too.

For Season 1, nothing's carrying anything else, everything is strong. And that's EXTREMELY rare in ANY show. So, so, SO rare.

Season 2 is not as good--but that's really just in comparison to how outrageously and unusually good Season 1 was. I'd say in Season 2, the script is not as tight, but all the other things are still as good as Season 1. So the animation/art design/music/etc. carry the script a little in the second season. The script isn't HORRIBLE though...it's mostly the pacing is off and it's missing some appropriate build-up in some parts. I've read they had to cut some scenes, and if that's true it would completely explain the flaws. The second season also suffers a bit in comparison to Season 1...Season 1 did everything right, so anything that's not perfect in Season 2 naturally sticks out. It doesn't make it bad though.

Anyway, yeah. Watch Arcane, if you missed that boat previously.

I've done some bopping around looking at electrical systems for RVs and vandwelling and such, and it shocked me how cheap it is to buy some lithium batteries and solar panels. A couple of years ago, a 200 amp hour battery was like $2000 per battery, but it's gotten way cheaper, really fast and you can assemble for yourself a little emergency setup for the price of a high-end PC or two. Which if you think of it, is crazy, as in the past those sorts of things only happened for like big businesses or whatever. Today, the main 'cost' is the time sink and research cost because there's not a lot of experts out there yet even though the hardware is available, so you have to do a lot of research and be careful as hell because electricity is complicated and dangerous.

(You can also get one of the jackery systems or whatever from Costco or Amazon, which is more 'plug and play', but is also more expensive overall for the amount of electrical storage you get.)

You won't be able to completely replace the strength and reliability of a normal grid connection, and you don't want to use it to produce heating or cooling (because heating and cooling suck power like whoa), but for brownouts and blackouts and storms it's pretty doable to put together a little battery system and some panels and stuff that will at least keep electronics powered. If you understand how much electricity you can store and how much your appliances draw, you can even (carefully) cook on it or keep a refrigerator going.

Like, it's possible to do this in a RV or van, where space is limited, so if you have a house you could totally do a backup battery system that tops itself off of the grid, then is available if/when the grid goes down for X amount of days at Y amount of draw.

I've been excitedly telling my doctors that this is possibly on the horizon. And I make sure to point out there's a real pubmed article with an actual picture of a ferret in it that has a little extra tooth grown in. Most are surprised but excited when I talk about it.

It's absolutely not pie in the sky like so many things seem, it literally worked on a mammal already.

I mean, just think of what it was like for teeth to come in when you were a kid. Or wisdom teeth coming in.

I think we can deal with going through that process again. It's not unfamiliar to anyone, after all, we all lived through it at least once or twice growing up.