Admittedly the “don’t know what’s on the other side” bit is a little iffy. Sure, they’ve got that little wheeled robot they use a couple of times, but after a while you’d think they’d do something as simple as “stick a camera on a pole through the gate first.”
The setup is just perfect too. “All hands - brace for turbulence.”
And you’re thinking, No. No way he’s going to do that.
AND THEN HE DOES.
Oh, I’m aware of them. Sorry, I should have been more clear!
What I was more speaking about is running historic equipment over long distances on main-line tracks. It’s startlingly rare in the US; most of the railroads (even shorter ones) don’t like historic equipment on them, so with a very few exceptions historic trains are limited to short excursions along tracks owned by the museums.
In fairness, we are now seeing a huge surge in steam locomotive restorations in the US. But I think there is only a single museum in which can even run main-line electric equipment at all.
Very neat, thank you! I wish we had more like that in the US.
What is the heritage railroad environment like in Sweden? Are these being run by the actual railroad owners, or by private groups over the railroads’ tracks?
I actually really like this. It teaches your cat that legs are a resting spot. (Or maybe you don’t want them to learn that, since it can lead to Feline Paralysis in Humans.)
Depends on the kind of home and how “handy” you feel yourself to be. There are a lot of minor things around the home which can save you boatloads of money (and be faster to deal with) if you do them yourself.
Tools:
Comfort:
Convenience:
Lastly, for furniture and other things, unless you’re in a really small area, check various community marketplace kinds of sites. You can find a lot of critical stuff for less than MSRP, and non-critical stuff at a point that won’t break your budget.
I know people I could torment with this. I’m not going to, but God it would be funny.
A lot. Some of them were genuinely great. Some were way less so.
To Kill a Mockingbird: Earns every bit of reputation it has. Should be shown twice.
Teacher’s Pet: They showed this as a reward. I despised it. Seriously, it sticks in my head
The outsiders: “Okay, I guess.” I remember feeling it was a decent bit of storytelling, but I was too detached from the themes and era to care. Honestly, it was probably too old for kids to identify with.
When the Levees Broke: In retrospect, one of Lee’s weaker works. Nonetheless, it made a hell of an impact on us. We’d mostly seen helicopter’s-eye views of New Orleans. Getting down in with the people was a whole different view.
Tuesdays with Morrie: Apparently it’s popular, but we all hated it. Felt it was sentimental slop.
Brighton Beach Memoirs: Honestly don’t remember much. We mostly cared that, at the end, they actually showed the nude photo the lead character received. As kids, that was mind-blowing.
This is a little surprising to me because I read it on a daily basis and haven’t seen sign of the paywall yet. I don’t know if Ublock Origin is simply squashing that as well, or I’m somehow lucky.
If anything, Tahini - a separate spread common to the Middle East, made from sesame seeds - is vaguely closer to peanut butter.
This. Actually launching a community is hard. Launching a decentralized network of communities is damn hard.
I’ve been around for long enough to remember the internet before megasites like Reddit, when every community had their own forums and/or website. Specific mod for a specific game? Unique forum. Specific sub-community of a fandom, like a bunch of tech nerds analyzing the starships in Star Wars? Unique forum.
And like, I don’t deny that losing that hurt. Each site had its own unique little flavor of community, and the great centralization of the internet definitely steamrolled that flat in favor of mainstream appeal. But centralizing did also improve ease of discovery and access. Now we’re trying to build all of those little communities back in what - 2-3 years? In comparison to the 10+ they had to grow in before? It’s not going to be easy.
I mean, you can argue some semantics about “peaceful”.
What it is undeniable is that it prevented global powers from going directly to total war, resulting in a much diminished number of casualties (both soldiers and civilians) compared to the World Wars. Nothing since then, even if we summed up all the wars going on around the world at any given moment, rival the unthinkable numbers of dead who piled up those conflicts, nor - if I can speculate a bit - would they have rivaled another worldwide industrialized conflict.
But.
Does that actually mean the world is “more peaceful”?
One can argue that the undeniable reality that you are much less likely to be killed in a war between nations today means “Yes.” One can also argue that peace should not be measured by cold mathematics: That the continued existence of smaller-scale conflicts around the world, internal conflicts within countries, or deaths from non-national conflicts such as the ongoing gun violence epidemic in the US or deaths caused by polluting megacorporations mean it has not gotten “more peaceful”; the risks have just changed.
I suppose it depends on how you are analyzing all of this, in the end.
Just one note: I don’t know what the nature of your thesis is, but you might get more nuanced results by something like assigning each book in a pair a 1-5 score. Right now, an answer of “I like #1 better than #2” could mean a few things:
Right? I try to stay away from it so a few unread pages can build up and I can devour them all at once, but I never manage to stay away for long…
Been following Jay for a few years now - he used to lurk the Worldbuilding community over on Reddit, so I ran into him a few times back before I migrated to Lemmy. Runaway is some really fantastic stuff, and the sheer effort of depth put into minor details of the world make it stand out. (Seriously, check for the small details of how the characters emote - it’s fascinating.)
At this point I only wish more of it would come out faster, but again given the sheer attention to detail and quality of art, I’m just delighted to have it at all!
Haha, holy shit. Somehow I had never connected that Piratesoftware was Maldavius. Yeah, that explains so, so very much of this entire SKG debacle.
Like, what kind of dictator are we talking here? Is this a Lord Vetinari benevolent dictator, or your typical generic slimeball autocrat?
Personally, I’d like to think that if they did become the latter, they’d be so far different from the person I love that I would break from them. Thoughtfulness, intelligence, and consideration aren’t usually things I see associated with dictators, you know? But people have an incredible capacity to isolate and put on different masks between their personal and professional lives…
In fairness, Microsoft certainly has tried to get the next closest thing with Bedrock. The hosting of server backends through their architecture via “realms” allows them to lock you out of a whole lot, and I still see people getting randomly banned because of their profanity filter.
But yes, if Realms shut down right now, there would always be Java (and even privately hosted Bedrock servers).
Whatever it is, I’m inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k’s “FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways”, but more… it’s risky. It’s a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there’s that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully…
Like, Babylon 5’s hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it’s also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.
Even Star Wars’ Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn’t get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.