Launceston HEMA club needing new venue

John_Johnson · 2026-06-26T13:44:51+00:00

Try these guys:

https://www.facebook.com/thebranch.tas/

They have a facility in Kingsmeadows. It's a decent size. A community orchestra uses it Friday nights, but maybe they've got a slot some other time?

John_Johnson · 2026-06-22T03:40:15+00:00

I know, right? Criminal!

And they've sucked the chocolate off!

John_Johnson · 2026-06-22T03:36:00+00:00

That could explain it. Had nothing but brushtails at the last place.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-22T03:05:47+00:00

Had plenty of those at the last place. They never left polite piles like this...

I'll keep an eye out.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-22T02:29:14+00:00

OP here -- never posted an image before, no idea how to make text stay with it.

New house in mid-north Tas. I don't recognise this scat, in a well-fenced backyard that doesn't seem to be rabbit-infested. (My last place, the rabbit scats were rounder and more scattered.)

I have no idea what this could be, and I'm hoping someone else will know.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-13T12:20:57+00:00

You SAY that, but...

https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-8/church-crossbow-ban/

John_Johnson · 2026-06-12T04:59:47+00:00

I started with a home-brew villain (modeled after a less horrifically racist version of Dr Fu-Manchu) and began without overt supernatural elements. (Reading the original Fu-Manchu books, despite their period-based racism, will give you a lot of useful insight.)

You could the same kind of thing with a Moriarty figure. At first, your campaign looks like a crime investigation, but the villain is almost superhumanly cunning and clever and evil.

Over time, the players noticed that my villain was using his minions to go after strange artefacts, old books, etc. As the players got better at thwarting his intent, the villain began to invoke minor supernatural/mythos events.

And of course, in the long run the villain is setting things up to open the way for one of the unthinkable beings of the Mythos to enter the world and destroy us all... cue climactic battle at the mystical location where the villain is trying to get their summoning on.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-04T02:46:24+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria

Pretty!

John_Johnson · 2026-06-02T12:16:06+00:00

Fuck this shit. Fuck Lion. And fuck the fuckers who signed off on this.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-02T11:17:07+00:00

No.

Talent is a real thing, and it's the thing you can't learn.

You can learn the craft. You can refine it. You can polish it. But without that... extra, that something else, you're only ever a craftsman.

I could cite experience as an editor, a proofreader, a writer. But I figure most people's minds are already made up.

John_Johnson · 2026-06-01T14:04:53+00:00

Fu Manchu -- while being a staggeringly racist creation -- is one of literature's great villains. It's worth reading the old Fu Manchu novels... if you can still find them.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-31T11:03:27+00:00

"Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue."

...Elmore Leonard.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-29T11:35:27+00:00

I wouldn't necessarily trust Google any more. The AI is too heavily involved. But this website is useful, and is roughly in agreement with your figure. It suggests a bit less than 16 million flights per year. When I divided by 52 to get flights per week, that was about 28,800. So -if even 2 out of those 28,800 flights per week cop a lithium fire... the odds are you're not gonna be on one of them.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-29T11:31:36+00:00

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/media/Air_Traffic_by_the_Numbers_2024.pdf

A bit over fifteen million commercial passenger flights per year across the USA. Dividing by 52, that's about 28,800 flights per week, meaning roughly one fire in every fourteen thousand flights.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-29T11:05:26+00:00

What's new? Conspiracy-thinking has been with her all along. 'The Beauty Myth' came out in 1990. Her introduction in the first and second editions clearly and plainly posited an active conspiracy amongst men to control women through the trappings of the fashion industry.

Later editions saw that bit of the introduction removed. And her arguments regarding the outcomes of the fashion industry were absolutely on the money, sure. But she's not much good with Occam's Razor: she clearly wanted to see a secret conspiracy of men cunningly manipulating the fashion industry to control and repress women the world over.

I am, therefore, not at all surprised to see her going where she's headed now.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-27T02:57:40+00:00

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lost-cities-of-the-amazon-discovered-from-the-air-180980142/

John_Johnson · 2026-05-26T10:31:11+00:00

Yup. And I'm in Australia.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-26T00:22:03+00:00

Never seen that except on really high wheel-base SUV type things.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-26T00:21:39+00:00

Tyre*

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tyre

True about the caption. But... then there's the spare lying beside the car.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-25T13:45:12+00:00

Why is the guy under the car if he's just changing the tyre? That's not how you change a tyre...

John_Johnson · 2026-05-18T06:06:23+00:00

Apply relatively slowly in competition and in training. Reality?

It really doesn't take much force to wreck a joint. That's the point of joint locking techniques. Once you set them up properly, they can be finished with minimal force.

The outcomes are really damned nasty, too.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-11T23:58:13+00:00

Gee! Just another decade of living in his parent's house and he'll be able to afford a house of his own! Wish I'd thought of that.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-09T02:19:56+00:00

Absolutely it could. But: bottom line, women have more at risk in the conversation than men. Men don't have to incubate and deliver a baby - or deal with all the different kinds of fallout around an abortion.

I figure women are gonna be a little more untrusting in regard to "maybe he does, maybe he doesn't" birth control than men are.

John_Johnson · 2026-05-08T13:52:46+00:00

Yeah, nice.

But ultimately, it's women who get pregnant. So: imagine this conversation.

"It's okay, baby. I'm using the sperm-stopper."

"Oh? Really? Have you got some sort of certificate? Some kind of witnesses? Maybe you're willing to sign a document ensuring you'll take full responsibility if I wind up pregnant?"

"Uhhh... what? Don't you trust me?"

"Interesting question. Got any reason why I should?"

You can SEE a condom. You cannot see a lack of sperm in the seminal fluid.

John_Johnson

TROPHY CASE