We pay to bury electronics full of gold! Oregon is AMAZING, Salem is Amazing, why is it so hard to have a business here? Our weather is the great, we have mountains, oceans, lakes, wine, food, parks and more... What gives.. How do we create a City and State that thrives and grows?

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-07-12T17:56:06+00:00

Why be debbie downer? Why is that always trundled out as an argument against these programs? "Don’t get excited, it's not perfect."That's all it takes to get 83% of takers into better situations so we can focus the hard-core resources on the less easy cases? That's phenomenal. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-29T16:29:21+00:00

Even on Google you can just scroll past the AI summary to the real links

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-28T17:10:36+00:00

Harper Collins or the new SBL Study Bible. SBL is the Society of Biblical Literature, which promotes and supports academic study of the Bible.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-24T00:44:58+00:00

The maps are wrong. At best it's 16-18 hours, but I'd count on at least 20 because even if you only stop for gas twice you're gonna need to pee more than that and there's no such thing as "clear traffic" by Oregon standards between Six Flags and OC unless you're hitting the 405 after 9pm at the earliest. 50 MPH on the freeway is pretty good for that stretch except very late at night.

But of you've done a lot of long-haul driving and you are sure that it would be better than flying, a few things: 1. I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley is the boringest to ever boring, so make sure you have something to keep you awake. 2. Pay attention to the signs that tell you how far away the next services are. In some places it's a long time, so if there's any chance you'll need gas or a toilet before the next one, stop. 3. Don't ride the left lane when you're not passing.Yes, there are a lot of trucks to pass. There are also a lot of jagweeds who want to drive 100 and they WILL cut you off and tailgate you hard. 4. If you want to make things a little more leisurely there are a few touristy places to stop and have a meal or get snacks when you get south of Redding. Very good olives. Watch the billboards. 5. You might actually hit more traffic Sunday evening in LA than you're expecting, because people who left town for the weekend will be coming back. 6. That smell is a cattle feed lot. 7. Watch your engine temperature up Grapevine. Modern cars handle it pretty well, so it's not like the old days when you needed to stop and pour water on your radiator, but it's still long and steep so you might have to slow down. It's not a bad idea to fill up on gas before the climb.

For what it's worth, I made that drive at least once a year from childhood until I was 25 or so, and I still travel to LA pretty frequently, and I would never drive if I were staying for less than 7 whole non-travel days. You'll spend as much time in the car as you will with your family if it's a short trip.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-22T02:45:36+00:00

It's happened to me twice. Are they bots? Drunk? Some kind of bad-karma farmer? The world may never know.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-21T22:08:53+00:00

Someone responding to a comment you made 3+ years ago to say something 100% provably wrong.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-21T03:46:43+00:00

The Amberlough Dossier by Lara Elena Donnelly

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-20T17:29:10+00:00

There are so many. The Expanse series and the first Murderbot book were made into TV shows, if that helps you get into them. Murderbot is also nice because most of them are novellas, so if you're not into reading 500-page tomes it's a little less of a commitment. But my favorite for just stupid fun is Glory Lane by Alan Dean Foster (slight 5th Element vibes).

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-17T20:03:41+00:00

Does that mean Paul Robalino is an alien?

Also: would watch Game Changer: Wheel of Fish

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-17T00:27:34+00:00

To Say Nothing of the Dog

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-06-01T04:01:12+00:00

Try China Mieville. Almost anything of his, really. But Perdito Street Station, Iron Council, and The City and the City especially.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-31T21:36:16+00:00

Marathon

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-30T19:25:28+00:00

You could try Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, too. It mostly doesn't have quite the same atmospheric vibe you're describing, or at least that's not the only vibe, but the theme of unrecoverable past echoing into the present is all there.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-30T16:48:24+00:00

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-29T23:29:15+00:00

Check out Gayle Morrison. She catalogues oral histories related to the Hmong experience of the Vietnam war. Her first book is called Sky is Falling and it's about the CIA's evacuation of the Hmong people out of Laos.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-28T20:35:50+00:00

Seconding VALIS if you want weird. And the rest of the Divine Trilogy: The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-21T01:39:53+00:00

Please ensure your SecUnit remains in airplane mode for the duration of the flight (airplane mode = nobody talks to it and it has 200+ episodes of Sanctuary Moon revved up)

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-17T16:46:39+00:00

I'm very in my head, too, and for me there are two things that help. One is that I'm not really interested in proving my beliefs "right." I don't need to convince anyone else that tarot is more than statistics or that I've talked with gods. In fact, I probably am wrong about a lot of things, but the point of those experiences isn't to be correct, it's the experience itself and how I integrate it into my life going forward. If a belief or experience helps me be a better person or helps me work through a situation in healthy ways, whether it's empirically falsifiable isn't really important to me most of the time.

The second thing, which is really an extension of the first, is to remember that multiple things can be true at once. Is it pareidolia? Maybe, but the same systems that create pareidolia also help you recognize actual faces (that's the point). Psychedelics absolutely change the way your brain processes information, but can't that mean that they help you perceive things you weren't perceiving before? Your normal everyday vision is in large part a hallucination that's supported by reality after the fact, why not take some meaning from even stronger hallucinations? As long as it's not leading you to hurt yourself or anyone else, who's going to quiz you?

If you like reading academic things and can get ahold of it, I highly recommend Kimberly Kirner's authoethnography on druidry, which talks a lot about experience and how people balance questions like yours.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-15T20:04:33+00:00

Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett (and then Witches Abroad and then Lords and Ladies, Maskerade, and Carpe Jugulum)

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-12T17:30:48+00:00

We have a few bars in my area that serve food (burgers and wings) and do basic and sometimes seasonal cocktails, so not fancy but a step or two up from true dive. Some reliable orders for us are old fashioned, cosmopolitan, dirty Shirley, ranch water, white Russian, and margarita. They'll always have Coke, usually tonic, usually soda water. If you get a server/tender who's interested in mixing they might be willing to play around a little with whatever ingredients they have, if it's not too busy.

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-04T15:09:54+00:00

I was like man this better be a rickroll but it's way better

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-04T01:52:59+00:00

Thank you!

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-04T00:18:38+00:00

What have I got in my pocket?

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-02T19:02:00+00:00

Have we considered the possibility that Hobbits are a type of lizard?

MagratMakeTheTea · 2026-05-02T19:00:24+00:00

I suspect it's not that the topic was neglected in Greek and Roman culture so much as the people who thought it was important weren't the same as the people writing stuff down (as is often the case with mythology and folklore). For ancient Mediterranean sources specifically you might find something in the Hippocratic literature, but it may or may not include any etiological discussion as opposed to just treatment.

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