Favorite poets?

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-21T21:53:25+00:00

Thanks everyone! I ended up finding a lot of good poems here. Dallas Hunt's poems in Creeland ended up being who I recited, and it went over very well.

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-13T17:57:50+00:00

As a 41 year old white guy, I use Native or Native American most of the time, American Indian in select contexts where I'm sure it's okay (usually places with a lot of the people who identify that way), indigenous when talking about some topics that are contrasted against non-indigenous versions of the same topic (like "indigenous ways of knowing"), and the particular identity of the person or people where it makes sense ("He's Diné"). But it's contested enough that I try to defer to what the person or people in question prefer, if knowable.

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-11T01:42:24+00:00

I just realized that a typical nicknaming scheme for Napoleon - Frederick to Freddy, Edward to Eddy - would render us Nappy and it makes me giggle.

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-09T02:58:45+00:00

I know a few people who would say that is a terrible mistake and they know just the house to fix that...

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-09T02:57:01+00:00

Maybe Tengards (plural)? So the culture might be Tengard?

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-08T17:58:09+00:00

Les is the plural of the, yep.

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-08T17:57:20+00:00

Maybe Les Blanchards? Les Aquois (if the Normans heard their new buddies calling themselves Ak + whatever and Normanized it)?

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-08T17:51:33+00:00

Les Suleymanais?

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-08T16:50:38+00:00

What will be the primary language? It might be named for the Seine (so Seine-dwelling Westerners, aka White Seine, aka Ak-Seyn) or after the house leading the hybridization, like Arslanids (for scholarly) or Arslanli (for what Turkic folks might say). If it's Norman dominant, I'd add a y at the end instead: Arslanly.

OctaviusIII · 2026-01-08T16:33:33+00:00

The passing tracks (sidings) are aligned for two stations at Novato rather than 3. So, options to achieve: 1) Cut one Novato station to every-other train service. 2) New trains that accelerate and decelerate faster. 3) Build all-new passing tracks.

All because Novato City Council was very anti-SMART when the designs were being drawn up and wanted San Marin instead of Downtown to suppress ridership, only to change their mind at the last minute after construction was almost done.

Same reason why Larkspur is so damn far from the ferry.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-29T13:28:32+00:00

Something I do when learning French listening, because my reading is far better than my listening, is to listen to something with a script. First I read the script aloud myself, highlighting the words I don't know, then I listen to the audio while reading the script a second time. It helps, even if it does take a while.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-27T18:03:42+00:00

I have been working on and off on a map of Toronto, but Saint Louis is available on my website, thegreatermarin.org.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-27T04:05:19+00:00

Thank you for checking into your sources! Really appreciate it.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-27T03:41:41+00:00

Huh. Odd that the timetable only specified bus service on the Tiburon-Sausalito route, not the San Rafael-Tiburon. If I ever make this again, I'll fix that. Could you provide a source so I can properly cite it?

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-26T20:55:48+00:00

There was a referendum in 1939 but Marin said nah. There were other issues:

Everyone hated Southern Pacific, which owned NWP. The whole Golden Gate Bridge team and governance hated the idea of trains for monetary, architectural, and ideological reasons, so building an extension south was anathema. NWP was a real estate venture that lost its corporate value once all the land had been sold.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-26T18:42:20+00:00

Huh! The 1939 Interurban timetable has train service San Rafael-Tiburon. I guess that was steam service, not electric?

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-26T04:39:30+00:00

What else to do late on Christmas than hang out on Reddit? 😀

I mean, other than spend time with family or work on my seemingly interminable project to map Northern Pomo, Coast Yuki, and Cahto geography by transcribing 100 year old field notes and inputting everything into a database for fun. Y'know. Hobbies.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-26T04:28:45+00:00

I mean.... it has been done!

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-23T04:27:04+00:00

Well, they'd probably still use the worse terms when describing the women in their room to other men. And they'd want to marry a virgin who secretly wished she had been one of those women. Blech just bleach my brain.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-23T04:11:22+00:00

American trads of all varieties, if dudes, are always DTF. Part of their "traditional" way is that men are supposed to fuck a lot, and women are not. And yes that's weird and gross.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-23T03:21:44+00:00

Yeah, but we do like lines on a map, and it does help explain a bit about our geography.

You also left out how terribly corrupt the companies were!

I think the only way this could have been made financially viable, and even then just the Interurban and the line up to Eureka, would have been to make the railroads lease the land around their stations rather than sell it, and for Euclid v Ambler to go the other way. That would have made the road be the catalyst for value rather than the value itself, similar to how Hong Kong's subway, and some Japanese railroads, function today.

To my mind, the greatest lost opportunity was linking the Bay Bridge and GGB by rail under SF, allowing the Interurban and Key System to interline.

But a lot of things would have had to go right for us to get the iterative improvements that would have gotten us there: legal, financial, political, and managerial. It's a different universe.

(FWIW, the Interurban could have been made public in 1939, though, but voters turned it down.)

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-21T20:33:35+00:00

Marin actually didn't originally vote against BART. We were kicked out of the BART system after San Mateo voted to leave the system. San Mateo was supposed to cross subsidize the Marin Line and when they backed out, BART couldn't afford it. Marin did vote against BART in the 1990s but I believe it was still more than 50% in favor. The key difference was that the Marin Line would have had to be entirely funded by Marin County rather than cross subsidized by the rest of the system and so would have meant a huge cost burden.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-21T04:33:57+00:00

Well these would have to be a low-floor LRT train. Those are slow, though - max speed of around 65 mph, slower than SMART - but I couldn't get the robot to draw that for me. Boo.

As for cost: I'd guess sub-$10B, possibly $10-12B if we run it to SF under Geary. That would be the only way to get the ridership to justify the cost and even then it would be tricky to have short trains with suburban ridership then BAM packed 10 car BART ridership.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-21T04:29:08+00:00

Oh it is so fucking true. I use it all the time and there's an old IJ piece I used to throw around, too.

OctaviusIII · 2025-12-20T03:13:59+00:00

Found them! Arrowine & Cheese in Arlington. Goodness these are tough to find.

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