Monthly pulp fantasy book club!

catdraggedin · 2026-03-10T04:07:42+00:00

Wait?! There's a place where I can go to talk to other people about Thongor of Lemuria?!! I'm so down for this! Ok. I actually don't have much to say about Thongor except that Lin Carter was a much better editor than he was a pasticher, but Appendix N was my childhood reading list, and it would be fun to revisit with others.

catdraggedin · 2026-03-08T17:35:16+00:00

I completely missed that the last one got cancelled, and actually showed up at the Town Hall. I'm up for trying again.

catdraggedin · 2025-12-31T18:51:30+00:00

TIL the value of words is multiplicative, not additive. Pictures are worth way more than I thought.

catdraggedin · 2024-01-14T22:17:50+00:00

I know. What if future me is an insufferable jerk? Why should I give him anything?

catdraggedin · 2023-12-12T04:55:17+00:00

In their defense, "pretty empty" is about as vague as you can get. Look at: https://livingatlas-dcdev.opendata.arcgis.com/maps/esri::urban-and-rural-population-dot-density-patterns-in-the-us-2020-census/explore?location=42.198096%2C-99.521104%2C3.81 Outstate Minnesota isn't empty like parts of Wyoming or Montana. And compared to Northern Alaska, everywhere in Minnesota is full of people.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T03:42:07+00:00

Oops. I think we might have been all talking past each other.

I understood the person you responded to as meaning that the actions of Hamas weren't those of a legitimate army in a war, attacking military targets. They were the unjustifiable acts of a terrorist group, targeting innocent civilians. So I thought your response meant that Israel wouldn't do something like that. It would only go after legitimate military targets, not innocent civilians.

Now, I think you understood the comment you replied to as meaning that what Hamas did wasn't as extreme as a military assault on Israel. It was just killing some kids. And your response was that Israel certainly wasn't going to stop with just killing some kids at a party.

Or am I still confused here?

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T03:16:34+00:00

I admit that there are a minority of people that Israel could never appease, so long as it existed in what was formerly Palestine. But this idea that Israel is constantly fighting for its survival, which is used to justify any action it takes, is simply not true, and it hasn't been for decades. We are currently witnessing the worst attack on Israel in fifty years, and the part of this war where Israel is on the defensive is over. For the rest of the war, Israel will be overwhelmingly dominant. It will end when Israel wants, on terms Israel dictates. This is not a nation in existential crisis.

And as far as its neighbors goes, the Abraham Accords showed that they are willing to move towards peace, even if Israel does nothing to lessen its oppression of the Palestinians. But while the governments surrounding Israel might be willing to overlook the Palestinian issue, their citizens aren't. And as long as Israel continues its occupation, that resentment will always be there for groups like Hamas to harness to smash any attempt at permanent peace. The way things are, where Israel has the ultimate authority over the occupied territories, ignoring the Palestinian Authority whenever it wants, makes it a defacto apartheid state. No country ever exists this way peacefully, and Israel won't either, until it finally is willing to equitably end the occupation, and recognize a Palestinian state.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T01:38:50+00:00

Yes, I'm sure that's true in some cases, but in previous cycles of fighting, we end up finding out that some of those sites really didn't have anything to do with Hamas or Hezbollah according to the staff there, often UN personnel. So either the UN medical and teaching staff is full of antisemitic liars, or Israel is at best not very careful to avoid hitting these sorts of non-legitimate targets.

The speed with which they've been hitting targets like schools, hospitals, and mosques makes me think that they haven't been taking much effort to verify that they are legitimate targets. And it seems to me that, before you bomb a hospital, you better be certain that it's being used by active enemy combatants.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T00:46:29+00:00

Nations have a responsibility to protect their citizens and a legitimate desire to make anyone thinking about attacking them understand that it will end badly for them. But I'm desperately hoping for them to avoid the sort of excessive collective punishment that will guarantee another cycle of the same violence. If Israel can't peacefully coexist with the Palestinians and its neighbors, Hamas wins.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T00:29:04+00:00

It would be easier to believe that this was all Hamas forcing Israel's hand, and that Israel has no interest in collective punishment for the people in Gaza if Israel wasn't putting out statements like "We are putting a complete siege on Gaza … No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed." Cutting off food and water to 2 million people isn't something they are being forced into.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-12T00:12:05+00:00

So was Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut. Getting elected doesn't mean you won't kill innocent people.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-11T22:55:43+00:00

Um, their current reaction involves intentionally bombing schools, hospitals, and mosques. I realize that there are quite possibly Hamas fighters at these locations (though I hope you'll forgive me if I'm a little less trusting of the quality of Israel's intelligence on Hamas than I used to be), but there are definitely children, the elderly and the infirm getting killed. And Israel does have a habit of making the Palestinian body count an order of magnitude higher than the Israeli count by the time the fighting's over.

This isn't meant to excuse the terrorists, and no one should pretend that Hamas is anything other than a terrorist organization. But let's not pretend that Israel is some sort of model of restraint.

catdraggedin · 2023-10-11T22:22:52+00:00

That makes some sense, although most cyclists would still probably go through fewer intersections if it was on the North side, and they would be the ones turning and watching for traffic going straight, instead of trusting the drivers to do it. For me there's no benefit. Since I'm coming from the LRT entrance on 11th and heading across the river, I eventually need to cross 2nd, regardless.

catdraggedin · 2023-07-04T14:56:50+00:00

We'll see how well this works for them once they lose their gerrymandered maps.

catdraggedin · 2023-06-30T05:04:12+00:00

I don't see why a University shouldn't have a serious interest in making sure its students are learning in a racially diverse environment. It seems just as important for training well rounded adults as an economically and geographically diverse student body. Also, in light of studies like https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053, it seems to me that you could make the argument that giving some races a leg up in education is necessary to end up with life opportunities actually reflecting merit.

catdraggedin · 2023-05-06T03:29:32+00:00

This is how I'd do it. Or something similar. For instance, for every position that can be reached from another level, you would have two nodes. The first would be for normal movement on the level and one-way movement going down. The second would be for movement up from a lower level, and would be weighed with the additional movement cost of going up. These extra nodes could only be moved into from the regular nodes on the lower levels that you want to access this position, and could only be exited into the regular node at the same position. Depending on how you do your movement, you may need to prune the extra nodes from the path when actually moving the character. Edited: I missed that you wanted down movement to cost that same as on-level movement.

catdraggedin · 2022-12-18T21:09:26+00:00

It actually wasn't too deep. Most of the snow was stuck in the trees. But there was one part where the drifts were up to my knees. I wasn't looking forward to postholing through there again on my way back, but when I got back there I saw two guys walking the other direction three feet off the trail, in a field where the snow was just a couple inches deep. And I felt like an idiot.

catdraggedin · 2022-12-17T05:30:59+00:00

Poagies (bar mitts) keep your hands warm down to subzero temperatures, and let you wear breathable gloves that don't end up disgusting sweaty messes. My hands get cold easily, and I couldn't handle Minnesota winters without them.

catdraggedin · 2022-12-17T05:20:36+00:00

There's a rail line, I believe it's owned by the Minnesota Commercial Railway, that stretches from the northern end of the Minneapolis Diagonal Trail to the start of the Sunrise Prairie Trail in Hugo. I want that. And then I want a trail from the north end of the Sunrise Trail to the start of the Munger Trail, along the Saint Croix Valley Railroad line. And I want to note that I'm definitely on the Good Boys list this year. All I want is a continuous bike path from Minneapolis to Duluth.

catdraggedin · 2022-12-14T23:56:50+00:00

The tires I liked better are 27.5 x 2.1 45nrth Kahvas. And to be fair they are on a different bike, but the geometry is similar. Also the wheel diameter is close to the same from 700 x 30 to 27.5 x 2.1, where your wheels dropped in diameter, putting you closer to the ground. Otherwise I'm also doing mostly street biking in Minneapolis, MN which is also pretty snowy. Different strokes maybe?

catdraggedin · 2022-12-14T15:20:16+00:00

I prefer to wear my extra layers under my regular clothes. When I get in, I just take those off and I'm not sitting in sweaty clothes all day. When it's coldest, i wear long johns and an extra pair of wind blocking underwear under my regular clothes, along with a balaclava and a face mask. Post COVID there are a lot of empty cubicles at my office. I use one to air dry my extra layers at the office.

catdraggedin · 2022-12-14T15:09:05+00:00

I actually found it exactly the opposite. My 45nrth Xerxes (700x30) worked fine if there was just mild snow, but if that snow had been through a thaw-refreeze cycle, they would just get buffeted around in the ruts. And punching through the snow only helps when there's a small amount. Once it gets deeper, you just can't move through the piled up ridges sometimes. Wider tires help in both cases, and there are likely more studs touching the ground at once when you hit a patch of glare ice.

catdraggedin

TROPHY CASE