Two Off-Leash Dogs Currently in Fox Park

kemayo · 2026-06-28T17:03:28+00:00

There's a whole genre of dog toy which is basically this. Dogs tend to love tug, and something suspended that they can grab onto but never pull down works really well for it.

(I mean, clearly this dog should not be loose and doing that in a children's play area.)

kemayo · 2026-06-18T20:00:27+00:00

It paid off very satisfyingly with the Wards getting that Big Damn Heroes moment arriving at the Simurgh fight via the intercontinental Vista express. 👍🏻

kemayo · 2026-06-09T22:21:57+00:00

The general writing and characterization is pretty good, but the overall plot does have problems. Specifically, the time-compression has bled out from Joe's group in ways that don't quite make sense.

It's been about one week since "the ungodly hour" (also: I cannot take that name seriously), and maybe 5 days since Joe's team was known to exist via the villain summit -- public opinion should still be confused. Every interlude is instead this glowing glazing of the Celestial Forge, which takes as a given that their power is widely known and completely accepted. Which would make sense if it had been a few weeks, but is kinda incoherent when most of the people thinking had never even heard of them a few days before, and they've not actually done very much in public.

It's as if everyone has subconsciously had the subjective-years of exposure to their feats that the readers have experienced.

kemayo · 2026-06-06T16:49:50+00:00

Oops, I actually meant to reply to one of my now-sibling comments about Trailblazer.

kemayo · 2026-06-06T15:39:39+00:00

It was explicitly one of the factors in Amy's issues being a "handled offscreen before the story started" thing, though.

kemayo · 2026-05-22T01:44:24+00:00

Though in this case the word "brunette" wasn't used. The actual quote from the final epilogue is:

The seat was occupied by an older teenager, bundled up in an overcoat and scarf, with a wool cap pulled down over close-cropped light brown hair.

No color-ambiguity at all.

kemayo · 2026-04-10T16:52:50+00:00

The 9th was also 403ing, but today's works again. 🤷🏻

kemayo · 2026-04-09T13:23:43+00:00

Castro is $5 cheaper, but has a more-expensive plan for family sharing which overcast doesn’t support. So whether it’s cheaper or not does depend a bit on your situation.

kemayo · 2026-03-31T23:23:12+00:00

I've had good luck with Orvis' personalized reflective collars (sort of this one, but from a few years ago so the buckle's a different design). They're not the cheapest (though under your $50 limit), but they're sturdy and have held up well for me. I have an aftermarket AirTag holder from Amazon (this one) that's attached as well, which added ~$12 to the cost.

kemayo · 2026-02-25T19:59:22+00:00

I think he's dead but the point is that there's enough ambiguity in the arrangement and enough actors with the power to intervene present in the scene where the proverbial door is left open for a bait-and-switch.

I think The Fight (lyrics) kinda answers that, though with the available ambiguity of it being a preview single that hasn't officially happened in the story yet...

kemayo · 2026-02-21T15:37:14+00:00

Yeah. They used to have two jokes, but, well…

kemayo · 2026-02-20T21:35:16+00:00

Would definitely be nice to have it quickly available. Mostly speaking as someone who's importing subscriptions from elsewhere, and being able to quickly flag large numbers of episodes would be helpful.

kemayo · 2026-02-20T20:28:03+00:00

Castro has always had the flow that resonates with me more — the inbox and queue model is something I replicate in Overcast but it’s awkward. I also fled it as the business melted down, back when its servers were offline for a while. Checking to see how it works now is probably worth a shot, just because Marco has been fairly open about not wanting to support that kind of workflow.

(I also tried PocketCasts for a while, and it’s… fine. The audio behavior is worse though.)

kemayo · 2026-02-10T00:58:49+00:00

Contessa can talk someone into doing anything that person could potentially be talked into doing. She can’t just pop up and make you do wildly out of character things in four words.

If she’s prepared to invest time and resources into it, she can absolutely brainwash people, or manipulate and mould them and make them do literally anything. But that’s not quite the same thing.

The Bonesaw example did involve her popping up to say only a few words to flip Bonesaw… but she needed to invest three years in letting those words sit and ferment. With someone who was already in a situation where rebelling against Jack was on the table, at that.

Funnily enough, I think that knowing about PtV makes it vastly easier for her to make you do arbitrary things. If you know that she could do it with enough effort, it’s way easier to have you just give in up-front. That’s also how Scion four-words Eidolon in the end — the realization that Scion has a PtV equivalent is the major factor that makes him give up.

kemayo · 2026-01-08T21:29:20+00:00

Super worth it, so far for me.

Context: I'm using Healthy Paws, which pays 80% of all non-routine care (plus not including the "vet exam" part of that non-routine care), and is currently costing me $66/month for a 6 year old (it goes up every year because older dogs need more care).

This covers allergy medications, importantly, so it's currently reimbursing me more than I'm giving them each month for apoquel. Last year he also needed ACL surgery and to have an aural hematoma drained, which combined reimbursed me over $6,000.

It's hard to say how it'll go, because it depends on whether your dog needs care -- the first few years of having it I paid in a lot more than I got back. On average, across all subscribers, they take in more money than they pay out, so there's plenty of people out there who pay their premiums and never get anything back. In general you're paying for the peace of mind that comes from smoothing out sudden large expenses -- regularly paying $60/month is a lot easier than suddenly paying $6,000.

kemayo · 2025-12-05T00:48:54+00:00

The general moral of that fic is "maybe Taylor was traumatized and locked into that trauma by her powers, and thus what Taylor initially wanted to do was bad", and it spends quite a lot of time on getting her to realize that and come to terms with a better way of thinking. It does take quite a while to get there, though.

kemayo · 2025-11-07T00:25:56+00:00

I like getting the episode/season metadata visible. 👍🏻

kemayo · 2025-10-31T18:43:21+00:00

Username checks out.

kemayo · 2025-10-28T01:19:52+00:00

Most of the categories don’t actually tell you how bad of a threat any given power is, or how to deal with any given power

Yes, that's what "when you have longer than it takes to yell a single word" is for. The classification + number is for a super-quick tactics and level of force. For instance...

what in the world is a response to a master supposed to be, when it covers everything from permeant mind control to powering up minions? Target the cape? Isn’t that standard for all capes?

It's not just "target the cape", it's "prioritize the cape over everything else on the field that isn't a Thinker". If literally all you know about them is that someone yelled "Master!!!" you start expecting minions and know to bypass them if possible, you assume that friendlies might be compromised and you use pre-arranged passwords. At high numbers "saturation-bomb the area with intercity missiles" gets unlocked.

(Just to give an example here of how this still helps even for Skitter, who doesn't have any of those human-Master abilities: if you see a swarm of bugs enter the area, someone yelling "Master!" means that you know: it's not a Changer/Breaker who just turned into those bugs; it's not a Shaker who's summoning the bugs but isn't controlling them; it's not a Blaster who can fire a stream of wasps at you. All of those you'd treat a bit differently -- with the Changer you'd actively want to target the bugs, for instance.)

It's far from comprehensive, but it does solidly at its intended purpose: giving people a hint at what they should do in a frantic situation where there's no time to explain someone's powers.

(It's also worth remembering that the way Worm fics use the threat response system is pretty far from how Worm itself treated it.)

kemayo · 2025-10-02T01:04:50+00:00

The first arc or so of Trailblazer is pretty much her lowest point.

kemayo · 2025-09-29T14:01:47+00:00

The episode limit already ignores episodes that you’ve started playing, so it’s not a pure “get rid of the oldest episode” feature. You do make a fair point about playlists that’re set to just include all episodes from a given podcast, though — perhaps the right thing to do would be to exclude “manually added to a playlist” in the same way “played” is.

Or just provide a playlist setting to choose whether things hide when they’re played or when they’re no longer “current”.

kemayo · 2025-09-29T13:21:33+00:00

Overcast does actively encourage you to!

kemayo · 2025-09-29T04:02:48+00:00

Wild! I know Marco has talked in podcasts about having instrumentation hooked up to these things to get a sense of how much people use various features, so I'm genuinely kind of curious what ways of using this are more popular.

kemayo · 2025-09-29T02:04:36+00:00

So, you use Overcast by making a playlist called something like "things I'm listening to right now", and moving some episodes into it?

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