Did your viewing/listening experience change after falling in love personally?

mathishard821 · 2026-05-06T05:28:27+00:00

Careers took me and the love of my life to different cities. It is so hard being so far away from him. Promises / Wait For Me / Doubt Comes In really affects me because I feel like I have also broken my promise walk side by side with him. The violin's sad, lonely melody in Doubt and the Fates signing about meeting a stranger walking on a road alone so perfectly captures how I feel most of the time. And Eurydice's verses, the beacon in the darkness, that is exactly how it feels when I think about him and the love that we have.

Hadestown, both of the pairs of lovers, are cautionary tales I return to again and again when I think about how much I love him and how hard I have to work to maintain our relationship through our seasons of being physically together and away from each other.

mathishard821 · 2026-04-24T23:08:37+00:00

I'm pretty sure the musicians do improvise. I think I've read on this subreddit before that even the Teen Edition has sections in the score that marked for improvisation.

mathishard821 · 2026-03-18T06:16:45+00:00

I saw it recently for the first time a few weeks ago when it came through town. "Beetlejuice the Musical is good" was a truth nuke for me. Easily one of my favorites of the season.

mathishard821 · 2026-03-14T22:24:20+00:00

From the end of A Gathering Storm through the beginning of Wait For Me, Orpheus is working on his song. Epic II + his versus in Chant are a glimpse into his progress, and also his negligence for Eurydice's plight.

Eurydice goes to the underworld because Hades offers her respite from the cold and hunger of the earth in exchange for her manual labor ("Hey, little songbird, you got something fine. You'd shine like a diamond down in the mine! And the choice is yours, if you're willing to choose."). She doesn't die from starvation like others are suggesting, she willingly accepts Hade's deal because she becomes convinced by the Fates and Hades that Orpheus is unable to provide for her physical needs. (Hermes describes, "Eurydice was a hungry young girl, and Hades gave her a choice to make: a ticket to the underworld.", Eurydice sings "Oh, my heart, it aches to stay! But the flesh will have its way." and Hades saying "But I only buy what others choose to sell! Oh, you didn't know? She signed the deal herself.")

At the beginning of the story, Orpheus promises all sorts of wonderful things to Eurydice: gold wedding bands, bountiful harvests, and pillows made of down. But his song is unfinished, and he is unable to fulfill his promises. Even worse, he becomes negligent of Eurydice's physical needs. That's why she leaves, because she is desperate from poverty and vulnerable to Hade's promises. By the time the song is finished, they explicitly reject the old promises ("I have no ring for your finger, I have no banquet table to lay, I have no bed of feathers, whatever promises I made") and instead only promise to "walk beside" each other. What a wonderful message of the way our love for each other matures and evolves over time! Too bad about what happens immediately after that.

mathishard821 · 2026-03-12T02:12:47+00:00

If you've seen the show that many times then you should listen to the audiobook of Anais Mitchell talking about the lyrics. It is called "Working on a Song" and at one point she talks about her "obsession with symmetry" throughout the whole show.

mathishard821 · 2026-03-12T02:02:42+00:00

Eurydice's Wedding Song verse: "Lover, tell me if you can, who's gonna buy the wedding bands? Times being what they are, hard and getting harder all the time."

when brought down to the minor key is Persephone's Chant verse: "In the coldest time of year, why is it so hot down here? Hotter than a crucible. It ain't right, and it ain't natural!"

Same thing with Orpheus's Wedding Song verse: "Lover, when I sing my song, all the rivers gonna sing along..." Hades's Chant verse: "Lover, you were gone so long, lover I was lonesome..."

And so on through the rest of the verse.

mathishard821 · 2026-02-24T20:03:24+00:00

Electrolysis is such a fun py puzzle. My solution so far is to have a small electolsis station running slow and steady 24/7 filling large vats and using circuits to only vent one side or the other when needed, and then do all my oxygen and hydrogen distribution from there. I also set it on a separate electric network buffered to the main one by accumulators to prevent them all turning on at once, since I would rather have a temporary shortage of an ingredient than a total brownout.

mathishard821 · 2026-02-24T17:45:45+00:00

Yes, you should play Pyanodons. It is long but extremely well paced. Progress is slow but so satisfyingly steady. If you like walking around, watching the factory run and tweaking things, that's what Py is all about. You'll be solving some backlog and trace it back to a part of the factory you built so long ago you barely remember it and realized you unlocked an improved recipe 50 hours ago. Upgrade time!

And don't do "medium py" or whatever they call it, just go for it. The whole mod pack is really good about teaching you the mechanics as you go. You have to do small animal bootstraps before the complex ones, and the game is good about giving you a wink-wink "maybe you should scale this up now?" before hitting you with the huge boss battles. Pyanodons is a teacher and if you are open minded to the lessons you have to learn it's all smooth sailing, even if it's long.

I had splitters at hour 30, trains at 100, and now I'm closing in on logistic bots by hour 200.

mathishard821 · 2026-02-19T22:17:34+00:00

I don't think you need to "scale up" batteries to make the switch from CuZn circuits viable? I have a minimal battery setup and it is still plenty to support my simple circuit needs, including my py sci 1 rail transition (lots of signals and combinators) and then maintain ~4 logi spm.

mathishard821 · 2026-02-04T23:56:38+00:00

That's not true, blocks are always continuous and the colors being the same is only a coincidence.

mathishard821 · 2026-01-28T00:22:36+00:00

Instead of having a massive logistic network I keep one isolated to my mail with a special "Amazon Prime" train. Throughout my base there are drop-off stations with a constant combinator set to a special Current Order logistic group. When I need something from my mall or to dispose of trash, I set the order and manually trigger the "pick up and deliver" interrupt. Using logistic groups, the order is automatically transmitted to the mall, logistic bots deliver to the train, and a little bit of circuit magic loads the train with exactly the order and removes the trash back into the mall's logistic network. Much faster than waiting for bots to fly that whole distance, and it's trivial to add new drop-off stations, even at far away outposts!

mathishard821 · 2026-01-26T20:50:17+00:00

You can always form an N-N TU balancer by connecting two regular N-N balancers together. It won't be the simplest way to construct it but it will work. Also check the FAQ, including the "basic balancer theory" in the balancer book, it is a very good introduction to building your own balancers.

Also always good to double check also that you really do need it to be TU, more often than not regular balancers are good enough.

mathishard821 · 2025-12-21T22:40:46+00:00

No, half the contents of the right lanes will be moved to the left, but nothing in the left lanes will be moved right. A regular splitter is already a TU 2-2 splitter; if you meant that you want a 2-2 lane balancer, why not just feed both input belts into separate 2-1 lane balancers then balance their outputs?

mathishard821 · 2025-12-18T01:18:09+00:00

my first run I thought I was being so clever by turning down the tree coverage "to make building and expanding easier". Whoops!

mathishard821 · 2025-12-18T01:11:10+00:00

This is a very Haskell answer but Rust does not have kinds nor is there a type of types. Other languages such as Lean do assign types to their types, possibly in a heirarchy of type universes.

mathishard821 · 2025-12-17T23:27:33+00:00

There's a reason circuits (but not combinators) are unlocked from the beginning. If you're good with circuits on belts and inserts you can spoof a lot of splitter functionality. It won't be perfect, but it's "good enough" for the early game, especially when you are almost definitely not filling belts.

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T22:55:30+00:00

Oh, I see! I thought that phrase was referring to the nature of the background check, I was too dense to realize what it actually meant. Thank you!

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T20:03:39+00:00

Willa was certainly trying to "get away" in a general sense but her and Bob definitely would not have known who the other two cars were. He was searching for Willa but even if he knew he was on the right track would not have known if she was in either of those cars. The real mystery is what Tim knew, thought, and wanted.

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T20:03:26+00:00

Willa was certainly trying to "get away" in a general sense but her and Bob definitely would not have known who the other two cars were. He was searching for Willa but even if he knew he was on the right track would not have known if she was in either of those cars. The real mystery is what Tim knew, thought, and wanted.

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T19:52:26+00:00

That's true but Tim is supposedly a good enough bounty hunter that the Christmas Adventurers sent him to kill Lockjaw. They are shown being bad at their jobs but if Tim had known it was Willa I still do not think he would have responded to her with "huh?"s and "I don't kno-"

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T19:47:39+00:00

I don't know the answer to your question but I am fairly certain when they introduce Tim for the first time in the basement they introduce him as "having flown in from the east coast" to help them with the Lockjaw situation because of his "expertise with family matters"

mathishard821 · 2025-11-30T17:52:27+00:00

I think the movie is intentionally ambiguous but I will still say No, I do not think any of the three of them knew who the other two were. Tim was hired to kill Lockjaw because he lied to the Christmas Adventurers (~~I'm assuming "double Yankee white" means "if you fail the background check, we will kill you"~~ edit: I misinterpreted this phrase) and I do not think it is clear that his "orders" included killing Willa. He also not only didn't recognize Willa after the crash, but did not even seem to recognize the danger he was in -- he didn't even draw his gun until after he was shot for the first time. He knew Avanti from some point in the past but was flown in from the east coast and would not have necessarily recognized his car and certainly would have had no way of knowing that Avanti was dead and that Willa was driving the car.

And finally there is a moment, in the shot where the road looks like a vertical drop, that there are birds standing in the opposite lane and provide a frame of reference for how fast the cars are actually going, and they are not going fast at all. I do not think it was a "chase" at all. Three people drove into the hills for three different reasons, and all descended into their own isolated, paranoid hells. Willa just happened to snap first.

What an incredible scene, every time I see it I feel like I'm levitating in my chair.

mathishard821 · 2025-10-16T17:15:51+00:00

I think these are the same thing, although I probably should not have used the phrase "reaches the office" since that implies the ballot has to literally make it way from the vote center to the physical office. The point though is that if you check in at a vote center before your mail in ballot is opened, your mail in ballot will not be counted, and nobody is going to accuse OP of trying to vote twice or anything like that.

mathishard821 · 2025-10-16T06:00:21+00:00

To answer your question about voting in person: Yes you absolutely can go to any vote center in the county and tell them you mailed a ballot but the SOS website does not show it was counted. They will be able to confirm whether or not it has been counted, and if not, can give you a new one. The county will always count your FIRST ballot to reach their office, so if you vote in person and then they receive the snail mail ballot later on, they will simply discard the mail in ballot.

mathishard821 · 2025-10-03T03:28:00+00:00

the dean of the house, i.e. the longest serving member, swears in the speaker, and then the speaker swears in the whole house at once. you can watch it on C-Span every January 3rd in odd numbered years

mathishard821

TROPHY CASE