stevenwoo

I remember growing up in Texas reading somewhere between 80-95 percent of all land in Texas is privately owned in various civics texts, my libertarian civics teacher was proud of this for some reason. It’s an exceptionally high percentage compared to the states to west of Texas. It’s a Texas issue dating back to Spanish rule and continued under successive governments. I don’t think this happened to other western states formerly under Spanish rule.

It’s amazing to me Waymo saw the estimated 50000-80000 tariff penalty (and time and money invested for essentially reinstalling electronics ) in their latest fleet worth it. American sourced options must really pale in comparison or be non existent and I wish I could just write off auto tariffs like that.

Individually some restaurants did hire their own delivery workers. I distinctly remember this being more common in larger cities with Chinese restaurants for some reason being most prominent, maybe because takeout led to packaging food in easily transportable containers, so an intuitive evolution seems probable, though the practice dates back at least a century in India.

I moved from software in medical to communications to gaming in my 20s. It’s possible but even back then was difficult, I had just the right set of skills and gaming knowledge to fit into a couple of slots and I also only had to support one other person at a time when it was a lot less expensive to survive in USA, I also took a risk and took a much lower salary for years for the opportunity. It paid off financially for the most part but that was entirely happenstance. I also was on the pointy end of the hiring process once I got in - it was impossible for anyone who had not completed a game to get past the resume screening process - only new grads and they still had to have done projects for school and on their own. If you have not done any work on your own games or mods at this point you have no chance of getting hired by a game developer at least from my experience a few decades ago.

If you have any games on PC there is a huge community making mods available on the Nexus mods website. That is one way to start, tons of people have ideas to improve existing games and have found an outlet for it there. I would never have finished Silksong without those mods. There are also a ton of mods via Steam, Skyrim has a all sorts of mods from gameplay to visual changing all sorts of behavior and looks.

The feline purring for healing is in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and I just blew it off as too fantastical, but I’m prepared to eat my words metaphorically speaking.

Maybe not for your first reading but I liked Emily Wilson’s Sumerian trilogy that reimagines the stories including Gilgamesh in fantasy setting.

I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).

The way this was handled before these gig economy food delivery companies sprang up. People didn't automatically die of starvation because they were disabled and became adults prior to DoorDash. Medicaid and Meals on Wheels fill in some of the gaps depending upon age and state.

It’s just an excerpt and not applicable to some but Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has a good if longer bit: “Are not all careers the same? Filled with demands and people filled with animosity towards the individual. At the same time absorbing the hatred of those who have silently and sullenly adapted to dull duty.”

Also quiet layoff by encouraging workers to leave.

I feel this is worse than Nintendo’s “solution” to Switch joycon drift - giving us in the USA (for now) free refurb/fixes which must be cheaper than admitting there’s an issue, but still a cost/brand trust problem.

It had a brief fad then but I just read Bleak House last year and in the later editions Dickens defended his inclusion of the person spontaneously combusting in an introduction, because it had allegedly happened in UK and this was around 1850s. This is possibly responsible for why it pops up now and again.

The Hearst papers uses some pretty terrible ad networks and it’s done so for years so one would have to assume it’s on purpose, like torrent tracker website ads. I only put up with it cause it’s free for now.

I think the Powell Memorandum (as response to nascent consumersm ala Nader) and Powell’s rise to Supreme Court Justice from US chamber of commerce points to deep roots of corporate takeover of USA.

This happens in first episode of recent East of Eden adaptation when Cyrus Trask claims to have been at all the major Civil War battles.

I had to frequently pause my read to research a discovery in more depth to understand the significance of it and I got a chuckle when he marries his childhood sweetheart because she got no mention prior to that point in the book.

On the Origin of Sex - real life examples that seem like science fiction. How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch, I read last year but goes into most recent discoveries in physics.

The audiobook version I listened to had different narrators for main text and footnote with audio cue when footnote started as well.

AFAIK he was outright lying when he said he forgot his zip code. It hasn’t been possible to buy gas in Bay Area for decades without inputting your zip code for credit card purchases. That smelled of some bad speechwriting.

There’s a show on Japanese television about touring Japan on bicycle which may or may not appeal to you https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/5115002/

The House and Senate GOP are afraid of his voter base and act accordingly in lock step and 33 percent of all voters still gives him greater than 60 percent likely GOP voter approval. So this boils down to House should have expanded from 435 and Senate was a mistake unless one thinks land area of happenstance state lines is good proxy for decision making power (since competent and determined minority in senate can just stop things from happening also as opposed to number of votes of entire nation for presidential election)

Yes, there are a couple of Arabic and other visitors quoted in this book as well, I think this is the primary one. It’s a fascinating part of history and a tantalizing glimpse.

Coincidentally I am reading Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, and there is a chapter on Viking burial practices and similarly archaeologists are left to do a lot of guesswork and hypothesizing despite these being only 1000-1200 years old since there’s quite a bit of variation and all of the written records comes via contemporary visitors from much different cultures or hundreds of years later via the Christian tinted lenses of transcribers who may have been conquered or invaded by Vikings of various sorts. There’s a lot of space for fictionalization that could fit the evidence like this novel - à la Vinland Saga manga.

Pilot B kept warning pilot A(who was at the controls) that the airspeed was too high and no adjustments were made https://www.npr.org/2026/09/10/g-s1-142664/cargo-plane-miami...

I think you are referencing it’s hugely profitable to not make artillery shells like that 500 million dollar factory we taxpayers paid for and got nothing from - in case anyone forgot https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artiller...

I took an iPhone SE generation three to Apple Store to replace battery and they broke the NFC functionality in a way that passed their simple diagnostic tool but failed to work in the real world. I had to go back and reset the phone and upgrade my IOS so they could troubleshoot it (the phone menu for setting appointments does not allow you to pick repair broke NFC funny enough) and they were nice enough to give me a new iPhone SE to replace we proved it was broken. But that was kind of worrisome and put me off any kind of Apple self repair for something they still make.

This mentions her new book, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, which I found an entertaining and short read about the work of translating.

Just listened to The River Has Roots - very short and good adaptation IMHO, it has a bit of singing integral to plot and that is one thing I have trouble translating to the sounds in my head when reading paper books so it’s a big plus for me.

Where do you find reasonably priced copies of those Fritz Lieber works? My library only has stuff that fits into short story collections and omnibuses. I fondly remember reading a couple of these obtained from Half Price Books way back when and never getting to the end of series due to demise of local used book stores.

The latest US Space Force dress uniforms look like Temu Schutzstaffel costumes.