Dear Subaru,
You say the sweetest things and show the sweetest pictures, but in 2013 you broke my heart. I just can’t trust again. Maybe someday, but not now.
-OTS
Editing
Bank Accounts
You ever look at your bank account and think, “Why am I so broke?”
“Oh, right. I spent a bunch of money.”
“But I spent that on reasonable stuff, like paper towels and toilet paper. That shouldn’t count!”
It turns out money doesn’t work like that.
Duology
Vampires and cat-girls are the yin and yang of absurd romantic partners.
Tesla Stock
I’m a fan of Matt Levine, and this is a good one about Musk and public investors: “He needs the money, they want to give it to him; he wants to make weird jokes on Twitter, they want to laugh at those jokes. It is just a good fit.” Bloomberg
World Building: Flat
I want to do something, so I’m going to figure out how to do it by describing all the ways it can’t be done.
I want to build a flat world for a fantasy novel.
The characters would be able to see mountains from an awfully long distance away. Communications between nations would be an issue of mirrors and weather. In general air a little higher has less particulate matter than air a little lower, we’re talking distances of a few hundred feet, so people would build giant towers to talk to each other when there’s a little fog or high winds. It doesn’t make all the difference, but it would make some, especially for communications across thousands of miles.
There’s the isue of the Sun. Suppose the fantasy sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Doing basic trig, they could figure out how far away the sun is, and from that the direction of the gravity vector. So what? Well, you couldn’t have coriolis force weather patterns, so no hurricanes/cyclones or tornados. Lands to the far north and south, orthogonal to the ecliptic, would get much less light. That’s fine.
Editorial Bias
Outfits like Bloomberg never recognize the possibility that those they disagree with actually believe what they claim. They write a lot of stories about why people fail to live up to their ideals or turn a coward to Trump, but there’s never any insinuation that those people might actually believe what they do. It’s an interesting comparison with the Journal’s coverage of Pelosi, as there is never any admission in the WSJ that Pelosi might have believed in impeachment, ie that she believed the president’s actions warranted it.
Electric Vehicle Announcements
I’ve invented a new car. It will have a 1000 mile range, 10 tons of towing capacity, and be carbon negative. It sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere.
It doesn’t really have a fuel tank. It has a filter, so the range is how long it can go between cleanings, which is how the CO2 is collected.
I built a prototype, but you can’t see it.
Give me money.
Worldbuilding
Geology was probably the most useful class I’ve taken for building fantasy worlds. I’d like to take an ecology one, but most of them have various Bio prereqs. With geology I got right into the shape characteristics of the natural world. What do mountain ranges look like? What causes the difference between valleys? How big are the flat areas? Interesting stuff.
Editing 3
There is so much work to do.