Yeah, if anything about it bothered you, that was probably smart. The trilogy is, among other things, a very slow yet steady escalation of horror.

She did write two other trilogies in the same setting following different characters that you may prefer more. Different narrators does change the prose, but she still manages that same fluidity, which is what I always loved so much about it.

Yeah, I take several random samples of the prose from throughout the book, just to get a good sense of the overall style. Though I do always begin with the first paragraph, and on at least one case, that was enough to immediately close and buy the book.

That being the over-the-top, sorta Victorian prose of Jacqueline Carey:

Lest anyone should suppose that I am a cuckoo’s child, got on the wrong side of the blanket by lusty peasant stock and sold into indenture in a shortfallen season, I may say that I am House-born and reared in the Night Court proper, for all the good it did me. It is hard for me to resent my parents, although I envy them their naïveté…

She then keeps going just like that for three large books, probably totaling something like 2k pages. I loved every page of it.

Yeah that’s more of a hotel thing. I’m guessing this is that influencer trick of intentionally lying about a detail so people will make comments to correct you, giving you free engagement.

The main difference I see is that when a professional wants to read something very thoroughly, they employ techniques of what’s called slow reading. That’s usually when the highlighter comes out along with note-taking materials.

This is possible with print information because of how much of it is put in front of your eyes at once. Rereading a paragraph, even a half dozen times to guarantee you fully understood it, is very easy with print. It is not with audio. Flipping back to page xxx to check something, also very easy with print and less so with audio. Smoothly speeding up/slowing down your rate of consumption to match the complexity of the current topic, also easier with text than audio. Etc etc.

So, for casual consumption, they’re fairly equivalent and both fine. But if you wanted to claim mastery of a complex topic after putting years of intensive effort in, I’d say that probably required some reading that could not have been replaced by listening, and if you did no reading, I’m going to be a little doubtful of your mastery of the knowledge. It’s possible to still understand what you need to, of course, but you definitely neglected what is usually the most efficient, reliable method by far.

This Stepan Banderas stuff gets so tiresome.

Your country doesn’t have any historical figures it honors for certain things despite an ugly background? Mine has plenty, just because history itself is pretty ugly and extremely messy.

If that were true, then Ukrainian airpower would be obliterating the Russian army with good old dumb bombs, while Russias fighters were kept at bay by Ukrainian SAMs and the drone threat to their airfields.

Not sure why you’re so desperate for this to be true, there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that more work needs to be done. Declaring success prematurely is unnecessary.

Don’t underestimate their air defense, it’s not dead yet. I’m sure they’re conserving interceptors so they don’t actually fully run out, and can still deny airspace to more expensive platforms Ukraine would like to use along the frontline.

Their problem has always been too much area to protect, and drones being hard to deal with in general for modern air defense. Not that their air defense is actually useless or anything like that. There’s still a lot of degrading that needs to be done to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_navigation

That should answer all your navigation questions.

Regarding crew morale, I haven’t studied Columbus since maybe HS, but I do recall the voyage was a fairly close thing. His calculations severely underestimated the size of the Earth, so he was sailing for much longer than he expected to be. I’m not sure if he had to put down any attempted mutinies, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Smokejumper by Jason A. Ramos and Julian Smith

I don’t know about the Spanish wildfires, but I know in America there’s a whole slew of challenges associated.

The first is the unpredictability of wildfires. You don’t want to over-evacuate, that causes unnecessary disruption. But conditions can change rapidly, and a plan that looked good 6 hours ago can quickly become bunk.

Another is speed. Wildfires can travel much, much faster than people’s intuition leads them to think. So, it can go from “over there” to “oh shit” quick enough to be life threatening. Wildfires counter-intuitively go uphill faster than downhill, winds can pick up, blowing embers can cause it to jump, etc.

A third is that some people try to protect their property. This is actually possible if you’ve taken proper precautions of removing burnables from your property and have a garden hose that you are 100% certain will keep running. This is not recommended, but some people will try and that is their right. It’s a calculated risk they have to decide for themselves to take or not.

Fourth might be various other failures to evacuate. Evacuation order didn’t arrive in time, elderly resident didn’t hear in time/can’t move fast enough, someone got stuck in evacuation traffic, mental illness, stubborn conspiracy nut thinks tin foil hats protect against wildfire, who knows, it’ll vary case-to-case.

Fifth could be firefighter deaths. It’s a highly dangerous job with a significant fatality rate, and our wildlands firefighters (colloquially called “hotshots”) are basically like the special forces of firefighting. They airdrop into wilderness areas with whatever gear they can carry, with instructions to change the course of an oncoming force of nature. They have the tools (chainsaws and shovels mostly) and training to do this, but it’s still exactly as dangerous as it sounds.

Wildlands firefighting is really fascinating stuff. I got an audiobook ages ago written by a retired one that talked a lot about the process. Was like 100 pages or something and super interesting, highly recommend.

It’s just fun. Thinking back to my childhood, I think this phase probably comes in around about the time the word “poop” stops becoming the world’s foremost source of hilarity.

Kyiv Post tends to be a little less bombastic with their reporting:

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/79532

They word it differently, saying the US warned that Russia was “considering” an attack. This is probably true, and has probably been true every year for the past several decades. Simply because a nation’s military planners “consider” pretty much everything they can think of.

Yeah, that’s … unfortunate. Can always just ask one of them if it’s cool.

Employees go through the canisters and pick out the obviously moldy ones. They’re trying to work fast, though, so they can miss some that aren’t obvious. The decay can also get much, much worse just in the time the product sits on the shelves, depending on how good the refrigeration in that exact spot is.

Anyway, open them up and examine before purchase. The employees will not mind, it’s what they’d do too.

edit: Assuming there’s no sticker. If they’re sealed with a sticker then I wouldn’t break it.

Yeah, they interviewed someone who talked about this on NPR the other day. Neat little tidbit.

So, a few years ago this stuff was fine. You can’t spin up a brand new global supply chain overnight, and that was generally understood and accepted, just like how we couldn’t find enough 155mm arty ammo for awhile. These things take time, and that’s okay. And fine, we weren’t predicting the Iran War, and that would definitely interfere with plans. Fine.

This is all getting less acceptable as time goes on, though. Now 2027 is a reasonable goal, that’s five years from the start of the main invasion. Let’s just hope we can stick to it.

Wouldn’t the name be in Chinese, with a translation to English for us? Which would usually include translating it into standard English grammar instead of the grammar it was in?

You know, if I was translating no hablo espanol, I wouldn’t be like “yeah, he said ‘no speak I spanish’”.

Why does a major international newspaper not use the proper adjective form of the word “China”?

Oh he knows. I bet he’s known since the second month of his special military operation. He just can’t do anything about it, he’s on railroad tracks that lead nowhere except disaster.

He’s a strongman, his power is based on his reputation, which is based on being able to make decisions that result in keeping the Russian people safe and secure. Had his invasion succeeded, this would have been good for him. But it didn’t, so now everyone has to ask: what have they paid, what have they gotten for it, and are they happy with their leadership based on that?

I think it’s pretty hard for anyone anywhere to argue that the past few years have been good for them, so Putin has to worry about his popularity. But wait, there’s no way to realistically remove unpopular Russian leaders, and that means … his actual life is in danger if anyone wants him out badly enough, which you gotta figure some powerful people in Russia probably do by now.

That’s the problem for Putin. Peace will be the death of him, and he knows it.

Yeah, I think that’s most people. Have you tried a light roast coffee though? They’re not common at all, and most people don’t like them in my experience. Those two things are probably related.