All Activity

Yes, I saw your previous post a few weeks ago. I was just trying to come up with an alternative.

Until it all backfires and curves back again. There should be room for both in this world. And I just thought I'd see about Mayne picking up a copy of Shogun at the local B&N, since it should be available again with show interest...only they're selling it in Book 1 and Book 2...ha.

Watched Rebel Moon Part 2, and it's very annoying, because there's actually a few good ideas and thoughts in there, but it's so amateurishly written and structured that they mostly get lost. Past that it was mostly just an unmemorable, clunky mess.

I think Tywin is both ambitious and practical. His actions and his morals are mutable depending on what he thinks will work best to get him what he wants. Tywin would be pious, or at least appear to be, if it helped him get / maintain his goals. He will be pious and follow the Seven as it helps him keep power / keep the Kingdom together, but I don't see any real following of the religion. Do you mean if he were re-written as a religious man his actions would largely be the same?

Watched the fifth of ten episode of In Her Car Ukrainian-European coproduction. I can highly recommend this one. Plot is built around a Ukrainian Psycho-therapist, who finds her a new calling by driving Ukrainians through their war torn country. Each episode tells the story of her passengers. It has some pretty dark humour in it.

It was suggested already a couple weeks ago by people who taken upon themselves looking at this horror far more often, far more closely, and far more attentively than I do that this is what he was up to.

UPDATED 1 MINUTE AGO https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/nyregion/man-on-fire-trump.html Um just what does this mean? "The official requested anonymity because the man had not been publicly identified." Since, buddy, you just did it. You are as confused and making as little sense as Azzarello as to who, what, when and why.

Too bad he’s not more old school and take insulin instead. Then Melania could go full Claus von Bülow on his fat arse.

The only drug you need to keep you going is bickering with DMC

On his weight - chances are good he is taking Ozempic.

As soon as Bran wakes up, the very next page is a Tyrion chapter, which starts by comparing Pycelle's head to an egg. This just after Pycelle complains of not sleeping as he did whe the was younger. George definitely likes to use the chapter transitions to draw parallels.

According to his substack, "We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup." There is an entire manifesto under it.

FTFY

I do 500m just as a quick warm up before weightlifting. When I was rowing as the workout, not just the warmup, I would do 5k in 21-23 minutes (depending on how hard I was pushing) but my legs were like jelly after that and my heart and lungs would be heaving as I stood up to rest. I have noticed that my new rowing machine in my home gym has a different pace than the ERG I used in our condo gym a few years ago (when I did 5k in 21-23 minutes). The ERG in the condo gym was an older model with a chain cable. On a setting of 10 (out of 10), I could sprint at 1:45/500m but a long row would have a sustained pace in the 2:10/500m ballpark. My newer ERG in my home gym uses a fan blade resistance and on a setting of 13 (out of 16) I find that 2:25/500m is a brisk warm-up pace for 500m. There’s no way I could do 2:10/500m sustained for 5k on this machine. i wondered if my fitness just declined a lot in the last few years but we’ve been back in that condo building in Chicago in the last two years to visit friends and I’ve gone back into the gym and used the same old ERG machine and I still rowed at the original pace. I think there’s just a large difference in either the resistance or how the machines convert resistance into distance. They are from different manufacturers and use different mechanical designs, but different treadmills don’t produce that kind of discrepancy.

Weird thing for me is while I’m fine with heights when I’m conscious, I have a lot of dreams where I’m terrified of heights/falling one way or another. Really big critters freak me out, but I wouldn’t really call that a phobia. Like, during the Superbowl I saw about a three inch cockroach on the ceiling of my kitchen. It freaked me out, but I still grabbed a paper towel and killed it.

Finally finished (yay, now I can unhife spoilers and see what people were talking about). Way more even and enjoyable than I had feared. Less of a clean ending than I expected.

Martin is a master of short stories, and I agree that is where most of his best work is. As much as I like A Song of Ice and Fire, it is very unfortunate that it dominated the latter half of Martin's writing career and potentially denied us many great short stories. Tuf Voyaging is one of my absolute favorites.

Any chance we could get the conversation back to contemporary UK politics?

1. Yeah I agree with that part. 2. Well not really, they were in conflict before the Vale was united but since then with exception of the 134 AC succession dispute they seem like they were on the same side more then against, both where Blacks, then Targaryen loyalist and eventually both would support Robert (the Corbray's might have tried to play both sides but its not sure), would not call them natural ennemies like the Brackens and Blackwoods, or the Yronwoods and Martells. 3. Yes, but to me it is more to do with the fact that the Royce and Blackwoods have strong first men connection and are both in the South, after all both house also intermarried with the North, so rather then a Corbray/Bracken vs Royce/Blackwood we have a Royce/Blackwood/Stark connection because of First men blood. Also important to note that the Corbray fit into the that since a Corbray married the daughter of a Royce/Stark match, so that supposed Royce Corbray seems quite slime. 4. Like I said the Corbray/Royce rivalry does not seem to hold up to me, so the Brackens trying to find allies in the Vale would not automatically mean a Corbray connection, furthermore we actually dont know any of the Bracken marriages so they could be from any number of origin, and since most of the blacks seem to come from the Reach, this is were I would guess the Brackens would try to find matchs, that is after looking around them, after all why would the Brackens care that the Blackwoods are allied to the ROyce on the other side of the mountains if the Brackens are allied with the Vance or Mallisters on the good side of the Moon mountains to help them straight away. 5. Like I said just above we have no information about Bracken mariages, but the fact that we know about so much Blackwood mariages seems to me that GRRM has a bias for the Blackwoods (I made a thread about that a while back asking about that) but I dont believe that it is because like that GRRM can pull out connections between houses 6 books in from nowhere and them having a big impact on the overarching story.

Yellow onions are much cheaper here. But both are cheap as fuck really.

Maybe he has cancer?

See the quoted content above, please! which tells you: "Further details were not immediately available."

Some analysis now that Israel was targeting the early warning detection radar in Isfahan which is tasked with picking up incoming missiles aimed at the Natanz nuclear facility. Unofficial US analysis is that the radar system was completely destroyed through three direct hits from air-launched cruise missiles. Iran's AA systems failed to engage until the missiles were practically on top of the target. I've seen some speculation that the missiles were launched from inside Iran's radar detection net by an F-35, which would confirm the long-circulating rumour that Iran's Russia-bought S-300 and S-400s cannot see or lock onto F-35s in flight. But that's very speculative. It would make more sense to launch them from well outside Iran's radar. That's a lot of messaging to the Iranian regime in one strike, and of course the worry that Israel deliberately took out the radar to deliberately take out Natanz itself in a follow-up strike. That would be extremely dangerous, with an unknown capacity for nuclear contamination of the surrounding area (with Isfahan just to the south and Tehran not far to the north).

What was this person protesting? If it was Trump being on trial we are into “Jim Jones” territory with the Trumpanista cult.

Why are those events nonsensical?