Socar Myles

This effing guy again.

Ugh. Sorry your biking was ruined by that. :-(

Yikes. So, maybe this is a case of very bad branding? Because there's no way I'd have looked at that and gone "oh, yeah. Sci-fi." To me, it looks like some rah-rah-rah pro-military slop.

It almost reads like a joke--I mean, "all grit. No quit?" It sounds like a parody. I'd assume it WAS a joke if the picture wasn't so straight-faced.

This feels like it should be a sitcom about a bunch of bungling wannabe soldiers in boot camp.

The fact that it's NOT a joke is so tone-deaf.

Is it just me, or are all these "complex" orders straightforward to make?

As far as I know, these are all simple permutations of syrup, sugar, milk, and coffee, and don't require a lot of extra steps.

(I've made the oat chai latte at home in the microwave. It takes 30 seconds.)

*mood

Nood.

THE most satisfying thing you'll see all day.

Love this. <3

You're right. It does say that. I missed the "always."

I do a lot of different types of professional writing, so I'm always checking a variety of style guides. For this reason, I rarely use "always" to describe stylistic rules. They vary a lot, and often in unexpected ways.

I've always written it uppercase in scientific contexts and lowercase in any other context.

I'd say this person's correctness may be somewhat context-dependent. One should probably go by whatever style guide one's project editor will be using. When there is no editor, go wild!

mOoOoOoN.

The song in my head today is--

SON PEREDA, SON RICCO D'ONORE; BACCELLIERE MI FE' SALAMANCA!

...it's too GD early for this. Far, far too early.

Oh, yeah, this wasn't in school I was getting these stories. There was just a random bible sitting around the house--which, now I think of it, was weird, as nobody in the house was Christian. And yet, there it was, and I got into it. Plus, you hear Christian stuff at Christmas and that.

I think she may have been trying to make the stories less "scary" for me by explaining what could've really happened. Because the idea of a god that tells parents to kill their children is terrifying. (But a parent hearing murderous voices is just as terrifying, so who knows?)

It's interesting to me that she didn't outright say that Bible stories were fairy tales. She seemed to think most of them were stories of real things that happened, but had non-mystical explanations that people didn't know about.

She explained Abraham and Isaac in the same way: Abraham was hearing voices telling him to kill his son, and because people didn't understand about mental illness back then, the voices were attributed to God.

I remember asking my mother, when I was probably three or four (definitely no older than four), if Jesus was a real person. She said probably, and he was right about a lot of things, but then he got a mental illness that made him think he was the son of God.

Yeah, I keep hearing about it showing up in, like, tiny specialty shops in Scotland. But it's NOWHERE in Canada, and I do mean nowhere. Not even in Scottish specialty shops.

(My craving is not deep enough to pay shipping from Scotland... Yet.)

Devouring Fortune book cover. Features a woman with folded arms on the cover. Her arms are crossed. She has straight black hair and her skin is light brown. She has a haunted expression. She is dressed in a white priestess outfit with wrapped bandages up her arms. Behind her lurks a monstrous skeleton whispering in her ear. They are surrounded by red flowers.

I'm happy to say today is the day for the book cover reveal of DEVOURING FORTUNE! @jeleynai.bsky.social did an incredible job on the illustration, I'm in awe.

For fans of Tanith Lee and A.K. Larkwood, about bargains gone wrong.

Follow the prelaunch page!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/ole...

Ha, fancy that!

I do think it's a shame there's not enough space to safely install swings in a lot of places. I remember playgrounds being on the huge side in my youth. Plenty of grass and space to run about. Definitely enough for lots of foam padding.

Kids should have space to run and swing.

I'm not: I looked it up, and it turns out to be a combination of space issues and safety/liability issues.

Swing sets now require more clearance around them, more areas of foam padding, so there's just not space for them in a lot of play areas.

COVID also prevented maintenance in some areas.

I think roundabouts fell out of favour because so many kids came off them and knocked their teeth out. Swings, I think it might be a maintenance cost issue, because they are easy and very tempting to vandalise. But don't take my word on that.

Y'know, it's funny you should tweet this: I had a dream just last night, where I was on a swing. And now I think of it, I've not been on one, or seen one, in ages. (I'm sure they're out there, but not where I've seen.)

Also, roundabouts.

They're probably not as good as we remember, anyway. We can console ourselves with that.

Oh, noooooooo!

Fortunately, our house had a semi-outdoor loo (in a wee breezeway off the side), so I didn't have to come all the way indoors for that.

Oh, I mean, it was horrible. An absolute chemical nightmare of a food product. But at the same time, it was delicious.

I wouldn't bring back, like, Maggie Fucking Thatcher. But they COULD bring back Creamola Foam. That shit was righteous. Can we get that back?

Things I genuinely miss:

* small foods and drinks that were properly small;
* non-HD TVs;
* user interfaces where you typed what you wanted to do;
* rotary telephones, and the satisfying feeling of slamming down that bulky receiver;
* Creamola Foam.

Things I don't miss:

* the 1980s in general.

I did my fair share of woods-traipsing, but I don't remember ever being specifically excluded from the house. Strongly urged to leave, perhaps, but I could come in for food and water.

Oof. Our house had a laundry door you couldn't see from the kitchen or living room, so if I got put out the front door, I'd come back in the laundry.

Not letting you in for a drink feels unusually harsh, though.

Oh, yeah, I lived in an area where you'd pretty much only see a hose in the summer, and then only when the sprinklers were on. It would be a whole nuisance to get one out of the garage, hook it up, and drink from it. Much easier to take off one's shoes and go inside.