Iris Meredith

Also, "it still counts as shedding blood even if you put the blood into someone else later" seems like a principle that might have some currency. And regular blood donations might be a good way to integrate the Wardum class into wider social and economic structures.

I'm picturing them as some kind of monastic: it's the usual solution to the problem of having to have a community of people who very much go against wider societal values but are also necessary to support them. A weird kind of paladin, as it were.

with anti-vaccination movements)

In your setting? Probably the doctors, honestly. Universally respected, wide latitude to act, have a level of social license to behave in ways that the rest of society can't, the enemy they fight is both somewhat mystical and very important...

(I've been trying to figure out how the SU would deal

There has to be an "escaping samsara" joke in here somewhere, right?

17% here. I know not what to make of that

I mean, in my experience, at that point you just write a Rust library...

109:8

From the archives: 2026-02-03 at 21:22 PM

On the inevitability of humans screwing up, and what we can do about that

The cult of infallibility

The main issue with my impending move to Wellington is that I'll have to actually get into the habit of using macrons rather than double vowels

As @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com and others have said at length, you want a government to be operating in the "risky-but-winnable-if-you're-good" zone policy-wise. Our Greens are the only people doing this.

(Sam, please forgive me, but New Zealand is obsessed with authority figures)

I mean... I think Banks' line about The Culture was "you have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once." So...

A little thinking is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep or taste not the pierian spring?

... a Vance/Kirk ticket loses to almost anything, up to and including a twenty-year-old cum sock.

Quite. How dare you slander the good name of the Indo-European speaking people of Hatti in this way?

I mean, the basic principle is the same all over, no? Heat up rocks in a fire, put them into a pit lined with vegetation, add a little water, bury the pit, leave it for a few hours. The only real difference is that New England First Nations had clams and maize, while Maaori had kumara and pigs.

I'm not saying corn boy was *good* exactly, but he was definitely a bright spot and the USSR could have done with more like him.

It's certainly curious. The Polish colloquialism for half-assing something is quite literally "fascist work", which says something

"Like a clam bake, but with pork"

FFS, just go and lay down a fucking hāngī already like a normal person.

...why is Starbucks a thing? Like, I get it being unpopular here: you can get proper espresso most anywhere. And American diner coffee is significantly underrated for what it is. But like... what demographic is Starbucks selling to?

Will admit, I'm a little perplexed by the existence of a Starbucks app in the first instance. But then, I'm a New Zealander. Our average gas station has better coffee than Starbucks

I have never felt more patriotic than when I went to the AA to file for my restricted license yesterday.

I mean, it's not exactly hard. Meta will ban at the drop of a hat if you don't match their shadow profile. Extremely unhelpful for devs, of course.

Property damage is not, in itself, violence and can be a valid tool for a nonviolent movement to use. It does require more care in its use than other tactics and can backfire, but I can't say that sabotaging the Koeberg plant was a bad thing, for example.

I will note, of course, that speaking as someone from outside the USA, you can primary the fucker. People in Westminster democracies could only dream of being able to do that.

I got banned from Threads for using the API rather than posting manually.

By that definition, Brownian motion is the most creative thing ever

OK, but like, Digital Extremes successfully made one of the weirdest fucking video games you've ever seen, so surely that should count for something?

in the nato alphabet her name is charli xray charlie xray