Among the 12 names in this chart, four are used for four of the characters in A Second Chance for Wings (the fifth character is C.J.), because we wanted gender-neutral names and went with very modern ones.
@Alon@acb@philipncohen There's a parallel process where historically masculine names get slightly altered to make them more feminine(-coded). My go-to example is Robyn Asimov (born at a time when "Robin" with an "i" was still predominantly a diminutive for "Robert").
I remember one girl in high school named "McKenna" because her father's name was Ken.
@Alon Horrified by everything I read about Naypyidaw. There was that article saying it's hard to convey in photos how desolate the area is, you can't show the nothingness, you have to experience it yourself. The scale is monstrous even if you're driving.
@Alon Thanks, very interesting, I wasn't aware of these projects except Brasilia. There's a typo in the first sentence about Naypyidaw: "between 2011 and 2011"
@Alon The traditional cliche is that the hostage taker should release photos or videos of the hostages alive in order convince the other party to negotiate. Is that only a TV thing?
@Colinvparker It's not only a TV thing - real-life hostage takers do it too, and Hamas occasionally does it as well. But Hamas's MO has long been to demand prisoner releases to even give signs of life. Not for nothing, the agreement it made with Egypt (which for a few hours the media said was the ceasefire agreement with the US and Israel too) said that only during the first phase of the ceasefire would it tell Israel how many hostages it had exactly.
In the Lazar poll from yesterday, the prewar coalition is at 46 seats. The opposition's 74-46 advantage is a bit soft in that Religious Zionism is below-threshold, and in an actual election when it had any risk of not clearing the threshold it would run with Otzma again, but even that only softens the advantage to 73-47 or at worst 72-48. The poll was taken after the ICC indictment of Bibi, Gallant, and Hamas leaders; Bibi is not getting any rally-around-the-flag bounce from this.
@gryzzly The polls have been so consistent since the war started that I'm not even sure individual revelations like this are so important electorally. Everyone knows conflict management has failed, some are just trying to cope by bleating about final victory.
@Alon@elliots There’s a limit for low ridership lines where you might as well put a stop wherever it’s safe because the stop penalty is proportional to the number of riders, as the chance of two people boarding at the same time and economizing the stop penalty is low no matter what. That might even be the majority of cases in the US by route-km.
@Colinvparker@elliots Yes, and this is also how night buses work. In New York, the rule at night is that passengers may get off anywhere along the route that the driver thinks it's safe to stop at. Service planning is also based on taking the drive time along the route and adding a small factor to account for such stops, since there's no traffic.
Travel plans to the US are getting more solid: flying in shortly before the 15th to visit Boston for a few days, then down to New York until early July. If people in Philly and DC really want I can come down there, but no guarantees.
@Will Yes. At the very least, there's going to be an in-person @eta_ny gathering that I'm going to go to. I may do an event at Marron about our high-speed rail project. Philly and DC are up in the air, depending on whether local advocates want to hear me.
@Alon Meanwhile, in Finland, Anna-Maja Henriksson says she won't work with the far right at the EU level while her (Renew member) party is in coalition with the Perussuomalaiset.
I suppose there's a reason why RKP is polling below the Christian Democrats nowadays.
@kechpaja Has any party emerged to fill in the gap? I'm thinking of how there are some recent mainline-left parties in Eastern Europe that are incredibly pro-EU and pro-NATO, for people who want something social democratic but don't like the Putinism of the ex-communist-now-socdem parties in that part of the world.
I've seen discourse on this on Bluesky (not here), and nobody is relating this to Austria's lack of Holocaust guilt. Nobody is connecting Austria's Islamophobia to its anti-Semitism or its Putinist rejection of NATO. But I have seen someone blame this on German Holocaust guilt, which Austria doesn't have (Austrians think they were Germany's first victim).
Germany and Poland have sent over a (small) proportion of their modern Leopard 2s to Ukraine. Spain is only starting to do so and only its older tanks; Greece has not done so at all. Why?
@Alon I've seen you make the argument that Germany's equipment is there to fight the Russian army. That's what it's now doing. Greece's equipment is presumably at least somewhat to fight the Turkish army?
@JonBright There hasn't been a lot of Turkey-Greece tension lately. There is still the unresolved issue of Cyprus, but a) Cyprus isn't Greece and isn't even in NATO, and b) that would be a sea war, not an armored war.
People are tweeting about LARPs in the context of the flop of a Star Wars immersive experience ($3,000 for meh?), and I'd like to point out the vast majority of both Nordic and American LARPs take place in original settings, not fanfic. The medium's strength is not rolling with a specific setting like Star Wars but combining different things, to the point that it became an Intercon trope by the 2010s that everything was a weird mashup (a LARP called Slash had PCs from like 12 different canons).
@billiglarper Yeah, so, the main argument I've seen for fanfic LARPs (e.g. by Laura47) is that everyone knows what it means to be a Stark/Lannister/Targaryen, so it's easier to set expectations for players. But then it's similarly easy to set expectations in an original setting. Laura47's own A Single Silver Coin opens with nine people having died and sitting in the boat to the underworld, where they need a coin to be able to enter it. Gritty low fantasy, a bunch of deaths from plague; go.
@billiglarper Or, in my magnum opus, Bad Apples, we took a bunch of gritty settings (the Mos Eisley scenes in A New Hope, Firefly, The Wire; none of us knew about the Expanse in 2013), and made something that dialogued with the genre. You don't need to know what it means to be from the uranium mining planet Shanti before playing to appreciate the combination of elements like "gritty space station" and "murder mystery" or "mafia gender values" and "domestic abuse" and "space piracy."
@asmallteapot I'm just surprised that among all the countries in the region that are fucking things up, Saudi Fucking Arabia, ruled by Mohammed bin Sawbone, somehow is behaving responsibly. What the fuck.
Conspiracy theory: Ebrahim Raisi's tragically untimely death (36 years too late) was caused by rogue Mossad agents who are hoping Iran retaliates in kind and gets Israel better leadership.