mrtoads.bsky.social
Grouchy old fart, enjoys books, birds, baroque music, alliteration and, of course, spiders (but then, who doesn’t?). Semi-skilled at a number of unimportant things like game-playing, computer surgery and natural history story-telling. Lazy.
2,552 posts
1,364 followers
282 following
Active Commenter
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To be scrupulously fair, Adolf demanded an oath of loyalty from all his generals, and King Donald is on record as requiring at least that much from his. Presumably each of his courtiers and sycophants will be required to contribute to the DJT Charity and Hamberder Fund.
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It’s my home, in Baltimore, MD. Looks just a tad less romantic when there is no mist..
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The movie never ends.
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When you “accidentally” keep doing things that hurt Americans and help the leaders of Russia, at what point do we start wondering how “accidental” it is?
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Very likely one of the rather dangerous Ctenid „Wandering Spiders“. Possibly a reference to one of the Black Widows.
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Is Monarda commonly called Bergamot? Is Monarda a wild mint? Does Monarda attract bees? Did I ever say that Monarda was the bergamot in Earl Grey tea?
I fail to see the reason for your „correction“.
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My personal feeling is that it’s too familiar to cause such a dislocation in feeling. I could live with another big jump in learning curve, but this feels like I shouldn’t need such a learning curve just to play. It’s disorienting. It’s also the first Civ in ages that has no „one more turn“ effect.
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different locations, demarked by some sparkles. It all fades into the background and becomes a videogame „find the special feature“ challenge which I, at least, find irritating.
Most of the actual gameplay is more or less the same, but it seems to have been fancied up to kind of disguise this.
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The previous iterations had relatively simple, straightforward designs for tiles and the graphical interface and such. The new effort is strikingly beautiful, but very ‚busy‘. It takes a moment and a tooltip hold to see what’s there, and instead of a single ‚tribal village‘, now there are many
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That may be; I remember liking 5 ok on launch. 6 was a big change and I had mixed feelings, but I kept going back to it until I grasped the new district arrangement, and then I was fine with it.
What’s different about 7 for me is not so much the new structure as the jump in ‚complexity‘.
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Outstanding! I’m waiting impatiently for news of the book’s release!
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Oh, that would be outstanding! I will look forward to it - the Latrodectus are such cool spiders, and the venoms are quite interesting. It may be outside the purview of such a book, but a short digression on the similarities of Steatoda venoms would be very nice..
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It’s simple, really:
Bergamot is a wild mint, also called Beebalm, because, like many wild mints, it has a strong attraction for bees.
All worker bees are female.
ipso facto, QED, cogito ergo summation.
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Republicans now hate Dolly almost as much as they hate Jesus, and for much the same reasons.
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Yeah, sure.
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I dunno. Seems to me that head lies as easily as breathing.
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Hochul is a NY Manchin. I’ll believe she’s going to buck the GOP when it actually plays out. Otherwise, I’ll assume she’s just spraying ink over her Adams inaction, until it’s safe to knuckle under to Donald Trump.
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I actually can work with regretful MAGAs. They take responsibility for their actions. The Purity Ponies still maintain their moral superiority, still insist they were right, and just don’t want to shoulder any part of the blame.
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You don’t get to help the GOP destroy in weeks what we struggled to build over generations, and then say „let’s not point fingers“.
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You are equating different things, you know. It only takes one to break. It takes many to build. Not blaming each other might be fine if we had a reasonable chance of stopping this. But thanks to the Purity Ponies, we’re thoroughly fucked.
So I’m blaming with venom and enthusiasm;
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A better person would try to gather us all together to try to ride out the typhoon.
I’m not a better person, and I’m old (so I’m going to get hosed much earlier than the rest), so all I can do is hope that the holier-than-though Purity Ponies drown as early as possible, keeping the rest of us afloat
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Alas, merely pointing out their appalling and completely willful stupidity only confirms their desperate need to be Right more strongly.
It’s one of our human things.
I wish there was some reason to hope that this would magically go away, but there’s no way out but through and we may not make it.
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Few people are more dangerous than young men with a little knowledge and a lot of arrogance.
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Presumably the rarely seen Jersey Devil Moth.
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You are supposing that Donald Trump is not fully aware that Russia invaded Ukraine. Of course he knows this. Of course he doesn’t care. He lies effortlessly and constantly, as a way of harming his enemies (anyone poorer, weaker, or resistant to his threats) or to justify his various idiocies
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He did write it.
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This is only a surprise to anyone who has had no experience of the GOP in general, or Rubio in particular, over the last decade.
There are no principles beyond “what Russia wants, Russia gets”, and the ability to spin on a “beliefs” dime without a hitch at any given moment might impress Orwell.
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You know, I always thought that Germany and Japan should have negotiated an end to the Pacific War in 1941-45. There was no need for the US or any other European or Asian nation to be involved.
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To be scrupulously fair, that would be _a certain kind of_ British accent. There are some, just a very few, of course, British accents that would be very difficult to associate with “smart”. The rough equivalent to our beloved Hillbilly or Shitkicker or Forrest Gump accent.
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Ronald Reagan and the Laffer Curve.
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Like too many Americans, he’s invincibly armored in his pro-Russian propaganda bubble. Unlike most Americans, he’s a paid hireling of Putin, so he gets something out of it.
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I disagree. There’s little or no duping involved.
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Except he’s a child’s imitation of a movie mob boss. And not a very successful one.
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The only one I knew of was the dinosaur one. Obviously I haven’t been paying attention.
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Princeton is doing a series? Outstanding!
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Are you a God, NEORSD?
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Absolutely! I couldn’t agree mo- oh, what was that bird?
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The funny thing is, it looks to me like the cheapest and surest way to radicalize a normal person into a remorseless terrorist is to kill one or more family members of that person.
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The rise of the GOP: an illustration in two posts.
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But if Lindbergh had become President instead of FDR, he might have offered to negotiate an end to the war in France directly with Hitler, without any input from France.
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Well, at least that explains why he doesn’t seem unhappy about all these crashes.
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I hope he also remembered to ask Ted and Cargill.
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Look, all I’m saying is that if I was the pilot and didn’t trust the landing gear, maybe I would have landed on my back, too.
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The first thing for me is the cinnamon shoulder strap. The next thing is the flared cinnamon eyestripe that stops at the eye.
I also see these guys more up in shrubs and trees than down on the ground, kind of unusual for sparrows.
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Tufted Titmice would not surprise me if they had cigarette packs rolled up in their shoulder feathers, and popped out switchblades if you look sideways.
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Interestingly, even in the Golden Days of Usenet, when the early trolls developed the techniques that sparked the first flame wars, the trolls I’m familiar with would have regarded this sort of lazy knee-jerk stupidity as kind of shameful. He’s just phoning it in. No passion. No commitment.
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Once you start banning, it gets easier and easier with each ban.
And what they do to Them now, they will do to Us tomorrow.
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Damn! I’m an old white man and I somehow missed all that. The only person who regulates my language is my wife. But then I’m not a quivering coward suckling at the poisoned teat of Fox.
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I thought that was his rapper name.