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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I fail to see how that’s relevant here. The guy isn’t a US national and wasn’t in the US when he committed his alleged “crime”.

    He has absolutely no duty towards the US and is 100% free to associate with whoever he wants, and yes, even Russia.

    US has no standing whatsoever in this situation, and it’s a travesty of international law that Sweden and the UK even entertained the idea of extraditing him. The response should’ve been “go sue the American who actually committed that crime on American soil. Oh wait, you’ve already convicted her, and she’s already out after serving her sentence? WTF are you going on about then?”







  • I’ve read all of them, and I really enjoyed them. It’s true that it’s basically “Royal Navy in space”, and it might be a little cheezy, but it’s a pretty relaxing read.

    The space combat stuff gets much better in the later books, Weber managed to build satisfying mechanics for it. There’s some good political intrigue too. The one thing that pulled me “out” of the books a couple times were some character names, some of them are pretty ridiculous (Queen Elizabeth III for example).


  • I’m one of these, my name is definitely male but when you read it it’s really easy to confuse with the female version. It doesn’t help that it’s really rare in my generation while the female version is much more popular. All this resulted in me getting misgendered on a regular basis. A few examples:

    • as a teenager, I won a prize with a monetary award. The check was for the female version of my name.
    • when I got my first house, I signed up ONLINE for the electric utility. The invoice ended up being addressed to the female version of my name. I sure as heck didn’t make a mistake in my own name when signing up, so someone over there must have “corrected” my name
    • I once went to a week-long course, where we each were assigned an individual room, but bathrooms and showers were shared across all rooms on that floor. I was assigned a room on the ladies’ floor, which took me a while to realize as I thought it was just mixed-gendered.
    • and that’s without counting the hundreds of times teachers took attendance. I’d say at least half of them got it wrong.

    Anyway, I thought pronouns were a bit of a weird thing for trans and non-binary people, but as a very cis man who’s had issues with people reading my name wrong, I put my pronouns in my signature now.









  • Just be aware that there’s a huge difference between coastal sailing and bluewater sailing. You can sail “on the ocean” but stay relatively near shore in a lot of boats. All the ones I’ve mentioned would be good for coastal sailing, where you’re never more than a few hours away from shore.

    To go truly offshore and cross an ocean you really want something more substantial. Why? It’s mostly because you’re much more likely to get caught in bad weather or to get something that breaks, so you need a lot more redundancy (spare parts, etc) and the boat needs to be built to withstand a lot more forces. Offshore you’re also constantly moving because of waves; something that flexes a little when you hit a large-ish wave will maybe flex 3-4 times during an outing in coastal or protected waters, but will flex every ~4 seconds for 20 days during an Atlantic crossing which adds up to about a half-million times. This can break a lot of stainless parts on your boat.

    Anyway, still achievable, I just wanted to add some perspective