Cancer

https://theneedling.com/2024/02/19/professional-pickleball-and-5-other-sports-to-follow-instead-of-letting-the-mariners-disappoint-you-again/
Professional Pickleball and 5 Other Sports to Follow Instead of Letting the Mariners Disappoint You Again

I've approached it in the past, but that's a whole story that mere mortals (with functioning livers) don't really need…

Well, you don't put in for the night on an open-water run! Which can be very, very long, by the way. English fleets used to show up off the Levant in the early summer on a regular basis from the First Crusade on. (Actually, probably a century or so earlier.) As far as we can tell, the standard route was : assembly at Dartmouth or nearby (hanging around); a straight run to Santiago de Compostella (hanging around); turn left at Lisbon and straight through to Sicily (hanging around); Levant. 
 
The hanging-around episodes in the midst of long voyages all involve waiting for the right wind, although when we have accounts of them they're all about politics. (People get bored, and bored people besiege cities and take sides in civil wars. It's  just human nature.) By late medieval times, English voyagers were clearly ending up in Candia (honey citron), Kalamata (olives), and Monemvasia (Malmsey) so often that the names are synonymous with their signature exports. By this time, the standard voyage was from London, and the place of hanging-around was the Downs. We know the Downs above all from the trials of the Pilgrims there: you took ship in London, went downriver to the Downs, and then waited for a wind that would take you around Spithead, from which it was usually fresh all the way to Gibraltar. And so this very long voyage from England all the way to Greece was usually most trouble a day's voyage from London.
 
It's all about the wind, is, I think, a fair summary of this particular kind of voyage. It's almost meaningless to talk about how long "the voyage" is, unless you include the time spent hanging around waiting for the right wind. Because if you haven't got a fresh wind, and an expectation of it continuing, why are you even bothering? Just wait on land!
 
Now, on the other hand, the "standard" voyage to St Kilda   was four days, and made under oars. This is a very small distance, and a very long time, and it is not as though you can't improvise sails on boats this small. (Picture that image of the lifeboat with the improvised sail made by hanging clothes off an oar.) The reason people did things this way is that by far the most laborious parts of the whole voyage were those spent doodling around land. The entire last day of the voyage to St Kilda was scheduled on the basis that you arrived off the island's anchorage at nightfall, waited until morning, and spent as much of the day as you needed negotiating your way to land --probably mostly determined by the tides. 
 
In other words, it is not just the distance across open water that matters here. It's also the last hundred yards to land. This is pretty common for Atlantic voyaging. There has to be close attention to destinations and also waypoints. You sail, period, long distances, and row, period, short ones. (Although by "row" I think we need to allow improvised masts and sails, as noted.)  I could pile on circumstance and location without end, here. Norwegians built deep-hulled ships because their waters are deep. Cinque Port captains go pirate easily, and this reflects corruption on land, because the only way to land at the Cinque Ports is to come up on the beach, and have some locals winch your characteristically short, fat-hulled boat up the steep dunes. 
 
And yet for a coastwise galley-trip in the Mediterranean, suddenly the rules are reversed; sails are used even for short voyages, and voyages are broken by what appears to be easy and regular beachings. The reason things are so different is that Mediterranean beaches are quite different from Atlantic, and much more common. While, on the other hand, tides are quite gentle and neither aid nor obstruct beaching. You probably can't just set out into the blue in a Mediterranean context, but if you know the land and seascape, you can plan a point-to-point-to-point voyage from one beach to the next. This is why the typical Mediterranean cabotage vessel is long, narrow, and shallow-hulled. It's meant to be hauled up shallow beaches. 
 
And then, from Bangkok to Canton, it's nothing but sails, ever, and even if you're going to war to restore the Bach Viet, your war elephants go from Da Nang to the Pearl by junk. Again, whereas if you're going to war against the Khmer or Surabaya, it is by war canoe. The long voyages rely on the monsoon winds, and your profit depends on your being the first ship of the season to catch them. Whereas the short voyages are going to landing stages on the flooded forest margin. It's that interface between land and sea that is decisive here. Different geographies demand different technologies, and different schedules.  
 
This is why, I think, most writers, and especially writers from the good old age of sail, scour ancient texts for voyage lengths. Locals know their waters, and, if pressed and talkative, will explain why the boats look like they do, and why voyages take the time they do. But, even here, you have to beware the "smartest man in the room." I think I'm on solid ground here, writing mainly from the maritime history of the Crusades and histories of the European workboat, and the very dangerously shallow basis of some tentative work on South China Sea piracy in the golden age. 

Yesterday marked six years of me never having to pretend to be a guy again, and today, like every March 31st, is International Transgender Day of Visibility, so it's a double celebration for me.
 
Being visible as a trans person is important to me for two main reasons. For one, to remind non LGBTQ+ folks that people like me exist and are real people who are part of their communities. The other reason is to help older trans people who think that they're too old to transition know that it's never too late. I started my transition at fifty-two and it's still the best thing I've ever done for myself.
 
So, like the title says, happy Trans Day of Visibility.

Title: Speed, Distance, Alien Invaders, and Meep meep

Title: Speed, Distance, Alien Invaders, and Meep meep

Title: Speed, Distance, Alien Invaders, and Meep meep

Interesting suggestion that T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) may undergo outburst sometime in the coming 5  - 6 months.  It is a recurrent nova (similar outbursts having been seen in 1866 and 1946) and there is a report that it has undergone its foreshadowing "dip" that was seen prior to the 1946 outburst (see the light curve in the linked Wikipedia article).  If the suggestion is right, then it will go from about 10th magnitude (rather below naked eye brightness) up to 2nd magnitude or so (comparable to the stars in the Big Dipper).  Cor Bor itself doesn't stand out (it has only one 2nd magnitude star) but is quite convenient for observation from the US and Europe.  Once it undergoes outburst it will fade fairly quickly -- a few days -- back below the naked-eye threshold.

66 F = 292.039 K 60 F = 288.706 K

Late this day (Leap Day) in 1992, my wife proposed to me.
 
My response was to get up, go to my dresser drawer, and hand it to her: I had already bought the ring.
 
(In what women have always derided as a Dumb Guy Thing, I was waiting to ensure that I'd have funding -- i.e., a job -- for the next academic year.)

Interesting suggestion that T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) may undergo outburst sometime in the coming 5  - 6 months.  It is a recurrent nova (similar outbursts having been seen in 1866 and 1946) and there is a report that it has undergone its foreshadowing "dip" that was seen prior to the 1946 outburst (see the light curve in the linked Wikipedia article).  If the suggestion is right, then it will go from about 10th magnitude (rather below naked eye brightness) up to 2nd magnitude or so (comparable to the stars in the Big Dipper).  Cor Bor itself doesn't stand out (it has only one 2nd magnitude star) but is quite convenient for observation from the US and Europe.  Once it undergoes outburst it will fade fairly quickly -- a few days -- back below the naked-eye threshold.

I know already that there is at least one RPG player with NASA (and in the astronaut corps, in fact).  Hope he had a hand in this.

Short of creating a large, scattershot table of wildly different "unintended effects" and having the player dice off it blindly, I don't know how to game with that sort of randomness.  I can't do it as a GM; I can make up stuff on the fly, but it's way too correlated with what I've been doing or thinking about for the last few minutes/hours/days.  And, it's inevitably filtered through my own preconceptions about what is appropriate to do to characters in my game.
 
The problem with really unknowable of that sort is that it gives the GM carte blanche to do whatever s/he wants with the characters whenever s/he wants, and there are GMs out there who can't resist yanking that chain (or pulling those wings off of those flies) in ways that are to my thinking completely inappropriate.
 
I admit that I am notorious in our group for never allowing my character to be captured.  NEVER.  Doesn't matter how far along in the campaign, it's suicide when that approaches, and (in HERO terms) I pay the cost of that mechanism at character creation so it is present (if, perhaps, unexplained) from Time Zero.  As a player I admit it is irrational and it's there, and it's drawn comment before on these boards in threads that no longer exist.  And it's there because one of my earliest extramural RPG experiences was one where capture inevitably led to the functional equivalent of mind control earworm, and the GM relished abusing people (players, not characters) via that channel.  And no, that SHOULD NOT BE PART OF THE GOALS OF ANY GM'S GAME.  Got something you as a player object to doing in a game, and you express that objection in the session?  It'd happen, guaranteed, in the next session or two, if the GM could fabricate a reason to compel the character to do it.  No, that's not what an RPG should be about, but at least at the time I encountered such a GM, these made a nontrivial fraction of the RPG community.
 
(That experience was part of what led me to absent myself from RPGs for most of a decade, but the bigger part of that was that it coincided with most of grad school and the first couple years after it, when I really needed to focus on Other Stuff.)
 

Also from our neighborhood is a famous football guy who served a number of terms in the House, Steve Largent.

So long as the mushrooms don't start singing, "A Whiter Shade of Pale".