Root beer is good. Wish it was more common over here.

Aha, okay! Exciting stuff.

When are you going to travel? I hadn't realised your trip was coming up quite so soon.

If it's stayed at 15/month for two decades it must've reduced significantly in real price!

Solving the housing crisis through demand suppression (gating ownership behind unlocks).

Certainly more glamorous than the Elizabeth Line to Heathrow.

A boost to my campaign to take pictures of weird trains to send to my dad.

The end of my trip, when I need to get back to Tokyo, shades into Silver Week, which distorts travel arrangements; I needed to have something booked in advance; I had a lot of surplus points (very few of them from actual flying).

I'm due to use Itami at one point this autumn, assuming jet fuel even exists by then.

* @thaliarchus.bsky.social voice* it has been ten years since the day when Ideon's Super Robot Wars debut had been as long ago as Ideon had aired before that

Lends the food aftertaste with mass.

Funniest thing in Turn-A Gundam so far is a bunch of dudes from Louisiana finding some Zaku Ils and thinking that they're the tightest shit in the world.

Person holding an antique flare gun "it's old. But it still bark!! 💥"

Presumably everyone has an individual threshold where movement gets too cranked to follow. I agree that some kind of speed slider for it would be good.

The B sides slap, almost like they have a different guy writing lyrics for those.

Album cover.

'You made a lot of people uncomfortable and unhappy.'

'So you're being executed.'

It'd be unwise to risk making a lot of people uncomfortable by discussing Cross Ange.

File our move towards ガラパゴス化 alongside the sword hunts.

Team-up between this guy and the Agriculture Ministry bureaucrat who was maintaining Japanese Wikipedia's Gundam pages during work hours.

"average New Labour minister causes 3 scandals" factoid actualy just statistical error. average minister causes 0 scandals. Scandals Peter, who lives in cave & causes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

I thought it was reasonably well written, though the prose is old-fashioned.

Kotozume Yukari looks wry. [Pretty Cure Dream Stars]

Good night, and good luck.

Can't speak on French history, but I think if you forced me to point to something in British history I'd either go earlier (1916–17) or later (say, 1997).

And was it an end of empire? I think it was more of a clarification, for both France and the UK, than an end.

What we see today is military action not only not solving a problem, but also creating a new, larger, and even more troublesome problem.

6. When the dust settled, the result for the Canal was… pretty much the same as before.

Iran came close to attempting full closure of Hormuz in the final stages of the Iran–Iraq War, but its capacity to do so hadn't been proven absolutely until 2026.

5. As noted upthread--an aspect I hadn't known much about--the Franco-British action met with significant resistance within the UK, including from people within the establishment, moderate politics, and even the governing party.

4. The Suez Crisis occurred to some extent 'inside' or 'within' the context of UN arbitration and greater US economic power.

No greater power is available to hold the ring in today's mess.

3. In the Suez Crisis, the two sides weren't military equals, but they did fight each other somewhat more symmetrically, across recognisable lines.

Hormuz presents a different picture, of very mighty intercontinental naval-air power set against cheap drones, mines, and small boats.

2. Egypt was perhaps a more fragile regime, not hardened by (people forget this!) the twentieth century's longest conventional war.

1. Egypt and the UK didn't always like each other in the '50s--the recent imperial history was, reasonably, resented!--but had nothing like the bitterness of the enmity between Iran and the USA from 1979 onward.