verwegen und frei

And they want me to trust them with my private data. They'll encrypt it and keep it safe. No chance of the encryption feature being accidentally* disabled or the data being leaked or sold or anything like that. Promise.

The second chat ended with them saying that they'd passed it onto the "appropriate team" and they'd look into it and get back to me. Well, they got back to me:

"To fix issues with the Etsy app, follow these steps, blah blah"

... I didn't mention the app. I don't use the app. My one and only problem is that I don't get emails when I make a sale. Somehow either a) the initial support guy passed along the completely wrong problem, or b) the "appropriate team" completely misunderstood what the problem is.

Oh, and they also sent me a link to a customer satisfaction survey. It goes to a page that says "this survey is unavailable".

While production will be slower than I’d like due to the team needing to work other jobs/gigs, I am beyond excited to be working on this again. Hoping a revamped and complete demo will be up by the end of the summer, and who knows with a lot of luck (and funding 😂), maybe we’ll get even further.

This is ABSOLUTELY a perfectly fine footpath.

In fact, with how much space I’m seeing here, it is entirely plausible, that the European hordes will just create a temporary little Wanderweg right next to the highway. With that much space they might not even have to interfere with traffic.

the grass is not a permanent feature. there just happens to be a chunk of it there. the side of the road can vary from grass to swampwater ditches to steep embankments to absolutely nothing within a very short distance.

they will call in every highway enforcer in the state and mass incarcerate the lot of you before they allow you to Darwin Award yourselves across 6 lanes of traffic into an international incident or, (their real concern) impede the progress of the single most important north-south interstate corridor in america, ball kicky game be damned.

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

Horses are not machines. You cannot just take the max speed of a horse and scale it up and go "that's how far a horse can go and how fast!" Horses are like us. The top speed of a human recorded is somewhere around 27mph. We sustain that for about 30-35 seconds, which is much less than a mile distance even at 27mph.

There is a guy who pulled 350 miles in something over 3 days running, but a. Humans actually have better endurance than horses (we're just a lot weaker) and importantly for this discussion, b. He was in absolute physical ruin at the other end - missing toenails, feed bleeding freely from multiple blisters, hypothermic, and woulda been in some Trouble if he hadn't had modern medicine right there to help him out. He was also running in the best equipment modern money can buy, on paved roads and clear terrain, and with his family driving alongside to help him swap socks, shoes, rinse the blood out, give him food to eat, water, and so on.

And again: humans are better at endurance than horses (honestly we're just fucking ridiculous, at peak condition, in terms of endurance, we're absurd) and the guy was a useless wreck at the end.

For horses, modern endurance races tend to max at 100miles, which are completed in around 18 hours (the max allowed is 24); there are some 2-day 100 mile races where you do two 50s and then add them together after sleeping overnight.

(This is the race for one rider with the same horse - there are much longer races (like the Mongolian Derby), but those involve switching horses, in order not to, you know, kill them.)

For the endurance races, those are intensely trained for and they're the big Effort for the year. Vet staff monitor the horses' very carefully at multiple stops, because it's very easy to injure them. Multi-day races are maxed at 50m/day in order to avoid injuring the horses.

After the race, horses normally need a month or more to recover from the effort, before it's even safe to do anything BUT rest with them, let alone actually race again.

Now if you're in a hurry and have no posts to get totally fresh horses (which is what things like the Persian messengers or the Pony Express did), you can eke a bit more out of this as within the story Théoden et al certainly did by having multiple horses, as it's harder for a horse to run with you on its back than to just run freely.

In the same time that it takes Gandalf to reach Minas Tirith, Théoden et al get to Dunharrow. Aragorn takes the Paths of the Dead because they cut under Dunharrow and vastly decrease the amount of distance in order to get to the Pelargirs, because his use of the Stone has shown him that if there isn't a lot more help than Théoden is bringing sooner than he is bringing it, Minas Tirith is fucked, and it is not physically possible for Théoden to get to the Pelennor before the 15th of March and still have horses that are capable of being ridden into battle.

(Obviously, part of what he did was cut off the enemy reinforcements by doing this, thus meaning that he reduced the need for significant more numbers arriving before the Corsairs would have . . . because he arrived instead of the Corsairs.)

. . . Shadowfax ran to Minas Tirith over the same terrain in four days. That would be a little over a hundred miles a night without stopping (Pippin is specific about how infrequently they stopped and that it seemed to have been entirely for Gandalf to talk to people) and when they get there he might as well have just come off a long rest, and thinks it's super stupid that he has to go wait in a stall while his two-legs goes and does talky-stuff. The next day he runs a super-speed race out to drive the Nazgûl off in order for Faramir to continue his retreat from Osgiliath (rather than be routed).

Shadowfax just did something that would kill a normal horse and then went " . . .what, like it's hard?"

To be fair, sure, Shadowfax was probably cantering because frankly fuckin' riding at a flat gallop for 4 days would be punitively exhausting even for Gandalf's new incarnation with some of his previous restrictions eased, never mind for Pippin, while a canter is p much the most comfortable gait. But for fuck's sake, guys.

Yes, a racehorse can, at flat fastest run, get over 25mph (Secretariat hit the 30s) - they do this for less than 2 miles.

A normal horse would have keeled over dead somewhere in the middle of that ride. If you had a super-trained endurance one they might make it in six-ish but they're not going to be useful for anything when you get there and are probably useless for several months if you want them to stay sound. (And you might still have killed them, or at least made them permanently lame.)

Shadowfax was like "toss me a waterbottle bro and then let's get back out there this stable shit is boring."

To be clear, I have no problem verifying my identity. I already did. Etsy already has a copy of my government ID and my tax ID. The problem is that now they want me to give my ID to them again, and they're using Persona for the process.

Persona was in the news recently because it's the company Discord was going to use, until all the pushback. The pushback came because Persona a) left their collected data in a publicly-viewable database and b) turned out to be collecting wayyyy more data than they said they were and passing it onto the US government (source).

Discord since went back on that. Etsy is pushing forward. I asked them, and no, there is no way to verify myself and keep selling on there without giving my data to Persona. Unlike Discord users, most sellers don't seem to care, or just accept it as "the cost of doing business". I don't. I can't believe how easily people are giving up their privacy and, yes, their personal freedoms. "They can have my data, I have nothing to hide" - the point is that nobody is entitled to your data. They are taking your data, and selling it, and getting rich off it, and you don't see a cent of that money. Why? What gives them the right? How are you okay with someone simply taking your stuff and selling it? It's yours.

(Also, you have nothing to hide until someone decides that you are hiding something because they don't like the look of you or because you said something they didn't like. Going by history, that's how that tends to work.)