Writing this relatively early in the day while I work on renders, which in practice means that I'm going to stop doing renders for a few minutes somewhere in the middle of this, because once I start typing it, my brain won't want to interrupt writing it ten times to pose and start the next renders.

But that's OK. I can spare a few minutes not doing renders, and if I wait until later in the day it won't happen, which is what happened (or didn't happen) yesterday.

I posted a link to these entries on a private Discord channel where some old online friends hang out occasionally and was asked by two of them whether there was an RSS feed. This is how I learned that people are still using RSS.

I don't actually know if this material is suited to RSS -- I think there's some special formatting I'm not sure I could translate over, like the blueboard grafs I use to designate aside context (e.g. the latter-day remarks in Dredge entries), or the pop-ins (any clickable orange text -- have you tried it? There's one above). Not to mention the first time your RSS feed hits one of those Dredge entries (the most recent one was fourteen thousand words), it might explode. But I'm going to look into it.

Today's rabbit hole is looking up Bhumibol (the king of Thailand from 1946-2016, who did you think I meant? Do you know a lot of Bhumibols?) because I just found out, from Jeopardy! either last night or the night before, that that's not how you say it. All these years and I've had it wrong in my head.

What I want to know is, given that RTGS is a thing, why aren't we using it in Western contexts? Yes, I gather it's old and creaky and flawed and used inconsistently, but "Phumiphon Adunyadet" (RTGS) is much, much closer to the way you actually say the damned name than "Bhumibol Adulyadej." I mean, RTGS seems to make more sense here. It isn't like Wade-Giles or some other system of transliteration that actually makes things worse.

Bhumibol was an interesting and intelligent guy, and he is apparently fondly regarded in my neck of the woods (he was born in Cambridge, MA, y'know -- his dad was studying at Harvard at the time) ... but he still was more than happy to rule for seventy years without doing a fucking thing about the lèse-majesté laws which are the primary reason I will never visit Thailand, because I don't go places where you can't tell your leaders they should go fuck off into the sun without risking jail or worse. Note, by the way, that our president would probably have wet dreams about adopting laws like that in the USA, if he were still capable of having wet dreams.

I allowed six weeks, at least two more than usual, for this Sleeper Squad because I knew it was going to be mammoth. Today I began the renders for part five (it is six parts plus an intermission). It's going to be absolutely hilarious if this story is done before the fifteenth of June after all that.

If that happens, I might try to squeeze in something for the DeviantArt people, who are going to be disappointed in this story, which is almost entirely story, and has almost no sex or kink and no more than the usual background level of Sleeper Squad weirdness. Maybe I'll do a robotization quickie for them. Robotization is always popular among my DA base.

If there are any errors or editorial cleanup in this entry after posting, too bad; this time they're going to go unfixed. My code uses underscores surrounding a word or phrase to indicate that phrase should later be in italics. The problem with this is that Wikipedia URLs are full of underscores. I can finesse it by replacing each of them with _ before saving the post ... but when the post gets saved, the code interprets those entities and replaces them with underscores ... so if I edit the post later, they're back to underscores again and the code will try to mangle the URLs. I have to replace all the underscores with the entities each time I edit the post, and there are five of them in that URL up there.

I need to figure out some other way of doing it. I'm thinking of switching to a double underscore for italics, the same way I use double asterisks to delimit boldface.