James Baillie @JubalBarca@scholar.social

If you have an individual letter that takes your own angle on a case, especially if it asks for comment on specific points or issues that matter to you, it makes it vastly more likely that the person you are writing to will see your letter and will mentally log it as another person writing to them. Template letters get a single reply written and duplicated, and will only need to be seen once. For the psychology of a representative gauging constituent interest these things are just worlds apart.

A general PSA on writing to elected officials about things: if you can put things in your own words, always do rather than using template letters. I think there's a temptation to use template letters to make sure you're saying it "the right way", but the scale of impact is just vastly different.

This was a good flower, a knapweed sort of thing:

A question that springs to mind as of interest because I genuinely don't know the answer is what people who don't think of themselves as liberals (that is, given I'm asking on Masto, people who think of themselves as socialist or anarchist as in opposition to liberal) think liberal activists and members are like and what they're motivated by? Like if you got dropped into a rural Lib Dem party activist meeting what would you expect it to be like?

How They Do Rise Up.

Thoughts of today:

Childhood was dreaming of growing up and being a wizard.

Maturity was realising this was never going to happen.

Self-knowledge was realising that the reason it was never going to happen is that my character concept has just become more and more obviously "bard with badly optimised statline" over time.

Recent butterflies from Perchtoldsdorf, #Austria:

#wildlife #wildlifephotography

I don't really get what's going on with my strawberries. The few fruits they've tried making so far have all looked really odd/wrong, but the plants otherwise seem happy and vigorous. Odd.

Other than that, the basil I planted seems to pretty much all be dead, but most other things are managing OK. The tomatoes need yet another de-aphid-ing quite badly though, they're being a real menace :/

I met a snake yesterday! I think it was an aesculapian, which is nice as it's not a species I grew up with (we don't get them in the UK).

#wildlifephotography #wildlife #snake

Wrote a song about a semi-professional dire eel wrestler who got Charm Person-ed by one of our party and then went off and fought crocodiles with us and somehow survived despite being a 4HP nobody fighting multiple bouts with huge albino cave crocodiles.

The author of the whole scenario saw it and said it made his day, so that's probably the best thing I've done today :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU1v_XJW_ZU

So yeah, Taplisperi, the wine merchant who passed through death and tricked a demigod. Solid guy. I hope he got to find a seventh level cleric and a good sum of money, got raised properly, and then went and lived a happy life of profitable wine trading with his niece.

Next week I'll be working out my next character...

Taplisperi had in fact died at this point, being gutted by a catfish-corpse-pirate (there's an explanation there but it's long). But due to that happening inside a dungeon that was metaphysically also the body of a demigod, he got kinda magically returned to his body, but bound to the temple, until he communed with the river spirits and persuaded them he needed to get home (nobody here knowing his culture's burial rites), and got a magic river-water bottle which kept him alive with daily sips.