Towards a Reasonable Approximation

Doing the thing where I have a real blog where I hold myself to standards, and a tumblr where I just try not to be completely stupid.

[reasonableapproximation]

Kind of annoying that github doesn't seem to have a list of "all public repositories user has commits in". Or even just a private version of that list for yourself only. Trying to make that list manually:

ghc/ghc (most impressive-sounding, but technically easy work in the base library; doesn't even show up in github's activity log, presumably because that repo is mirrored from elsewhere)

nikitavolkov/refined (haskell library)

has2k1/plotnine (python graphing library)

stackbuilders/hspec-golden (haskell library)

lspitzner/brittany (haskell formatter)

yesodweb/wai (haskell library)

chrisdone/intero (emacs package)

mebassett/servant-db-elm-auth-example (haskell/elm sample app; we had no idea what we were doing back then)

ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum (LessWrong 2)

yhat/ggpy (python graphing library)

bellroy/predictionbook (PredictionBook)

mooz/percol (command line app that I thought sounded useful but maybe never used)

Draknek/fcsh-wrap (command line app)

Also most-but-not-all of my own repositories. (Pretty sure I have some that I forked but never committed to.) And several in my employer's namespace that I'd feel weird linking here even though they're public. And two repos I have open pull requests in that mostly seem to be getting ignored: hedgehogqa/haskell-hedgehog (haskell library; would probably be my favorite on this list if the second PR was accepted) and harelba/q (command line app).

(Might try to come back and keep this updated as it changes. Last update: when posted.)

[reasonableapproximation]

Updates: the small hedgehog PR got merged, the interesting one has had some maintainer comments and is currently waiting for more. I get the impression he's busy. I've also opened a third that's also cooler than anything currently on the list.

More excitingly, I got a bugfix PR merged into util-linux/util-linux, which means when it rolls out I'll have code installed on probably millions of machines.

(Not Debian though. The bugs were in the rename command. Debian installs a different thing under that name, that arch calls perl-rename, and from a quick google it sounds like it currently doesn't install the util-linux rename at all.)

[reasonableapproximation]

Apparently util-linux 2.39 was released in May, so the code I wrote made it on to my machines without me noticing. Also, I've had some more PRs merged into hedgehog (including the interesting one I was talking about before, and a bugfix for it) and others ignored.

(Idk why I was being vague and just talking about "the interesting one" without saying what it was. Rn I'm doing it because I can't be bothered to explain, so maybe that's why I did it then.)

I now also have commits in

haskell/aeson (haskell library)

LuanAdemi/toumei (ML interpretability library)

but the exciting news this time around is that I now have a commit in GHC itself, not just the base library, courtesy of mentoring at Zurihac.

[reasonableapproximation]

Now also openscad/openscad, 3d modelling software that I contributed to the man page of.

[reasonableapproximation]

Some more:

JJWRoeloffs/VimOS (a shitpost).

Briefly some in JJWRoeloffs/advent-of-code-2023, a friend was trying to do advent of code in a different language every day and we paired on day 3 (rust). She didn't have time to do much after that and now seems to have deleted/privatized the repo, so my fork is no longer marked as a fork.

Bodigrim/infinite-list (haskell package). (My commit message "add @since" referring to function metadata seems to have been interpreted as a reference to the github user @SIncE. And now tumblr's doing the same.)

haskell-CI/haskell-ci (command line tool to help set up CI for haskell packages).

[reasonableapproximation]

hspec/hspec-hedgehog (haskell package)

haskell/containers (haskell package)

And open PRs at ledger/ledger (admittedly only a draft that I wanted opinions on and never got them) and ledger/ledger-mode.

[reasonableapproximation]

I had to switch my work laptop from Arch to Ubuntu. Some things are improved (less buggy with my external monitor), some are degraded (when HLS gets OOM killed, it now seems to take emacs or my whole desktop with it). The installer didn't let me preserve my existing home partition inside an LVM-on-LUKS partition, and that's not too surprising except that apparently previous versions could do that. So far it's mostly not as terrible as I feared.

... Except that (at least with focus-on-hover, which is obviously the correct focus behavior)

Left clicking on a window titlebar doesn't reliably raise it, which it should obviously do

Middle clicking the title bar doesn't automatically lower it, which should happen because that's a setting

But double clicking and right clicking reliably work according to their settings (toggle maximize, open menu)

Raise and lower seem to work for some apps but not others. Which, what? Why? How can this be the case and how did it slip through?

[reasonableapproximation]

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[reasonableapproximation]

Current account: the update went through the next day, but the downloadable statements still had my old address. I explained my problem to the customer support bot. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I do not want to change my address. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I want to talk to a human. «Sure. They'll be able to see the conversation so far.»

«Hi there. I see you want help changing your address.» I explained my problem again. «I see your address as being updated.» I explained my problem again. «It can take some time to regenerate. Try again tomorrow.»

Tomorrow, to no surprise, nothing had changed. This time I found their phone number and spoke to a human. She said those statements had already been generated but she could generate a new document, essentially three months' worth of statements in one pdf that would have my new address. That would take 24-48 hours to generate. I said I'd have hoped to have it sooner, and she said it's usually less than 24 but they have to say it could be up to 48 just in case. That's not what I thought she meant originally, but okay, that's less bad. It actually came in ~12 hours, and was fine.

The text conversation asked for feedback at the time, but I didn't know for sure the advice was wrong at the time. By the time I found out that the person had, bluntly, wasted my time by spouting a crock of shit, there was no way for me to feed this information back.

[reasonableapproximation]

One of the S&S ISAs (M&G), I just didn't end up being able to prove it was mine. They don't have a pdf export feature, so I just had to print a page on the website to pdf. And they didn't have any pages with both my name and my account balance, and whoo boy, "here's one document with my name and account number, and here's one with my account number and balance, don't you think that kinda suggests that maybe my name is associated with that balance, at least as long as I'm not committing the kind of fraud that would be trivially easy to commit even in a single document" is apparently Not How Things Are Done Around Here?

Idk, maybe it could have worked? This was all going through my mortgage broker, and I'm not sure how hard he tried - it wasn't really necessary, because I have more than enough in other accounts to fund the whole thing, so mortgage providers don't actually need to know about this one, so we decided not to bother.

But my plan had been to fully drain this one. And I think it makes sense to do that over a period of weeks-or-months, instead of running the risk that I happen to withdraw it all in a market dip. But if something goes wrong, and I need to give proof of funds again, then suddenly I have a mysterious injection of tens of thousands of pounds into my bank account that I can't easy give provenance for. Proooobably not a dealbreaker, but at least a pain in the ass.

So I thought maybe I'd withdraw it all from the other ISA (Vanguard), and then when I'm done I transfer everything from M&G to Vanguard and close M&G. I've been vaguely meaning to do that for years anyway.

But! I can just transfer it all to my Vanguard now. People who want proof of funds only ask for three months of statements for my current account, and single snapshots for other accounts. So as long as it doesn't go through my current account nothing's going to look suspicious. (And it's not even allowed to go through my current account, HMRC would be Very Upset with me if it did that.)

[reasonableapproximation]

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[reasonableapproximation]

Current account: the update went through the next day, but the downloadable statements still had my old address. I explained my problem to the customer support bot. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I do not want to change my address. «Sure, let me help you change your address.» I want to talk to a human. «Sure. They'll be able to see the conversation so far.»

«Hi there. I see you want help changing your address.» I explained my problem again. «I see your address as being updated.» I explained my problem again. «It can take some time to regenerate. Try again tomorrow.»

Tomorrow, to no surprise, nothing had changed. This time I found their phone number and spoke to a human. She said those statements had already been generated but she could generate a new document, essentially three months' worth of statements in one pdf that would have my new address. That would take 24-48 hours to generate. I said I'd have hoped to have it sooner, and she said it's usually less than 24 but they have to say it could be up to 48 just in case. That's not what I thought she meant originally, but okay, that's less bad. It actually came in ~12 hours, and was fine.

The text conversation asked for feedback at the time, but I didn't know for sure the advice was wrong at the time. By the time I found out that the person had, bluntly, wasted my time by spouting a crock of shit, there was no way for me to feed this information back.

[reasonableapproximation]

There's an ad for some google AI thing that features someone saying «tell me about dating Scorpios» and the AI saying «Scorpios are known to be blah blah blah».

And like, "AI entrenching existing prejudices" is so far from being the most important story about AI. And "AI playing along with your astrology bullshit" is far from being the most important story about AI as it relates to entrenching existing prejudices.

But still. What the fuck!

[reasonableapproximation]

Until the past year or so, I've been giving my parents' address on most things like bank accounts, thinking "they move less often than me, might as well avoid having to change it". And of course there are things I've had since before I moved out (I've had my current account since probably 2003, and never changed its address).

I'm hoping to buy a place of my own soon, so that would be a natural time to decide "okay, I officially Do Not Live At My Parents' Place any more".

So of course, having had my offer accepted and being asked for documents to prove my address and that I have funds, I realize that a lot of these documents have addresses other than the address I gave them, and this might look suspicious. So I guess I gotta get a bunch of addresses updated before I can get a new address.

Current account: parents' address because I've had it since forever. To update, I needed to go into the app and enable face verification. Now, every time I want to log in to the website, I also need to log in to the app and play with the camera. (Previously I needed to enter a code they'd send to me through the app.) The update seems to take some time; at any rate, has not yet gone through (~1 hour later).

Help-to-buy ISA: address I lived in 2015-2016, because for some reason I was being Conscientous about the address I gave then or something. To update, I needed to install a new app. But at least it was an instant update when I did, and at least I now have one bank statement with my current address.

Premium bonds: parents' address because I guess I was still using that when I opened the account? Updated just through the website, with them giving me a phone call for security.

Credit card: I actually updated this one recently, because "not on electoral roll" was hurting my credit score. But it's no help, because they don't need to see my credit card statement.

Revolut: I updated this one recently too, to be able to give proof of address to someone else. Also no help, because I don't keep enough money here to worry about.

Two stocks and shares ISAs: not sure what address they have, but it's not on the documents they generate, so doesn't matter.

Coinbase: parents' address, but not on documents.

[librarychair]

As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.

[winged-light]

You.... realise that animal welfare legislation will make your chicken more expensive, right? Like either you can afford to buy the more-expensive chicken already, or you can't afford to have animal welfare regulations. If you need cheap chicken to not starve and you make a law that bans cheap chicken then you are advocating for your own starvation.

Like I am very very very much not a libertarian! I agree that free markets are often terrible and we should regulate more stuff! But I'm concerned that you think banning cheap chicken will help you to afford cheap chicken. The corporations will not go "oh we'd better lower the price of free range eggs since caged eggs have been banned", they will absolutely just let you starve.

[reasonableapproximation]

Like either you can afford to buy the more-expensive chicken already, or you can't afford to have animal welfare regulations.

I think this is an overstatement. I'd expect stricter animal welfare regulations to raise the minimum price of chicken, but not to the current price point of ethically raised chicken. Partly because there's more supply of ethically raised chicken, and partly because there'll be more optimization power applied to the problem of "how to raise chickens cheaply and ethically".

I have no particular intuition for where in between the current price levels things will equilibriate, or for that matter what the current price difference is.

I'd also expect other foods that can substitute for chicken to become cheaper/more available, since there's more demand for them. I could imagine that being basically-unnoticeable though.

(I also buy meat raised under welfare standards that I'd vote to outlaw. This is a moral failing on my part.)

[reasonableapproximation]

I've written some porn over the past few years and I don't feel like making it easy to find but I am interested in talking about how it's been rated.

The first two are chapters 2 and 1 of the same series. (Chapter 3 is awaiting publication and I intend there to be a chapter 4 hopefully by the end of May but I'm not gonna rush myself.) #4 is one I wrote a few years previously but just didn't put on Literotica until I wrote #3.

I agree with the general ranking that #1/#2 > #4 > #3. I maybe think #3 is a little underrated but not much. #s 1 and 2 I really am proud of. My girlfriend and recent ex also think they're great, and they got some very flattering comments on reddit. (#1 got way fewer votes on reddit than #2, probably because it's a chapter 2 and both chapters are longer than normal for the subreddit. Chapter 3 currently has slightly more votes there than #2 there but no comments yet.)

Both the stories in the serial have similar numbers of favorites-per-view, which tracks with them having very similar ratings. But #4 has way fewer favorites-per-view despite also a fairly similar rating, and #3 is in between despite having a notably lower rating than #4.

#2 was at 13 favorites before #1 was published and got 9 after. The others got one favorite each after #1 was published. Between #2 and #1 they got no favorites but that's when #4 got its comment.

My guess would be that that's because #4 is F/m, so a lot of people bounce off without even reading. It says in the summary that it's F/m but maybe a lot of people don't notice that. Or maybe they're just looking for a different style of femdom or something.

But it has more votes-per-view than #3, so that doesn't seem like it can be the explanation. I don't have any other guesses. And I don't have a guess for why #2 has wayyy more votes-per-view than the others.

My guess for why it has lower views than #s 2 and 3 is saying F/m in the summary. And I guess #1 has low views because it's a part 2.

(I don't expect it would be hard to find these if you wanted and I'm not gonna be sad if you do, but I still don't feel like making it easy.)

[reasonableapproximation]

Chapter 4 (probably the finale) of the series is finally waiting for publication. This is what the stats look like several months after chapter 3 was published.

Along with with the general flow of time, it gave a boost of 4.1k views, 6 hearts and 25 votes to chapter 1; 2k views, 3 hearts and 14 votes to chapter 2; 0.8k views and 1 vote to one of the other stories and 1.1k views and 1 vote to the last.

[reasonableapproximation]

Cruella has a character named Artie. Wikipedia has it that he "was promised to be the first original character in a live-action Disney film to be openly gay".

But unless I really missed something, the text of the film doesn't give him any sexuality. He basically doesn't interact with anyone except Cruella (briefly with her henchmen) and doesn't talk about himself much. He doesn't kiss anyone, gaze longingly after or into the eyes of anyone, pull anyone into a closet and come out looking disheveled, talk about banging or wanting to bang guys...

I think the subtext based on how he dresses and speaks is supposed to be: "he's gay, he's not trying to hide it, this is supposed to be obvious to you and it would have been obvious to the other characters even if he doesn't explicitly tell them".

But I actually parsed him as "trans woman but in the 70s". Not sure exactly what caused that - maybe something like, today I don't particularly think of gay people as presenting different from straight people, I do think of trans people as presenting different from cis people, and in the 70s trans people would presumably have presented differently than they do today? Idk. And I don't actually know anything about how "people we'd understand today as gay" versus "people we'd understand today as trans women" presented in the 70s.

(Ally, who is themselves a trans woman except NB, parsed him as gay.)

Also, the actor says "I think it's important to say he is queer because obviously, lots of people were dressed like that at the time that weren't necessarily queer, but in my head, he always was." So acknowledging that it's valid to read him as straight.

So I'm not sure "openly gay" is quite accurate, but I'm not sure how I'd word it differently.

(Also who's "promising" that he's openly gay? Wikipedia has two citations, the one before which is "actor headcanon is he's gay" and this one which is "people who've seen it read him as gay".)

[reasonableapproximation]

The other thing I wanted to talk about with Cruella is how it's about (or at least built around) an art form that I don't really get and low-key think is fake, and it doesn't give me any reason to think otherwise.

Like people talk about fashion, but... from what I recall all they ever really have to say about it is final judgements? Like, this is good or bad or exiting or boring. Not even very nuanced judgements I think. (But it's been over a month, who knows.)

There's no "this is good because" or "this would be better if". When Artie and Cruella meet and he's seeing if she knows fashion, she passes his tests by recognizing specific outfits, "Celine Dior, autumn collection, 1955" sort of thing.

I don't actually know if high fashion is fake, but it feels like the script writer didn't know either.

Anyway I was reminded of this because I just saw Ratatouille for the first time, which is also built around an art form I don't really get and low-key think is fake. And it's not like the complete opposite of Cruella, but. At least the film (and the characters) know that food contains ingredients! And that it's supposed to have tastes and smells, and that these can combine. It has sound and visuals to try to represent the experience of tasting things.

It never has characters disagree though. There's "this is the recipe / but this is what's good", but that's not what I mean. There's never "we should add X to do Y / no, that would also do Z" or "/ no, the thing we're going for here wants less Y".

But it still feels like there's a lot more substance to Ratatouille's idea of gourmet food than to Cruella's idea of high fashion.

(The art forms are specifically high fashion and gourmet food. I mostly don't think middle class fashion and food are fake. Mostly.)

[reasonableapproximation]

The Devil Wears Prada is pretty close to Cruella here. The only exception I remember is one scene where people try to find things to pair with a dress. There's nothing about why a particular pairing might or might not work, but at least it knows that "if this doesn't work by itself, it might work combined with something".

It didn't feel like a deficiency of the film as much though. Partly because the film does have opinions about how the fashion industry works, and those kind of suggest that yes, high fashion is a fake artform. (If the only thing that matters is one person's opinion... it could be that there's something real here that's getting suppressed by a cult of personality, but it could also be that there's nothing real.)

There's also a speech about fashion as fashion that has its own section on wikipedia: «you think you're above this? That shade of blue you're wearing, I can trace its lineage from a particular show years ago to recently appearing in high street shops, we gave you that color and you don't even know it».

Other things about the movie:

It has a weirdly high number of people who I think look like other people. Anne Hathaway looks like Zooey Deschanel. The friend-who's-into-fashion looks like a young Stephen Fry. The journalist love interest looks like Elon Musk.

There's a "in pursuing your dreams you sacrificed the thing you cared about" thing going on. That doesn't feel like a particularly gendered trope to me, but when I try to think of other examples, all I can come up with are Molly in Molly's Game and Glinda in Wicked.

Emily Blunt's appearance in The Muppets (2011) is a lot funnier for having seen this movie.

[reasonableapproximation]

Gilmore Girls isn't about food, so probably this isn't fair. But to the extent that Sookie makes it about food, Gilmore girls is closer to Cruella than Ratatouille.

(I think there's a scene at one point where she's sad that someone didn't like her food and then later she's like, «oh! They had this wine with this meal and that was a terrible pairing!» But mostly she just seems to have Strong Opinions)

[reasonableapproximation]

Weird things about the Eras concert on Disney Plus, that I remember so far:

«Would I be more successful if I was a man?» Idk when you wrote this song Taylor, but I do not think this is a plausible hypothesis right now

«Does anyone know the lyrics to this song? Prove it!» Subtext: Prove how much you love me.

«In my head I'm not a lonely millenial woman covered in cat hair watching 700 hours of TV a day.» Yes Taylor I'm sure you want us to think you are very relatable, but uh

[reasonableapproximation]

IME airlines advise arriving two hours early for a short haul flight or three hours early for long haul.

Why? There's no part of the airport experience that's obviously slowed down by the length of your upcoming flight. You go through the same security lane to the same set of shops, and then maybe long haul flights could be at more distant gates but that's not an hour's difference.

I guess some airports might have different terminals for long haul versus short haul? But not many, that's not going to be the explanation. You might be more likely to check a bag for long haul but I doubt it's that.

My guess would be, the cost of missing long haul is higher (less frequent alternate flights) so it's worth spending more time in the airport to avoid.

[reasonableapproximation]

Something I noticed: Boston legal has the common tv intro format where you get clips of the main cast with their actor's names. But in season 5, the thing it does that I don't remember seeing before is, a handful of sounds from the clips get heard over the music. Carl saying "boom", Jerry popping, foot stamp, gunshot.

[reasonableapproximation]

Gilmore Girls has the same format, the variant where minor characters who don't show in the episode don't get billed. (In S2, at minimum Lane, Paris, Jess and Dean are optional.) But I'm pretty confident the theme song is the same length every time, and the total number of minor characters isn't fixed. So are there non-minor-character clips that only show up sometimes? Do some clips get lengthened or shortened to fill the time? Is the fade between clips of varying length?

Maybe this sort of thing is why minor characters tend to get billed even if they don't show up.

[reasonableapproximation]

Something I noticed: Boston legal has the common tv intro format where you get clips of the main cast with their actor's names. But in season 5, the thing it does that I don't remember seeing before is, a handful of sounds from the clips get heard over the music. Carl saying "boom", Jerry popping, foot stamp, gunshot.

[reasonableapproximation]

I've heard people say that a petard (as in "to be hoisted on one's own") is a type of jacket and a type of gallows, and I think one of those is true but I've looked it up multiple times and can never remember which it is.

But interestingly, they suggest slightly different interpretations of the phrase. If I'm hung up on the gallows I built (presumably for hanging other people up on), that's ironic, I'm the architect of my own demise. If I'm hung on a coathook by a jacket that I just happened to buy, that was never intended for hanging people on coathooks with, that's just kind of unfortunate.

[jadagul]

As a couple other people said, it's a siege bomb; and more importantly, it's a siege bomb named after a fart.

[reasonableapproximation]

Oh oops

Guess I remembered even less well than I thought

[reasonableapproximation]

I've heard people say that a petard (as in "to be hoisted on one's own") is a type of jacket and a type of gallows, and I think one of those is true but I've looked it up multiple times and can never remember which it is.

But interestingly, they suggest slightly different interpretations of the phrase. If I'm hung up on the gallows I built (presumably for hanging other people up on), that's ironic, I'm the architect of my own demise. If I'm hung on a coathook by a jacket that I just happened to buy, that was never intended for hanging people on coathooks with, that's just kind of unfortunate.

[reasonableapproximation]

Graphical emoji with no good text counterpart that I know of: 😅🥰🔥

Vice versa: ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ :p

Can be either: :)😊 :/😕

[reasonableapproximation]

A thing I gather is that having military control of an island or a piece of coast also gives you some control over the nearby sea. Seems intuitive, but also, I don't actually know what the mechanism behind this is? Or how far the control extends.

You can build a tall tower (or use existing cliffs) and see where enemy ships are, seems useful but insufficient for control.

In the age of gunpowder you can use land-based cannons, but that has fairly limited range and I think this predates gunpowder? Prior to that there's bows and arrows but idk how much use that would be.

If it's a river or a sufficiently narrow strait you can run chains or something across but I don't get the impression that's a requirement.

You can launch your own ships in reaction to enemy ships coming near? And then maybe you have an advantage because your sailors will be fresh and you don't need lots of provisions weighing you down?