Southloop [he/him]

Teashader sunglasses and an amphetamine-fueled grin? Nothing more 90s than trying to be Natural Born Killers for marketing

The astral plane tribal chieftain bowling alley SonicWorld lore dump is peak post-Zooniverse/Mardi Gras parade. Almost as fun as “Eels” IMHO.

And Mighty Boosh.

So, is this a “Last Starfighter” kinda deal or what’s up?

I honestly thought I kept getting Tomb Raider confused with the character and events of Fear Effect. Now you’ve got me even more turned around.

That’s the spirit! Be ambitious! Everybody’s always going on with “Train set! Train set!” Fuck that! I want a functioning miniature spaceport! Mixed civil and military use at that!

Only if you’re one of those guys on YouTube with the channels that are downhill Hot Wheel racing series involving crafted storylines and intricately built miniature villages.

This is nothing new to me. I’ve been calling my brain dead asshole “good normal folk”conservative in-laws weird for decades.

Think your kids shouldn’t hear about sex until 18, provide no protection whatsoever and then go into deep grief when they get pregnant in their teens? Weird.

Think the Bible is in English because Jesus walked (yes, on water) to England and had it translated? Weird.

Think we failed in Iraq because we weren’t doctrinally stringent enough with our application of violence, right down to every child and bird (yes, that specific)? Weird.

Have your whole family vaccinated ASAP for COVID, but you think people with ADHD are likely influenced by demons as an explanation for their behavior, despite holding a master’s in nursing? Then change your mind on the vaccines when your kids wind up having ADHD and scramble into months-long fugue state inducing mental breakdown to try and save your babies? Weird.

Insist on buying guns for your kid who has about the most egregiously spastic cerebral palsy imaginable, all so he can defend his home, it’s okay, he watches his brother play the Fortnite! He know how they work!” Home BTW is a squalid dump no one in their right mind would chance breaking into because he’s neglected and won’t use help? Then when his older brother joins the Marines (imagine the stupidest reason why you’d join and you got it) you engineer the purchase of a class III firearm and silencer for a Christmas present to take with him to basic training—not allowed—despite your trailer home falling down around your ears and you complaining about money constantly as your kids have to skip meals? WEIRD!

Sorry for the dump. Had to get some stuff off the chest.

This. I can fumble around with physical switches while inverted in a negative 4g dive and still change the station off of Chappell Roan. You can’t do that with capacitive touch, especially the ones that get hot and all the heuristics get goofy.

I hate to be a party pooper contrarian, but you can do this tour if you’re ever in Chicago. I heartily recommend it and the architecture riverboat tour!

http://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/tours

Psh! Chicken!

I believe Ikki is the original “kuso-ge,” so be forewarned.

The water at the time was around 40 Fahrenheit/9 Celsius. That gives you, if you survive the fall — which includes not inhaling water with the human gasp response when you hit the cold water or breaking you pelvis/legs/back on the at-that-height now concrete-consistency water (~20 feet/7 meters or above) — a rough seven minutes to get to shore and wrapped up nice, tight, and warm to prevent hypothermia.

They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.

The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.

To clarify, this is the AFQT which is a seperate subtest from the ASVAB and specifically for USAF service that you actually have to put a modicum of effort into, but for the good jobs — and by good I mean interesting, stimulating and potentially lucrative as a civvie — no. 30 won’t get you into special operations, specialized maintenance/aircrew, or the good “chair force” jobs like combat engineering, space, medical, scientific support, cyber, weather…etc. It’s also probably going to ding you for officer or hinder the climb to higher NCO, which is similarly equivalent to warrant officer in other services.

No, it’s going to be stuff like “light vehicle driver,” or “airport maintenance” where you ride around in the bed of a pickup and shoot a shotgun in the air to scare off birds. It used to not even qualify you to be a cop it’s so low.

Same in the US military. To fly anything is pretty stringently rigorous and high competition.

“Easiest” flight pipeline is probably the Army’s “High School-To-Flight School” which takes exceptional high schoolers and places them as warrant officer helicopter pilots. But in ten years of existence it’s only produced maybe 80 pilots.

Conversely, for Navy Aviation (say, fast jets for example) you have to graduate in the top 50% of your class from a top 200 university, preferably with a BS, within a certain seated height and uncorrected vision acuity, pass the officer qualification test, the aviator qualification test, officer school with a high proficiency, two years of flight school finishing in the top 20%, select fast fixed-wing jets, hopefully find an open seat, then qualify on catapult and cable retrieval. All for a total of about 1800 seats. After that it’s trying to qualify and be elected to Top Gun and hope it doesn’t ruin your career.

StarTAC! Then I had a Nokia 5100 when I went to college with a blue airbrushed lighting faceplate so it looked like the cover of Ride the Lightning. I might have made three total calls between the two of them and never texted, only partly because it was 10 cents a text.

I’m actually just a bit younger than you. We had it because my dad worked at Bell Labs and Scientific Atlanta way back when, so we could get the hook ups and build out whatever computing or network machinery we needed at the time. It was like sci-fi legos learning it as I grew up. It was great!

Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.