Lorindól

Lasr summer I asked ChatGPT about Liberty Caps - just to see how bad advice it would give me. It showed me pictures of Death Capsand Destroying Angels and claimed they were Liberty Caps.

After that I was certain that someone was going to die just like that poor guy.

I remember reading that ammonium chloride / “sal ammoniac” / salmiakki was probably first discovered by ancient egyptians. They found natural deposits of it condensed in a ceiling of a cave or something similar. And naturally someone just had to taste it.

Primer is excellent low-budget hard scifi. Few years ago I read Shane Carruth’s script for his scrapped project “A Topiary”. It is wild, no wonder he couldn’t get the funding for it.

Jupiter Ascending is a remarkable achievement.

I’m a bit of a film freak and I have seen quite a few. The only things I remember of Jupiter Ascending are that Mila Kunis and Sean Bean were starring in it and that bee DNA was somehow involved with the latter. I think there were also lots of chases?

No. I shall thank you now.

How can one learn such power?

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/good-omens-season-3-michael-sheen-teases-finale-newsupdate/

Yes and no. The third season plan was scrapped and reduced to one final episode to wrap the story up. We’ll see how it goes.

During my military service I constantly fought against idiotic traditions and doing things the stupid and inefficient way. I had read the regulations manual carefully to back me up and presented my cases respectfully with proper conduct.

I always started by quoting the relevant regulations, so they had to hear me out and could not officially punish me for my “disobedient queries”. This got many of the regular staff royally pissed off at me, some just found my resilience amusing and a few younger offiicers even showed occasional support for me. I knew very well that nothing big would change, but I actually did manage to get rid of a few small things that were just hassling disguised as training.

My service friends thought I was crazy for stirring things up in vain, but I took good care that I never got them in any trouble. The only “punishment” they could give me was that I was always given the assignments that were considered most unpleasant and I was regularly sent on long range recon excersizes with my men, so I would be out of sight for most of the time. I loved those long trips in the woods.

I also quit my first real and well paying job out of principle a week after we got a new manager. I had been there for 5 years and really liked the work, but after the new manager gave us a list of changes he wanted, it became clear to me that it was time to leave. It would have been entirely impossible to fulfill my duties properly with the allocated resources and time. I could have done the work badly, sure, but this would have led to the customer leaving us for other services. I did point this out to the new manager when I was cleaning my desk. “Just because you cannot do doesn’t mean that someone better couldn’t” was the only response. They promptly lost the customer and 3-4 others also quit the team in the same year.

With the help of an old friend I landed a new, little less paying job but with vastly better benefits. Been there since.

17, always.

I got the same thing. In the army I realized that I was the only one in my platoon who was able to read maps clearly at night without lights. And I never needed a flashlight to navigate the woods in the dark.

My night vision started to wane clearly in my early thirties, but being closer to 50 now I can still see a lot better at night than my friends whenever we go camping. Still, I bought my first headlamp a few months ago ;)

I care, a lot. But this wasn’t always the case.

Before I was 13, I didn’t care much about music at all. Sure, I liked some songs I heard on the radio but I didn’t own any albums in any format. I considered music to be a harmless but mostly pretty meaningless.

Then my 7th grade music teacher gave me a really low grade, on the sole basis that I couldn’t sing in tune or play an instrument. I got good grades on the written tests, but this apparently meant nothing to her.

So purely out of spite I decided to learn how to play an instrument and sing. Getting music classes wasn’t an option due to my parent’s economic situation at the time, so I used my savings and bought my friend’s old acoustic guitar. I found good intro books from the library and started practicing.

I listened to the radio and recorded a few acoustic guitar songs on tape, so I could practice playing and singing along with them. This must have been a terrible few years for my family, but slowly I started to get the hang of it.

During this time I discovered some bands I really liked and copied their albums from LP’s from the library. My dad brought me an old discarded boombox from his work, it was big but had an excellent sound. I also scrounged enough money to buy a secondhand Walkman, so I could carry the music with me.

In high school I formed a few bands with my friends, I played rhythm guitar or bass, depending on the genre. We weren’t good, but I loved it. In university I had a chance to minor in music, which opened up whole new worlds for me. I learned to sing properly and had piano lessons.

By this time music had become a big part of my identity. I almost always had something playing on the background, if I wasn’t listening actively.

Nowadays I don’t have as much time for music as I’d like, but I’ve got myself a really good vintage Hi-Fi setup. It’s amazing to discover small things in songs I never noticed before in songs I have listened for decades. My gear may not look like much, but it’s got what counts.

When I was younger, I couldn’t afford good gear but now that I have some musical education and have learned to listen", I can’t really enjoy the music if the sound system is crappy. If it’s in the background it’s fine, but I just can’t use bad headphones anymore.

I listen to music from a large variety of genres, but hiphop/rap is something I just can’t get into. I’ve tried several times to approach it with an open mind, but there’s something in that genre that just rubs me the wrong way.

I don’t care if the music is a jokey meme thing or considered a masterpiece of it’s genre, if it clicks with you it’s good. I love symphonies as much as I love old simple folk tunes.

You are correct. It’s scary how things like these used to be just dystopic fiction. Now it is a completely plausible scenario in the very near future.

TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.

Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.

Back in the day my not-so-tech-savvy colleague bought a Windows 8.1 laptop that had a touchscreen. After two days she brought it to me and asked me if I could “rip this hellspawn out of this computer”.

Before wiping it we checked if there was anything to backup and the ~30 minutes I spent using Win 8.1 were hideous. It was the only time I ever had to use it, of which I am very grateful.

If it’s wakeup alarm, it takes about 5-10 minutes for my higher cognitive functions to get back online. If someone tells me something during this time, I most likely wil not remember it at all. And it doesn’t matter if I have slept 20 minutes or 10 hours, I’ll still be as groggy.

If there’s a loud sound in the middle of the night, it’s almost instantaneous.

Yep.

In one of the books he is on Earth without his shipmates and pretty quickly regresses back to sociopathic behaviour.

But he recognizes this and does not welcome it. After killing a stranger just to get access to gear he needs, Amos realizes that he is making the wrong choices and states: “I need to get back to my crew.”

He has an understanding of what is good and what is bad. He cannot understand why there are limitations to by which means “good” can be achieved. But he knows these limits do exist and should be respected, therefore he needs Naomi and Holden to lead him.

I read the entire Bible when I was a kid.

Atheism was the only possible path for me after that.

Nowadays, definitely.

But a few decades ago in my backwater country this was reality. It happened to me twice on different regions and one of my friends who also had long hair told me it had also happened to him. I only got pocket change, but still enough to buy a can of beer ;)

At the time we deduced that there had to have been some broadcast TV show which had given them this bizarre idea, since widespread Internet access was years away at the time.

But as if this was not enough, the wierdest heckling I got was when I walking the dog with my girlfriend and a group of guys about our age passed us and called us “fucking gay”. My girlfriend was feminine, pretty and I was very far from both.

It was a very, very strange time.