The fella on the right seems to have a bright future with the Minoans.
Jul 062022
Jul 062022
Not lovin’ it! Fed-up Russians are served MOLDY burgers in their replacement McDonald’s restaurants after the chain left the country due to the invasion of Ukraine
Whoops.
The photos there are *not* appetizing. Of course it’s impossible to say that they are legit. All the photos there are closeups of moldy buns and insect legs in burgers and fries… none at least in that article show the food actually in context of being within the former McDonalds restaurants. The bug legs could be added in for effect; the burgers might be old. But it could all be honest reporting, too.
You wouldn’t think it would be *that* hard to maintain standards when you have the same facilities, presumably the same supply chain and presumably much the same staff. But I guess here we are.
Jul 052022
Heh.
Jul 052022
Brandon Herrera walks us through the history and workings of Hiram Maxim’s machine gun… designed waaaaay back in 1884. The period from 1850 to 1950 has got to be the most amazing time in terms of technological advancement actually and obviously changing things, and military tech was a large part of it. Interestingly, what the Maxim did is pretty much exactly what modern machine guns do; the lead it sent downrange would be largely indistinguishable from what a modern gun would send. The difference, of course, is that a modern gun would be *far* simpler and much lighter, thus more practical. Compare to the difference between a musket from 1850 and an M-14 from 1950: there is no comparing what they did.
Which points out the genius of Moses Browning, and why we need a Federal holiday – nay, an entire *month* – to properly celebrate him and his 1911.
Jul 052022
Courtesy Reddit:
My mom held a graduation party today and no one came.
Could easily be a hoax-post… perhaps the party was scheduled at 6PM, and this photo was taken at 5. Or it could be legit. In any event, for a lot of people, this sort of thing strikes a nerve:
The whole thread is *full* of this sort of thing…
My mom always said I couldn’t have bday parties because my bday is during winter break. I never questioned it. Then I realized that I had no friends and was bullied. My mom wasn’t going to humiliate me like that and wasn’t going to spend money on bullies. I had 30 kids in my class k-12, so bullying was very…targeted and specific.
…
When my youngest had her 7th birthday we invited her class to a party at the children’s museum. Lots of interactive things to do there…the place was like an indoor physics playground.
Nobody came. We were heartbroken. Sure, she would still have fun. But it was sad.
A couple visiting from England spotted what was happening. Their girl spent the whole time with ours, and they even bought her a birthday present from the gift shop.
I still think about that act of kindness.
…
I’m near retirement age and never had a birthday party in my entire life. Family was dirt poor when I was a kid, as an adult it’s a day that’s just impossible for people to attend. Always wondered what it was like for y’all.
…
It happens to adults too. I invited a bunch of “friends” and coworkers to a bar for my birthday. I sat there drinking alone for two hours before I walked home crying. Didn’t even get a happy birthday last year from anyone except my mom and aunt.
…
We took COVID seriously and during the summer of 2020 our daughter turned 4. We didn’t have a party, but we invited all of our family to a zoom meeting to sing her happy birthday.
Not a single member of my family joined the call. I tried my best to keep my composure but I ended up crying in the bathroom after we cleaned up. They’re always on their phones and tablets anyway. There was no reason they couldn’t pop in for thirty seconds on a Saturday to sing happy birthday. I’m tearing up just thinking about it.
…
Jul 052022
Tomy has announced two new things about their 1/350 scale die cast Enterprise:
1) The 5,000 backers needed has been reduced to 2,500 (they currently have 1061)
2) The deadline has been pushed back to July 24.
These should make it more likely that the effort will succeed, and for a few reasons. Chopping the number of needed backers in half not only makes it easier to achieve, it also makes the thing more desirable to collectors: instead of there being 5,000 of them in the world, now there will be 2,500. The secondary market in years to come will probably make the price balloon substantially. Additionally, Comic Con International in San Diego is July 22-24, and I imagine Tomy will be there. I suspect that if they have their prototype on display for the thousands of nerds with fat stacks of disposable income, they should rack up a good number of new backers. I can’t immediately dream up another reason to end the campaign on the 24th.
I still remain a little annoyed that Haslabs $300 “Hiss tank” has nearly 13,500 backers with more than a month to go. Hmmmph. At least the Haslab “Reva” (the disliked character from the Obi Wan Kennobi series) light saber looks likely to fall far short of funding. It’s $500 with 1300 of 5000 backers with six days to go. I don’t *know* why that one is failing; maybe there’s a cutoff just north of $300 that people are willing to spend these days. Or perhaps Reva is just not intriguing of a character. Or perhaps the Star Wars fans with cash are no longer in the mood to keep funding a franchise that keeps insulting them.
Jul 052022
… screw up *big.*
An entire fireworks display went off all at once. Whoops indeed.
Jul 052022
So July 4 gave the media a new obsession… a mass shooting in Highland Park Illinois, just north of Chicago. Somewhat unusually, the shooter has been caught alive and uninjured, so this time they’ll at least be able to ask him why he did it. But I get the feeling that the answer will be something along the lines of God told him to do it by speaking through the neighbors dog. He’s got “crazy” written all over his face.
Inside the Sick Posts of July 4 Massacre ‘Person of Interest’
As yet there doesn’t seem to be a lot political there, just a bunch of random gibberish. He photographed himself wearing a Trump flag as a cape; he liked Biden posts. But the random gibberish comes off as someone whom the FBI and/or local cops should have been aware of. I suspect we’ll soon hear – quietly – that he was on the police radar, and that he was on psychiatric meds of some kind.
Interesting that just when the hoplophobes need to drum up fear of guns, the whackjobs come out of the woodwork to oblige.
Jul 042022
I have no idea who this weirdo is. There are far, FAR too many of them in the world, with their rampaging narcissism and LookitMeAintISpecial makeup, to even begin to catalog them. That said, what she says in the first few seconds of this clip is *fascinating:*
'I want to exist as a bisexual person… the most hurtful response I get when I speak about my sexuality is "I don't care".'
On the 50th anniversary of the UK's first Pride, Natasha Devon explains how her sexuality is part of her identity.@_NatashaDevon pic.twitter.com/nXLGBoQdnZ
— LBC (@LBC) July 2, 2022
the most hurtful response I get when I speak about my sexuality is “I don’t care”.’
Get used to it. Because most people *don’t* care. Not just about your sexuality, but about your religion, your politics, your mental diseases, your tragic backstory… about YOU. And you trying to make every damn thing about you makes people care all the less.
I’ve said it before: there is a flaw in the human operating system that makes seeing oneself as a victim, as the oppressed, as the loser in the great game of life as a *desirable* thing. These are the people who get outraged at, say, British people proudly hang up the Union Jack and want to maintain Britishness in Britain; Americans who do not feel automatic and utter shame about America because our history was not ethical purity from the get-go; any man who is not ashamed to be a man, any woman who wants to be a feminine woman. These people *live* on feeling hated, whether they actually are or not. And a few decades ago… sure, they would have been. But when I was a kid in the 80’s that time was largely already past (with, of course, loudmouthed exceptions). My generation was raised on “everybody is ok, don’t be a dick about it.” You could not turn on an “after school special” or a “very special episode” without getting hammered with The Message.
So… they look out into the world and *don’t* see the hate surrounding them that it seems they feel the need for. So they do one or both of two things:
1) They just dream up that hate anyway, and attribute it to anything that isn’t 100% affirming and validating
2) They ramp up their own weirdness until they start pushing buttons, get pushback, and then bask in the warm glow of their oppression. See: Antifa, BLM, Drag Queen Story Time, “Pride” parades featuring things that would get an NC-17 rating, celebrating grooming.
To this kind of person, the worst thing they can hear is “I don’t hate you. I just don’t care about you. You don’t factor into my thoughts at all.”
Jul 042022
As it turns out, Speedbump will willingly live down to the basest of cat cliches… he’ll sit in even a two-dimensional box.
