This hydraulic fire gets out of hand faster than you can say “Uh-oh, I’m on fire.”
Catastrophic failure at an aluminum extrusion line. Looks like an overpressure event and the oil itself (over a drop ceiling no less) open a portal to a demon dimension… pic.twitter.com/VQeM0f85Mw
Photos of the aftermath. Remarkably good, all things considered. The investigation currently involved local police, so it will likely be some time before we hear more about the root cause. pic.twitter.com/cwq0hfYvQH
Not being British myself I can’t comment on how accurate this “British Person Simulator” is, but the YouTube commentariat seem pretty uniform in their praise:
“Brittain is my favourite survival horror indie in the past decade, the attention to detail and various references to George Orwell’s works really tie it together.The only thing I would work on is the broken character face rendering which protrudes the teeth way too far out of the face.”
I imagine the “Canadian” and “Australian” simulators are similar horror indies.
A Napierville (near Chicago) police officer has pulled over a car for running a stop sign and is talking with the driver when *another* car pulls up and the driver of that car launches himself towards the cop, wielding a hatchet. The cop puts him down *real* fast.
Bet that civilian driver had one *hell* of a story for his friends and family later that day. I kinda hope he got let off with a warning; the interaction between the driver and the cop was seeming to be cordial and respectful. He blew a stop sign, which ain’t good… but I think watching a maniac get put down might be considered adequate.
One thing I’ll never understand is on display here. The Bad Guy gets shot multiple times in the torso/abdomen. He is *down.* It’s unclear whether he’s conscious; it’s quite clear that he is very, very incapacitated. And yet the cops that gather around keep shouting commands at him to roll over onto his stomach. Dude… he ain’t doin’ nothin’ nohow. He’s *done.*
So last night the neighborhood resounded to the sound of random explosions. I was confused until I remembered that today is the new Federal High Holy Day “Juneteenth.” Yay, strike up the marching bands, fire up the amateur and unwise fireworks. So, how enchanting of a day is this going to be going forth? Here are some hints from Our Betters in the media:
How thrilling: a “holiday” that comes with racialized lecturing. I don’t recall such things for, say, Saint Patricks Day or Bastille Day or Pearl Harbor Day or 9/11 or Leif Erikson Day. And where are the lectures on how to celebrate Yuri’s Night? Where, indeed, are the jeremiads on how to celebrate Apollo 11, or the Wright Brothers, or D-Day or VE Day or VJ Day or The Day The Berlin Wall Came Down or The Day The USSR Went The Frak Away or Trinity Test Day or Edison Lights A Bulb Day or Moses Browning Day Goddard Launches A Liquid Rocket Day? To be honest, though, some other holidays *do* come with lectures… Cinco De Mayo (Drink Like A Fish Day) and Dia Die Los Muertos (Mexican Halloween) tend to come with finger-wagging harangues about how we’re not supposed to view them as lightly as St. Patty’s Drink Like A Fish Day or Actual Halloween. And of course Columbus Day tends to comes with screeds about how it *shouldn’t* be celebrated and the fact that history lined up in such a way that *you* exist should be seen as a monumental tragedy.
So, yeah, this one will be a hoot, at least until it is “celebrated” like all other basically meaningless artificial holidays:
I had this image in my head of what London, England, looked like. Tea and crumpets, eh wot, and all that. Terribly civilized people, high culture, a bunch of, well, English people. Behold:
There is a bit of a thrill in the last moments of any auction. I suppose it’s like gambling or sportsball-watching, neither of which I’m into, but I guess there is a similar result. Anyway, this afternoon saw the end of an Ebay listing for a lot of McDonnell manned lifting body + ASSET documentation & blueprints; this is exactly the sort of thing the APR Patreon/Subscription was created for. Having seen such auctions go for *stupid* sums in the past, I expected the same here, so I had a group of people together to crowdfund it. I was prepared, with crowdfund backing, to bid a *stupid* amount for it. And in fact I did bid a *stupid* amount (well above what I’d gathered via crowdfunding) in the last few seconds. Fortunately, the final cost was not so tragically high, so the funders only got charged a smidgeon and my tragically over-stretched credit card didn’t get demolished.
Still, those last few moments were troublesome. Because as it turns out, my cardiopulmonary system ain’t over the Pinko Pox yet, and my system *really* didn’t like that at all. That aspect of the exercise sucked.
Bringing fists to a gunfight? Stupid. Squaring off against a guy with a gun and telling him to shoot you? Double-plus stupid.
The first video may be “potentially sensitive,” but it’s worth watching, especially if you want to see how *not* to behave.
background for the video, the guy with the gun is outside his house and had put a restraining order on a neighbor and so at 5am he waits for him wanting to "scrap" as he pulled his shirt off he had a knife in his pocket following with the "imma take that gun from you". justified pic.twitter.com/M8C1NDE0S4
A YouTube video of the same incident, same videos. Explains that this was adjudicated a legal self defense shoot, as well it should be. If you’ve drawn a firearm on someone and they advance on you… that alone is evidence that they not only mean you harm, they’re out of their fricken’ minds.
Amphibian Aerospace Industries, an Australian company, says they are going to start manufacturing new Grumman “Albatross” flying boat amphibians. The Albatross was last manufactured in 1961, so it has been a little bit of a while, but the Albatross was a good, rugged design and sixty years have not seen many fundamental changes in amphibian design or technology. The G-111T will have turboprops rather than the original radial piston engines, and modernized avionics and such… but it’ll be made out of good ol’ aluminum rather than modern composites.
I fully support this. Unless you’re flying extremely high, close to the speed of sound or trying for VTOL performance… civilian aircraft from the 1940’s and 1950’s remain perfectly valid design choices. Subsystems such as engines have certainly improved, but the overall designs have not improved by leaps and bounds. It’s not like the C-130 isn’t still in production…
Does AAI have the staff, funds, infrastructure to manufacture this sizable aircraft in a production line capacity? I have no idea. Won’t surprise me if they fall on their faces and nothing comes of it. But if they pull it off, I would kinda demand that the US Coast Guard, US Navy, USMC and SpaceX buy a bunch of ’em. Load them to the gills with anti-landing craft missiles and sell them in vast numbers to the Japanese, Taiwanese, Philippines, South Koreans. A new UK government could make considerable use of craft like this to take out the ongoing invasion flotilla. If need be, land next to the boats and rafts, scoop ’em up, fly ’em to Utah Beach.
Two weeks ago yesterday I started displaying symptoms of covid, a coughing fit came on *very* suddenly Friday afternoon and lasted all through the night. Temperature stayed normal until sometime early Saturday, at which point it went up about five degrees F from my baseline and the day became *really* awful. Sunday was bad, but not quite as horrifying. Monday saw a test and confirmation that the ChiComs had got to me with their little pandemic. Since then it has been a general even improvement; temperature fluctuations disappeared within 4-5 days. Coughing has remained, though it’s at the “kinda annoying” level now.
I have, however, noticed some things that continue to hang on: physical exertion results in almost complete systems collapse, and my brain remains a little fuzzy. I can do CAD drafting no sweat; I can bitch and moan online just fine. But fiction writing – which I’d typically engage in to the tune of about a page or three a day – has dropped to an average of two sentences a day at best. And non-fiction writing remains challenging: I start writing, then need to refer to source documents… and I just can’t maintain focus. And there remains a general indefinable *weird* feeling, akin to fatigue but… a little different.
So, nothing at all like the disease I was promised, what with ventilators and hospitalization and death in a forgotten corridor. But it’s dragging on well past the point when it has lost its novelty.
