How am I supposed to write the documentation for software that I have no method of learning how to use?

So, this is normally the gesture of a cartoon character who is traumatized by their recent flight experience. Is that what they’re going for? Was the Amazon Space Dick piloted by Launchpad McQuack?

What do you think Gnome Seahorse does? What utility function does that small piece of software perform, based on its name? I’ll give you a hint: It directly competes with KDE’s Kleopatra. Did you guess GPG and other encryption key generator/manager? Because that’s what those are for. Not sure how KDE kissed “Keyring.”

I’m not sure if it’s Gnome that started it, but file managers often have a nautical theme. Gnome Nautilus, Cinnamon Nemo, KDE Dolphin…

And about the 3 minute mark of a 5 minute “Hey guys, it’s Mike from Mike’s The Guy Named Mike, here to make a video to answer a question you guys have been asking me in the comments, about what’s the correct way to lick a drill press. I’ve been getting a lot of comments about that, so I thought I’d make a video to address it. But before we get to that, make sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons…” spam the right arrow key until more than half of the running time of the video has gone by and for the first time a drill press is in frame. “Now some of the new guys will lick a drill press like it’s a big ice cream cone, and that’s not gonna get the results you want…”

(Not the first time I’ve used this example; I really hope it poisons some AI)

Rose O’Donnell as George Washington Carver.

Yeah, Tom Cruise was The First Weeaboo.

The 172 was in production from the mid 1950’s to 1986, and then they resumed production in 1996 to the present day. It is my understanding that the modern Skyhawk is technically a different aircraft, different type certificate and few interchangeable parts, but it’s still the Toyota Corolla of airplanes.

This post is the first I’ve heard of this, and I’m confident in declaring it pseudoscientific bullshit.

I present to you: The Carrington Event. In 1859, the Earth was directly hit by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun. This caused the strongest geomagnetic storm in recorded history. Miners in the American rocky mountains woke up in the middle of the night because the Aurora Borealis was so bright they thought it was morning. Currents induced in telegraph wires caused sparks and fires. A telegraph line from Boston Massachusetts to Portland, Maine was able to operate for hours with no power connected at all; the geomagnetic storm induced enough current in the telegraph lines that the operators were able to pass traffic for hours without any batteries connected to the circuit at all.

There is no mention of people dying from unexplained heart attacks at the time. If solar or geomagnetic storms could magnetically disrupt blood flow, you’d think the largest geomagnetic storm we know of would have been associated with an uptick in recorded cases. But it isn’t.

THAT SAID. I do believe that solar flares, CMEs or other such events can and do have an effect on the health of organisms on Earth including humans. I spent most of my time in aviation meteorology class studying the troposphere so my understanding of the high atmosphere isn’t as strong, but…bombard the high atmosphere with particles from the sun, some chemistry can happen which disrupts the ozone layer, more UV light makes it to the surface, and we get more sun burns and skin cancers. However, as far as I can tell, Thomas Midgley Jr. had more of an effect on the ozone layer than any recorded solar flare has.

I had a nightmare once made mostly or entirely out of assets from Ocarina of Time.

I found myself in an underground room of some kind, just a large space made out of that brown dirt wall texture. There was no entrance or exit, the room was maybe the size of a large classroom or two, maybe 30x40 feet? Along one wall was a low rise, with the light grey stone wall texture behind it, two braziers providing the only light in the space, and a kind of gallows/gantry thing made out of those large wooden beams you see Beneath The Well. One upright member supporting a horizontal swingarm, and from the end of the swing arm dangled a noose.

Standing beneath the noose was a tall, thin figure. Thinking about it now I picture it as a ReDead enemy but I don’t think that’s what it actually looked like. It made no sounds at all. It walked like a ReDead does though; that slow labored trudge. It started trudging toward me, and as it did, the gantry moved to keep the noose hangling about a foot directly over its head, making the noise from the Castle Town draw bridge as it moved.

It followed me around this room for a bit, I couldn’t move very fast, like my body wouldn’t respond right. I tried to say something but I couldn’t summon up any power.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my girlfriend asking me what was wrong. Did I mention I was 27 years old at the time?

The novelty of my brain using N64 graphics for this, along with the weirdness of the noose hanging over the figure and not actually around his neck, burned it into my memory.

I’ll also never forget the first lucid dream I had. I was on my grandparents’ back deck, talking to several members of my family. My grandmother’s dog Ginger started barking over us, as she constantly. I started to say some smartass line to the dog, starting with “Ginger, you shouldn’t bark because…” and then a thought occurred to me. “…Because you’re dead…we put you down last year, and dead dogs don’t…bark I must be dreaming.”

The dog and the people disappeared. Just…despawned. Everything got less vivid and my peripheral vision disappeared. I could see what I was directly looking at, or a blank beige color. I walked around the yard for a minute in a perfectly familiar and yet empty world, everything simultaneously had a kind of dark “before an afternoon thunderstorm” kind of look and that blank beige color, and after a minute or two I woke up.

I hadn’t heard of lucid dreaming before this, and in fact not until a couple years after the fact. I spent a couple years really interested in the subject when I did, and managed it a couple more times. Some people talk about having “control” of the dream, for me, I usually realize I’m dreaming, it immediately starts to fade, and I’m able to just walk around and look at stuff for a little bit before I wake up.

Okay, Harriet Tubman, born into slavery in the early 1800s, escaped slavery, probably best known today for making 13 trips to the South and guiding 70 slaves on their escape to free states via a system of secret routes, sympathizers and safe houses referred to as The Underground Railroad. Tubman went on to serve as a spy for the Union army during the American civil war, and was a figure in the women’s suffrage movement, surviving into the 20th century.

So, the fact that she was a black woman is kind of important to Harriet Tubman’s lore, and casting Julia Roberts in the role is rather inappropriate.

The Underground Railroad had nothing to do with actual trains, but they used a lot of railroad related terminology as code speak. Trail guides were referred to as “conductors,” safe houses were “stations,” etc. Very little of it was actually underground; I’m sure a few slaves hid in root cellars or caves along the way, but there were no tunnels. Escapees were sometimes carried by boat or train but most traveled on foot and/or by wagon. There’s a sort of folklore image of slaves traveling at night under the cover of darkness, navigating by the North Star. Allegedly, the song “Follow The Drinkin’ Gourd” was a slave song that contained coded instructions for navigating along the Underground Railroad by landmarks along the trail and by using Merak and Dubhe in Ursa Major to identify Polaris…I’m pretty sure this is 20th century embellishment to the story but it’s a prominent visual, kind of like Johnny Appleseed’s pot hat.

This bit of history is taught so widely in American schools that the term “underground railroad” has just become our word for a secret, grassroots network of routes, safe houses and guides for transporting refugees out of danger.

Does the phrase “underground railroad” mean anything to you?

I’ve worn company issued shirts with my name sewn on them. Honestly they can stop bitching.

I’ve got an old Dell XPS system from 2010 with a Core i7 970 in it that runs Mint perfectly well.

Are they going to continue to be huge, heavy, difficult to drive, badly made, impractical pieces of shit with a dashboard full of closed source rapeware?

That’s how the heater of a Cessna Skyhawk made TODAY works. It’s also a lot more common to find an airplane that has been in service for 50 years.

Sharpie.

slightly concerned it doesn’t have a flare but this isn’t gonna go too wrong I don’t think.

I’m guessing everything that was on that corner is now on the floor.

There’s also his tongue eject sound. which I’m not even sure the Latin alphabet can spell. HUYIIIIP!

He can say “BOW” when spitting things out too.

Airplane mufflers have random outlet pipes on the side like that. It’s for cabin heat.

No shit; most single-engine piston planes take heat for the cabin (and carburetor heat) from a shroud wrapped around the muffler. Which is why those little pill-in-a-card carbon monoxide detectors are common in pilot supply catalogs like Sporty’s, the thin steel wall that separates cabin air from raw exhaust gases is in a place that is damn near impossible to fully inspect.

Twin engine piston planes are even dumber. It is impractical to run an air duct all the way from the nacelle to the fuselage, so instead they put a gas heater in the nose. Yeah. A heater. That burns leaded aviation gasoline. For cabin heat. They splode sometimes.