Captain Aggravated

Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

The crossfit down my local stroad* does that. On the one hand, I find it kind of funny that they’re paying a gym membership to run up and down the sidewalk next to a five lane highway, on the other I think it’s an advertisement tactic; used to be you’d see the whole “congregation” but now it seems they only make the women who forgot to wear sports bras to class go run on the sidewalk.

I haven’t flown in ten years, so…yeah.

Are geriatric names coming back? Are we going to have a generation of Gladyses and Eustices?

Being able to engineer is by itself something that can even exist in genetic memory, instinctual.

I don’t think this is the case. There are creatures that instinctively construct, like ants and beavers, but their constructions are more an emergent behavior from simpler rules or systems. Their behaviors have evolved, the ants that dig slightly more efficient nests were more successful and went on to reproduce more offspring colonies.

At the root of engineering is the sentence “If I do this, then I bet I can get this to happen.” That behavior is unique to humans. It takes a lot of forebrain to do, and to develop that forebrain took a very successful omnivorous, multi-strategy primate.

Speed runs of the video game Super Mario World for the SNES are divided into a lot of categories, some allow glitches, some don’t. Glitchless runs are just about playing the game as intended as efficiently as you can. The absolute fastest run though, Any%, involves a trick where you perform a glitch that allows you to write arbitrary values into RAM, effectively reprogramming the game on the fly to trigger the end cut scene. This is called Arbitrary Code Injection. Now you’re playing a different game by a different, more abstract set of rules called 6502 assembly.

Upright bipedal gait with knees that lock, dexterous hands with opposable thumbs on highly articulated arms not significantly used for locomotion, binocular, tri-color vision granting great depth perception, the ability to sweat to stay cool for long periods of time under moderate exertion? All of that is just gettin’ gud, playing the game of evolution exceedingly well. Sometime between tying a knapped flint to a stick to make an axe and digging the first irrigation trench we arrived at that level of Arbitrary Code Injection. We’re not playing the same game as the other animals anymore.

Engineering predates what we now call science by millennia.

guillotines are renaissance era.

I think the invention of engineering is what finally broke evolution, but there are a lot of factors we have that bootstrapped us to that point. Walking upright on two legs is more efficient at the price of raw power. Many creatures can outrun a human but no land animal can come close to our jogging range. A Cheetah can go 60 miles an hour for a minute or so but a human can go 10 miles per hour for 6 hours straight. It also frees our forelimbs, already made flexible, versatile and dexterous by our distant tree swinging ancestors, for tool use. Funnily enough, another ability that is unparalleled in nature is our ability to throw things with accuracy and power. You also need pretty good hands to master fire, and thus cooking, and thus unlocking extra nutrients from the food you catch, which provides for that very hungry brain of ours. A few millennia later and we’ve pretty much got control of the biosphere itself.

It already has.

Oh man “extensibility” in FreeCAD. The documentation is non-existent, is the main problem. It’s just about impossible to understand how anything works, it’s like trying to figure out how to run a battleship by turning cranks and seeing what they do.

Amazon certainly helped.

The stagnation of several anchor stores like Sears also helped. Sears was in serious decline well before Amazon became a major player in the market.

Also is this an AI making a dumb blonde joke?

Having a pool doesn’t make it easier to hang dong, just marginally more plausible.

Transcript of me examining this picture:

"Okay, face looks okay, jacket makes sense, let’s look at the hands. Looks like four fingers on her left hand there, the right hand, thumb’s a little screwy, is that a stick or is she part tarsier? Something’s kind of screwy there. Boots look about right, there’s even a pretty decent depth of field on the sho-THE FIRE IS IN THE TENT.

I’m a guy, I’m already damned to tit loans. I only get to borrow tits for awhile.

He has published his audio book about the airship R101 under a creative commons license, if you haven’t seen that yet I’d check it out.

I am okay with some billboards that advertise services that are relevant to motorists, such as fuel, food or lodging near the road.

Product placements in television shows where the ad becomes part of the fiction.

I officially stopped watching Eureka when there was an episode about Degree For Men. I similarly gave up on Bones when the characters started delivering Toyota ads to each other.

I’m okay with there being a stick of Degree For Men label out in Sheriff Carter’s bathroom, or if the cast of Bones drive Toyotas. But when they stop to talk about long lasting anti-wetness or zero percent APR financing I’m fucking done.

That’s exactly what I was referencing. They pissed off Sony by working with Phillips on the CD-i. Hilarious.

Man I haven’t heard the name RocketBoom in so long. Wonder what ever happened to MeMe Molly?