I made my semi-annual trip to the theatre and saw Project Hail Mary, despite Weir making an ass of himself. It was very good, and much better emotionally than The Martian, but I think that earlier one nailed the “I’ma science the shit out of this” vibe a little closer to Weir’s writing.
It hasn’t been plugged in for the better part of a decade, back when we had a house with a floor lamp plug right by it, but it theoretically has a mini fridge, charging, and a Bluetooth speaker. In use, it has one very big drawer to go with two normal drawers.
Very similar, but it’s from some brand called Sobro, it’s a little smaller, and only 2/3 of it is a mini fridge.
It hasn’t been plugged in for over six years.
I know this design was for safety, with a shit ton of parachutes on the passenger cabin, but modularity generally fucks the economics of a plane design. You have to have a self-contained module, a plane that is flyable (and landable) without it, and you need a way to securely connect one to the other. Things get chunky real quick, and chunky is expensive, and modern passengers are basically "walking mozzarella sticks who think that $300 and a photo I.D. gives them the right to fly through the air like one of the guardian owls of legend. ([email protected]) For cargo planes, a lot of older designs would drop capacity by 20-30%.
Heelers love us very much, but they also believe they know best and our suggestions like “Don’t bite my face” or “Don’t get chest deep in mud” are the barely coherent babblings of beloved children with low intelligence.
The heeler will decide what is best. Mud is best.
He doesn’t generally lie with his tummy to the sky out there. He prefers to let the black fur soak it up like a solar panel. He has a “saddle” pattern like a german shepherd.
Houston the baked pit-tato says, DID WE JUST BECOME BEST FRIENDS!?
lack of commitment, rather than any law, was the key point.
This is the rub. Can he officially? No. But then, he can’t officially rename the Department of Defense either. What they can do is go in arrears on payments and refuse to cooperate with allies or acknowledge that a given incident involves treaty obligations, and be extremely open about all of it. The only thing the law does is give the next guy cover to walk things back because it was never formal, but by then 99% of the damage will have been done.
Just from a sheer nuts and bolts point of view, the foreign relations damage is going to take literally decades to undo, including at least 8 years of republican administrations that top out at George W Bush levels of fascist exceptionalism. No sane government would trust the US with long-term commitments otherwise.
I have a halfway decent woodworking setup, plus a 3D printer and a cheap laser, but metalworking is just not really an option. The space dedication, plus the oils and the fire hazards and the scraps/shavings/slivers/chaff/god-knows-what-else all being completely incompatible with sharing a space with the rest of it. Sigh, just not likely to happen until and unless I can get in with the makerspace mafia. I am thinking of trying to figure out designing for mills and using metal-bending workbenches in CAD, though, and sending more designs off to be fabbed.
Interesting to read a review that is very much not written by someone in the hobby. Cherry as “low profile” simply because it’s slightly shorter than OEM, and mistakenly thinking that has anything to do with key travel are interesting takes. Also complaining that VIA is meaningfully missing the (more blatantly obvious) way to do per game customization that some proprietary software has.
I am definitely on board with 45g linears being too light, though.
I call it replicator chicken. It looks perfect, striking you as having been cooked in pristine oil, is consistent and properly fried, but then when you taste it you get the world’s blandest recipe. It’s really like a well-meaning computer’s idea of chicken tenders.
The sauce is decent, and utterly necessary, but it’s really not worth it, even within the space of fast-casual chicken fingers. I prefer Layne’s or even Zaxby’s.
I mean, why else do we think this was the final straw?
Then there’s the timing of the announcement that Barron is ineligible to serve because he’s too tall or some shit
I had to look that up. Apparently the limit is 6’8", and they claim he’s 6’9". Now, the kid is clearly a tall motherfucker, but how much y’all wanna bet he actually tops out at 6’7"? (6’9" is 205.74cm)
I agree with the general takes here, and can add one for specific situations. I have some very old keyboards, and frankly even my newer ones rely on designs that are over 40 years old. In this particular case, I find the old tech superior, because they simply feel nicer to type on, and that’s what a keyboard is for.
I also have quite a few fountain pens, but whereas with a little effort the keyboards are as good or better than an average modern model, I’ll admit there is a fussiness and mess with fountain pens you have to weigh against the nicer writing experience.
North of North is nice. As a comedy, it’s far from brilliant, but it’s nice. To an outsider, it does read as a loving but grounded portrait of a community that’s just trying to deal with it’s own shit, which is good thing. And frankly, it’s probably good for representation if a show featuring an underrepresented community can get made despite its not being groundbreaking.
This poll is done online based on selection by address, and they’ll even hand out a tablet if the person at the address doesn’t have internet access. There are undoubtedly still old school polls doing landline cold-calls, but I think they’re growing rarer, and frankly at this point they’re Karoline Leavitt’s favorite ones.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-are-reutersipsos-us-public-opinion-polls-conducted-2024-05-09/
Good for the recall folks, though I’m sure there’s a share of pure NIMBYs in there and some folks definitely having the day they voted for. That’s funny that the supporters think the 1000 construction jobs will be for locals and not the specialized oilfield-like firms that are already staffed up to work these projects, or that Google will have 200 permanent staffers tied to the location and contributing to the town’s tax base.
“Gravity plating!” As long as there is floor, you’re good.
I don’t know if it’s really necessary at this point, but I’ll put it behind a spoiler tag…
spoiler
For me, just the simple fact that there was an interpersonal dynamic at all helped quite a bit. Grace had someone to look after him and to look after in the moment made the emotional connection more real for me. I also appreciated that there was a deeply optimistic take on first contact that Hollywood doesn’t seem to love, so we had some power of friendship vibes.
Now all that said, I also think that the book PHM was a pretty serious course correction for Weir as a writer. The Martian was his first novel, and while enough of it is compelling to make it “good,” it’s very clearly that: a first novel. The plot is meandering and episodic. Watney is a clear author-insert and is literally the only character who gets even nominal treatment as an actual human being. Fortunately he’s wry and and engaging and brilliant and gets to do science adventures that don’t insult an informed audience, and the info dumps are good reading.
Artemis was pretty clearly a failure, I think mostly because Weir and/or his team needed to show that book two was going to be more sophisticated, but unfortunately while Weir kind of knew what he needed to do – full cast of characters, actual plot with antagonists, lead who isn’t the result of
Ctrl-H Andy to Mark– he doesn’t pull it off. The result is a lead he can’t sell to the audience, a plot that ends up kind of boring because it has to adhere to his view of what the science will permit with minimal fudging, and while the supporting cast is not the wet tissue of The Martian’s, they’re still paper.Project Hail Mary dials back the number of characters from Artemis, immediately kills off the annoying “other astronauts” who might compete for mindspace, and also gives us a world in crisis where only the emotionally unencumbered nerds can save us, and so it’s okay that most of the humans are that. Grace, who frankly could have been Mark Watney without messing things up too much (and indeed his reluctance to go on a lonely space mission might even make sense), does get more flaws and internal conflict than Watney and is a more well-rounded author insert. However, Weir succeeds in doubling the number of characters we care about by having Rocky there to be the sounding board that allows Grace to reflect and grow and have someone with whom he can connect, since it didn’t work out with literally any human on Earth, with the device of the limited communication allowing Weir to distill emotions down to their accessible cores. Divorced from the “science fuck yeah!”, it’s just a step in the right direction as a storyteller, while still not nearly as ambitious as Artemis (and therefore snowflake Weir doesn’t get his fee-fees hurt by the queer Star Trek fans).
To circle back to the film, though, because of that, I think they made a slightly less interesting movie, because it’s still Weir, and the main thing he does well is turning science and infodumps into dramatic tales. The hollywood team made Rocky iconic, though. That part wasn’t exactly how it all was in my mind’s eye, but pretty close and also adorable.