It's awesome to see these sweet boys sharing a sensitive giggle

my brother my brother and me

the internet is beautiful 

star wars squadrons feels extremely weird because it's not a flight simulator, it's a star wars starfighter simulator, which means it makes perfect sense to put yaw and pitch together instead of roll and pitch, because these are vehicles that don't need to roll to turn.

I keep on trying to do Ace Combat manouvers. Ace Combat manouvers do not work when you could just yaw on 'em.

The main gimmick is the power management system, where you can divert power to weapons/drive/shields, which also eats up a ton of control space.

I am interested to see how the VR handles but I have other things to do. It's very very visually busy, and I'm taking on the additional challenge of flying instruments-only for now. Might change that.

VR is super cool in this but also highlights how fucking stupid Imperial fighter designs are for dogfighting. Zero visibility. In a Rebel ship you can look up! If you see a speck on your radar you can look that way and see your target and track it as you turn.

Ended up putting non-inverted flight controls on this because it reminds me that this isn't a goddamn plane.

Other benefit of VR is that your instruments are very obvious. The game does not know how to show you cutscenes in VR though, it just stretches the view across your eyes horribly.

hey my birthday is this coming sunday and all of my loved ones and friends are 1000 miles away from me. if you feel like giving me a little birthday treat you could draw for me a weevil wizard to keep me company.

alternatively you could consider giving me $5 to draw you any bug of your choosing so that i can justify buying myself a bottle of fancy liquor. i won't take straight up donations because i'd feel extremely bad about that so i insist that you request a bug drawing if you give me money.

<3

Sorry i'm super late but hey !! Weezard !!!

Necessity is the mother of invention, but being a total cheap-ass has to at least be an absentee dad. Our society is enormously wasteful, buying hugely expensive things it doesn't need and then throwing them out. If you are bright enough to make use of those things, you can get them for much less money.

Here's a great example: car door locks. They fail all the time. Repairing them is a pain in the ass. Replacing them is expensive. Each model of car has a slightly different one. A padlock at Wal-Mart costs $1.89. Sure, it doesn't look as good, having a budget Master-Lock bouncing off your paint on the interstate, but it does keep the door closed, and accurately communicates to thieves that you have nothing of value contained within.

Whenever I go to a car show, I am not impressed at all by the high-dollar exotics. I don't mean that to sound snooty: I am sure they have ripped off, exploited, or simply murdered a lot of people in order to afford that car. It's a deviousness that doesn't show up in person and that I simply am not aware of enough to appreciate. I am sure they are very popular at accountant conventions. What I like to see: junk being misused. Old leaf-blower being used as a supercharger? Yes. Road signs pop-riveted into the place the floor should go? You betcha. And that all-time, enduring classic, an engine swap from a car of the wrong make, a project both aberrant and delightful in equal measure.

So, if you are trying to impress a bunch of penniless dickheads on this year's custom car circuit, my advice is to hit up the dollar store. And then don't buy anything: follow the employees until they head to the dumpster to get rid of unsold inventory, and pick the lock. You don't have to spend $1.89 to get doors that close properly, it's not a Jaguar or anything.

just once they should release the newspaper first and make everyone do what it says in there. instead of the other way round. of course they'll never do it due to powerful interests

The past? Buttercup Festival 3-276

Working at a dog daycare (for cash, under the table) has taught me a lot about man's best friend. Primarily, it's that dogs have one hell of a PR team working the job. For one thing, virtually every pup would sell you down the river in exchange for a single bite of Snausage.

Like many of my part-time jobs, I came by the dog daycare gig honestly. I realized that their parking lot was empty most of the day, except at pickup and drop off, and then proceeded to fill up that parking lot with shitbox cars.

Sure, it's a lot of work to shuffle them in and out, but it was better than paying for parking, a concept which I avoid with an almost religious fervour. They figured out what I was doing around month three ("What's with all the puddles of oil and coolant in the parking lot?" "Why are all the cars out there brown and tan?") and I had to think fast.

Turns out my definition of "think fast" is simply to tell them that I'm the new dogwalker, and then pick up a batch of leashes from the front. Pleasure walking is something I usually avoid, because I get enough of it already trying to get back from wherever my car has broken down, but in this case it was really nice.

Pleasant spring weather. Slowly taking in the city instead of being in a go-go rush all the time. A squadron of dogs at my command, pissing in unison on whatever lightpole I so deem a suitable victim. And getting to scope out alleys and parks for additional unguarded street parking spots, without drawing the attention of nosy neighbours and bylaw enforcement like usual. Everyone loves a guy with like thirty dogs.

Will I keep doing this forever? No. Eventually it's going to get cold again. For the time being, though, it breaks up the monotony of the day. And the other day, I found an old Honda lawnmower that someone just threw away in the alley. A Honda, can you believe it? I'm thinking of starting my own dog-operated lawnmowing business, if only I can manage to train the little bastards into adjusting a carb properly.

Is there a better system to do precise 3D stuff in than Autocad? I'm trying to use it to do math lattice/polyhedra stuff and it's going. Very poorly. Is she stupid

if you need very precise placement of vertices you might try openscad, you can use its polyhedron system to assemble shapes out of vertices and faces. It's text-based.

There's also ImplicitCAD which is a haskell-based Super OpenSCAD that's still in alpha but has a lot of extra features.

mutuals do this!!!!

Reblog to pass around warm bread and soup

Let's say we blew up Mars. It's part of the asteroid belt now. Would this affect the astrology queers?

they're already using maps so out of date they're inaccurate by almost a month, I think they'll be fine

A Historical Space Fuckup

Geostationary satellites. You know the ones, right? Hanging out 5.6 Earth radii above the Equator and sending us cat videos and premium TV channels? Let me tell you about their worst few years.

Background: GEO satellites are just big fat bent pipes. They take a weak signal from the ground, amplify the fuck out of it, and send it back. The amount of dollars you can make doing this is related to the total power of the amplifiers, so everyone making money like this wants more power. How do you get more power in space? Bigger solar arrays. What's the catch? Bigger solar arrays are more expensive: your 15kW solar array might cost you ten million dollars. Bigger solar arrays also mean a satellite that costs more fuel to control, and running out of fuel is the primary way these satellites die (and stop making you money). So everyone's looking for cheat codes here.

1999. Hughes Satellite Systems (just before it's bought by B̷̧͛o̶̹̕ẻ̴̙i̴̩̓n̴͎͆g̵͉̈) develops a really mass-/cost-efficient way to make the solar arrays bigger: trough concentrators. Instead of adding more solar panels, instead they'll add cheap, lightweight, super-reflective panels that redirect more sunlight onto the existing solar panels! This increases the amount of light hitting the solar panels (++power), while also increasing their temperature (-power), but they did the math, it's positive, let's launch some concentrators.

Let us digress for a second. Space is a vacuum (citation needed). In our Earthbound experience, a lot of matter stays where you put it because atmospheric pressure is keeping it there. In space, some materials start to escape much faster, but other materials stay in place. Spacecraft solar arrays are made of semiconductor (stable), glass (stable), copper (stable), aluminum (stable), and glue (INCREDIBLY VOLATILE). Oh also, the glue is selected to be really clear, but it stays that way only because it's usually hidden behind something. When direct sunlight hits it, it turns SUPER BROWN. Brown doesn't let sunlight through it.

What happens to a molecule when it starts to fly free? It picks a direction to go and flies that way until it hits something, where it maybe condenses and stays put. When the solar panels are flat, this is fine, because most directions have nothing to hit:

However, with trough concentrators, a large fraction of the glue hits one of the concentrator panels and stays there... and then some fraction of that glue evaporates, hits the solar panel, and stays there (but browner):

Oh, okay, yeah that's worse. Spacecraft that were supposed to lose 5% of their power over 15 years instead started looking like they were going to lose 20% of their power in that time period, meaning you can't keep the TV channels running, meaning you can't make any goddamn money! Very embarrassing for Hughes (/Boeing). They launched 6 satellites with this issue before they noticed the problem and started freaking out. "Freaking out" in this case means almost bankrupting the people they'd sold satellites to, and nearly exploding themselves.

My aunt started working at Hughes during this timeframe and was given a commemorative pin for the satellite she was working on. Six months later, they asked everyone to please give back the commemorative pins; the company urgently needed to fix a design issue with the satellite that would change how the pin looked. My aunt kept her old pin, which... still had the concentrators in place :)

Anyway, right around this same time, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, whose existence was classified at the time), had exactly the same issue on some of its satellites, as far as I can tell. NRO also freaked out about it, and because they're the government, they started an annual conference with all of the country's high-clearance solar power experts to help them figure out what the fuck was going on. That conference slowly got less and less classified over the years, and my wife was invited to speak at it this year! There were a couple of graphs presented by government speakers that lampshaded the Late Nineties Concentrator Fuckup, but absolutely nobody mentioned it directly. (another win for "getting a bee in your bonnet at exactly the right time and then making your spouse listen to everything you've learned about the bee")

@beccaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh

I love this