No, the products. World War 2 ended in 1945, and then EVERYBODY FUCKED and 80 years later we’re still cleaning up the mess.

Same reason we started with X, millennials actually got a name, and then went back to Z. Somebody with a head full of lead came up with it.

I had hamsters and gerbils, my hamsters weren’t bitey. I guess we socialized them better, they just liked walking from hand to hand.

I’m gonna go in a different direction than everyone else here.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl

is a big budget movie that had absolutely no business getting made, because:

1. Pirate movies have always been box office poison. Less than a decade earlier, Cutthroat Island made the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office bomb of all time, the latest in a series of pirate-themed failures. The only vaguely pirate-themed movies that had ever had anything you’d call success was Muppet Treasure Island and Goonies, and you could argue that Goonies wasn’t really a pirate movie, it had some pirate theming in it. In 2002, Disney’s Treasure Planet, basically Treasure Island IN SPAAACE had proven a box office flop. Treasure Planet is a well-written, well-made, well-advertised, well-reviewed pirate movie that failed at the box office. What idiot would bankroll another pirate film?

2. It was a movie based on an old ride at Disney World. It was their fourth attempt at this, they made a TV movie based on Tower of Terror in 1997 that they’re apparently not proud of, 2000s Mission To Mars was a “commercial disappointment” and 2002’s The Country Bears was a critical and commercial flop. Yeah the year before they made Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney made a G-rated pastiche of the Blues Brothers out of The Country Bear Jamboree. They decided to do that and nobody stopped them. No movie based on a theme park attraction had ever made its money back.

The public’s reaction to the announcement was “They’re making a movie based on WHAT?” This wasn’t going to work. This movie had no business being made.

The film achieved massive critical and commercial success as the 141st highest grossing movie of all time taking $654.3 million against it’s $140 million budget and spawning four sequels.

hamsters are cooler than mice. it’s fun to hand them seeds and watch them stuff their pouches. Face luggage.

The…Atlantic Ocean?

It’s worse than boomer vibes. It’s corporate vibes.

Both of your guesses I would put into Resignation. “I can’t do anything about it, so why bother?” Why bother checking the fuel for contaminants, it’s always clean anyway. Why bother standing up to the aircraft owner, I’m gonna have to fly the mission anyway whether or not I think it’s safe.

The other is Impulsivity, the tendency to do things at the spur of the moment without thinking anything through. Jumping into the plane to fly off somewhere without planning the flight, reacting to a problem by instantly doing the first thing that comes to mind instead of working the problem, etc.

Is there a way to block literally all studios that have a parent company? Because I don’t think parent companies are good things. Nestle is a parent company, QED.

Recall the core was supposed to be the business end of a nuclear bomb, it was supposed to be near criticality so that a nuclear explosion could be triggered. They were measuring just how close to criticality it was. I don’t fully understand why they were doing that; could be anything from refining nuclear bomb design to developing safety procedures, aka “Don’t store this next to this much beryllium.”

In the first case, Harry Doghlian was stacking bricks. The instruments read he was close to criticality as he started to place one last brick, so he had achieved the goal of the experiment, and then he dropped the brick. Doghlian died from failure of imagination, his experimental apparatus did not account for clumsiness. Also in the room was a military private named Robert Hemmerly acting as a security guard, who was also exposed and died 33 years later from leukemia.

In the second case, Louis Slotin was closing a hemispheric shell. As designed, there were supposed to be shims that wouldn’t let the shell completely close. He removed these shims and instead used the blade of a screwdriver. Which slipped. Once again, the test apparatus did not account for clumsiness…or it did, but the safety measures were defeated.

Slotin was apparently prone to bravado, he had done this test/demonstration about a dozen times for small crowds; there were seven other people in the room with him including someone looking over his shoulder. While part of the scientific method is repeating experiments, I’m not convinced he wasn’t just showing off.

In the human factors chapter of flight school we teach about the five hazardous attitudes. Slotin demonstrated three of the five:

Anti-authority. The removal of the shims was not authorized, but he did it anyway.

Macho. Most accounts I’ve read make a point to mention the blue jeans and snakeskin boots he wore, suggesting a cowboy attitude.

Invulnerability. Slotin knew Doghlian personally and had visited Doghlian in the hospital as he lay literally falling apart at the cellular level…and then went to work to take the safety shims out of his radiation test apparatus. What kind of man does that? One who thinks it can’t happen to him. How’d that work out?

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look up what the other two hazardous attitudes are.

Further experiments with the demon core were done via robotic remote control with personnel a quarter mile away. Somebody finally said “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing criticality experiments with our bare hands.”

I have an unrelated headache, but the constant allcaps of KRAFTON really makes me want to nail someone’s dick shut.

I graduated high school in 2005, one out of some 300 of my graduating class. Had plenty of friends. Went to community college, several folks I knew from school went to the same community college, met plenty of new folks. Had plenty of friends. Transferred to university, had plenty of friends, got to know my roommates pretty close, that kind of thing.

Out of college, I disappeared into what I thought was going to be my career for a few years. When I came back up and looked around, I found myself in a different world with people that aren’t people anymore, there are walking talking eating shitting cell phone stands.

I don’t try to socialize for the same reason I don’t go hunting for Carolina parakeets: Interpersonal relationships aren’t a thing that exists in the world anymore. We killed them all and the corpse of the last one is on display behind glass at the Raleigh museum of Natural Sciences.

The Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium intended to be used as part of a nuclear bomb dropped on Japan. It wasn’t used for this purpose, and instead nuclear physicists used it in various experiments. Two of which involved approaching criticality.

One experiment involved stacking bricks made of some neutron reflecting material, like beryllium or something, around the core. Reflecting neutrons back at the plutonium would cause more fission events to occur; if it hits a certain threshold called criticality it it will release a considerable amount of radiation and heat. The goal was to get close to, but not exceed, that limit. The scientist was about to place one more brick when his instruments told him it would go critical if the brick was placed, so he started to back off…and dropped the brick.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of dazzling blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the brick away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

A short time later, another scientist started a similar experiment, this time enclosing the core in two half-spherical metal shells. If the core was completely surrounded by the shells, it would go critical. He used the blade of a flathead screwdriver to almost, but not quite, close the shells. Then the screwdriver slipped and the shells fully closed.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of blinding blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the upper shell away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

Decades later, youtube hair and beard model Kyle Hill released a video detailing this story, and it has since become something of a sensation on the internet. Images of the demon core in its “closing the shells” configuration is often used as shorthand for something that is exceedingly needlessly reckless. Some of the humor comes from if ya know, ya know, some of it is based in the justaposition of teh high intelligence required to do nuclear physics, with the negligent stupidity of putting nothing between you and a long ugly painful death but the blade of a screwdriver.

I’m sure in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store.

I made a mistake, I bought a jeep.

Or, they knew what they were doing.

The Rotax engines use digital CDI ignition that is independent if the airframe electrical system, and from each other. I’ve never seen one fail.

Take a lesson from welding class: You release what you’ve got bottled up just right with a little spark and you get an intense yet precise flame. It’s amazing what you can get done with skillful application of said flame.

If you buy a brand new Skyhawk here in the space year 2025, it will come with a newly made Lycoming IO-360 that requires 100LL. I think they’re still working on eliminating leaded avgas, I think because the Trump regime hasn’t noticed it yet.

My cat just finds the nearest big idiot to yell at. That’s usually me.