random_scrub

Alright, I'm finally going to collect all of my military history book threads into one master thread-of-threads to pin for easy access... Starting with, of course, the Franco-Prussian War. twitter.com/random_scrub/s…

I mean, who among us

We’re on the verge of shutting down our airports to save illegal immigrants from deportation.

A physicist, engineer and a statistician are out hunting. Suddenly, a deer appears 50 yards away. The physicist does some basic ballistic calculations, assuming a vacuum, lifts his rifle to a specific angle, and shoots. The bullet lands 5 yards short. The engineer adds a fudge factor for air resistance, lifts his rifle slightly higher, and shoots. The bullet lands 5 yards long. The statistician yells "We got him!"

the "translate tweet" button is the biggest thing to happen to Western-Japanese relations since anime dubbing and cheap reliable pickup trucks

@exQUIZitely @SandyofCthulhu Agreed. Something in the vein of “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”, with a pile of barely-connected vignettes seems an easy fit with what’s already here on Twitter…

@SandyofCthulhu I know I might not be the first person to say/ask this, but OMG you need to write a book! These little gaming history nuggets need to be preserved!

My friend worked at Origin Systems. Now, my friend loved loved loved Gauntlet. To the point that he would often talk in Gauntlet-speak. For example, he'd stand up from his cubicle to go to lunch and announce it, "Fred needs food badly." Or when a co-worker gave him something he needed, he'd say, "I've not seen such bravery." Or if the co-worker had bungled something, he'd say, "Exit the room please." If a deadline was coming up, he'd say "Your life force is running out." That sort of thing. Anyway one day a new worker, an experienced coder who'd been in the industry, came to Origin Systems, and settled into the cubicle right next to my friend. Seemed like a nice guy, if a little quiet. Anyway, Fred continued his Gauntlet-speak hijinks for a few weeks. Then, one day Fred spilled his coffee or something and said, "Someone shot the food!" and the new guy cracked. He stood up in his cubic and started violently denouncing Fred, ranting about how Fred was constantly mocking him and he wasn't going to sit down for it any more and Fred better watch himself in the parking lot and and and ... During the rant, Fred came to realize that the new guy was ONE OF THE ORIGINAL PROGRAMMERS OF GAUNTLET! He though Fred was making fun of his game! Fred managed to calm him down, and convinced him that he, Fred, practically worshiped the guy and had no idea he'd been on the game. If he had he would have been quizzing him non-stop about his tasks, buying him coffee, etc. So they became friends. This kind of thing happened more often than you might think in the gaming world back in the day. There weren't that many professional developers so we'd see each other at conventions, or when we switched jobs. And there was usually no more than two degrees of separation. For instance, I only met Lord British himself once, but I knew two men pretty closely who later on went to work for Origins Systems and became top guys there (Fred mentioned above and Andy Hollis). Ask me anything.

@random_eddie Life imprisonment would be acceptable

How much does it pay? Genuinely asking. My experience from the US (where I grew up) is people pound the table about skills shortages and when you ask what they’re paying, it’s equivalent to working at Walmart in a no-skill job.

"Don't go after fraud, there's so little that it's not worth the effort" counted as Good Policy Thought for like 25 years

@GarrettPetersen x.com/random_scrub/s…

My children consistently refer to this as "maple syrup."

Wife playing Cyberpunk 2077. Goes to meet Panam, carefully parking her car. Agrees to go with Panam to do the mission in *her* car. Wife watches from passenger seat as Panam pulls out onto the street and absolutely obliterates wife's parked car. 10/10 both still laughing.

If you want to bring shipbuilding to the U.S. at the scale of China or South Korea or even Japan its not only going to take massive capital investment, but you also have to fundamentally change the way these businesses operate. You have to change the workforce. You have to change transportation. Change neighborhoods. Change waterfronts. This isn't a money problem, it is whole of system problem.

紙工作でLIVE2Dの動く女の子を作ってみた

Good morning

if you build the LEGO container ship in the US is it technically Jones Act compliant?

people will ask: “Gregory, what radicalized you.” and I’ll say: “buying a 50 year old L.L. Bean polo that was made in the USA on eBay and it being higher quality than one I bought a few years ago.”

Say it ain't so....

@SaucercrabZero Winner

@MelbaofNM I have five kids. Ain’t no air fryer with that kind of capacity, so why bother?

Anyone else refuse to buy an air fryer or am I the last mom standing

Last fall, as my 86-year-old father-in-law lay dying of cancer at his home in Lakeland, Florida, the pool guy told my wife—who was tending to her dad—that he was owed $2,000 for past services. He claimed that he’d left my father-in-law’s check “out in the rain” and it had been ruined. Although distraught over her father’s situation, my wife is a sensible person and asked to see the “ruined” check before writing a new one. Weeks pass, and the pool guy starts to get pretty aggressive about demanding payment, before he finally produces the “ruined” check on which he also claims to have spilled ink (!)—and shows her many other similarly “ruined” checks. My wife logs into her father’s bank account and sees that the check—in perfect condition—had been cashed by the pool guy months earlier. So he’s obviously trying to take advantage of her vulnerable situation to scam her. We were outraged and concerned that he’d pull this stunt on others, so we immediately contacted the Polk County Sheriff’s Department. We were assigned a Detective to whom we presented the evidence: emails demanding payment, the copy of the bogus “ruined” check, and the bank’s copy of the intact check that was cashed. Alas, they’ve now ghosted us since we last reached out 3 months ago asking for an update. And that brings me to my point: I don’t know what’s happened in our country, but our law enforcement agencies and prosecutors seem more interested in doing their paperwork than in actually enforcing the law. I hope we can change this before people stop bothering even to bring wrongdoing to the authorities’ attention, as has happened in many other countries. The rule of law requires enforcement of the law!

my mom once showed me the house my parents bought for 70k fresh out of school. she was like “okay but you have to understand we were only making 70k per year combined!” i was like “you’re telling me you bought a house for the same amount as your joint annual income at age 25?”