Captain Aggravated

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.

Concussion at an ice skating rink.

I’ll admit to liking the look of some gaming PCs, with a custom loop with clear tubing, colored coolant, coordinated lights; it hits the same way a well done build in Satisfactory does.

I’m not really interested in gaming peripherals like a big chunky mouse with a bunch of angled plates on it trying to look like Gigatron’s jock strap. Some RGB can be kind of cool, I kinda wish I could do more useful stuff with it, like I always throught it would be cool to have RGB lighting that varied from blue to red with component temperature or something. I’m not the biggest fan of just unicorn vomit for the sake of unicorn vomit.

In the 1940s or 50s. My family has owned it since the 60s.

xXx-=The_Mouse_Sl@yer_69=-xXx

You know that cute thing vets do when they come out to the waiting room and call the cat’s name?

They won’t do that if you name your cat “Shithead”.

I wanted to be a pilot since I was a child. I got an introductory ride in a Cessna on my 14th birthday. Started taking flying lessons in earnest around 16, earned a private pilot’s license my freshman year of college. Decided I wanted to go into it as a job, started working on my instrument rating, and for my junior year of college I transferred to ERAU in Daytona Beach. Lasted just over a semester there. Ended up earning a light sport flight instructor certificate and I taught classes at a small school, eventually earning an LSRM certificate and working as the company mechanic as well. I’m a walking flight school, just add airplane.

Wasn’t earning enough money to pay all my own bills, and though I was logging 20-30 hours a week of flight time little of it was applicable to further ratings, and then the owners of the school started doing some sketchy shit and I decided to dip out. In the summer of 2012 I landed after a lesson with a student, and I haven’t flown an airplane since.

I kinda built myself a job as the project manager of a little job shop/prototyping firm, then that business didn’t survive COVID. I’m a woodworker now.

I don’t think light modes were as glaring in the past, first of all monitors were smaller, second I don’t think they were as bright.

From an old edition of the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge:

An airplane’s tire will hydroplane at a speed in knots equal to 9 times the square root of the tire pressure in PSI. So if your tires are inflated to 36 PSI, sq.rt 36 = 6 * 9 = 54 knots. If there is standing water on the runway, you will have no braking authority or steering control from the wheels, you will have to maintain control of the aircraft with the flight controls, and you cannot rely on short field stopping figures from the POH if it requires applying brakes above 54 knots.

I got that out of the 2003 edition; I don’t know if it’s in the current issue.

I had a nightmare once made mostly or entirely out of assets from Ocarina of Time.

I found myself in an underground room of some kind, just a large space made out of that brown dirt wall texture. There was no entrance or exit, the room was maybe the size of a large classroom or two, maybe 30x40 feet? Along one wall was a low rise, with the light grey stone wall texture behind it, two braziers providing the only light in the space, and a kind of gallows/gantry thing made out of those large wooden beams you see Beneath The Well. One upright member supporting a horizontal swingarm, and from the end of the swing arm dangled a noose.

Standing beneath the noose was a tall, thin figure. Thinking about it now I picture it as a ReDead enemy but I don’t think that’s what it actually looked like. It made no sounds at all. It walked like a ReDead does though; that slow labored trudge. It started trudging toward me, and as it did, the gantry moved to keep the noose hangling about a foot directly over its head, making the noise from the Castle Town draw bridge as it moved.

It followed me around this room for a bit, I couldn’t move very fast, like my body wouldn’t respond right. I tried to say something but I couldn’t summon up any power.

I woke up in a cold sweat with my girlfriend asking me what was wrong. Did I mention I was 27 years old at the time?

The novelty of my brain using N64 graphics for this, along with the weirdness of the noose hanging over the figure and not actually around his neck, burned it into my memory.

I’ll also never forget the first lucid dream I had. I was on my grandparents’ back deck, talking to several members of my family. My grandmother’s dog Ginger started barking over us, as she constantly. I started to say some smartass line to the dog, starting with “Ginger, you shouldn’t bark because…” and then a thought occurred to me. “…Because you’re dead…we put you down last year, and dead dogs don’t…bark I must be dreaming.”

The dog and the people disappeared. Just…despawned. Everything got less vivid and my peripheral vision disappeared. I could see what I was directly looking at, or a blank beige color. I walked around the yard for a minute in a perfectly familiar and yet empty world, everything simultaneously had a kind of dark “before an afternoon thunderstorm” kind of look and that blank beige color, and after a minute or two I woke up.

I hadn’t heard of lucid dreaming before this, and in fact not until a couple years after the fact. I spent a couple years really interested in the subject when I did, and managed it a couple more times. Some people talk about having “control” of the dream, for me, I usually realize I’m dreaming, it immediately starts to fade, and I’m able to just walk around and look at stuff for a little bit before I wake up.

They do publish pretty good information about home canning, though in batch sizes more and more of us aren’t going to do because we’re not putting up 10 acres worth of vegetables.

I we ar my PPE. Most commonly eye and ear protection but I’ll wear a dust mask when routing or sanding, etc. Allowing onesself to be injured in the shop is unethical.

I think we could sacrifice billionaires to Peppa Pig and it’d still get the job done.

No, but I did case mod a computer for this once. My Fractal Node 202 my last computer is in has a very bright white power button LED, too damn bright. Fortunately in this case it’s a standard 5mm through hole LED standing up off the board on its leads a bit, bent to point out the front. So I bent it to point upward. Dimmed it down significantly.

Somewhere in middle school they give up on the “if you have two apples and buy two more apples you have four apples” or “if you have 3 pizzas cut into 8 slices each and your family eats 13 slices how many pizzas do you have left?” and they start trying to teach 11 year olds by making them memorize proofs and phrases like the transitive property of equality.

To a lot of high schools and colleges, the aesthetic of academia is much more important than students actually learning anything useful, so they teach math class with a chalkboard full of squiggles rather than any kind of practical approach.

From Algebra class on up, it’s taught as a rules following exercise. “Okay, now we do this, and then who knows what we do next?” And it is amazing how many of them are set up as trick questions, how often out of the infinite span of numbers there’s often one right answer and one wrong answer. “How many of you got five? Well you’re wrong, it’s negative 3.”

Meanwhile, I was learning how to fly. In flight school, you learn how to navigate by dead reckoning. I want to fly this course on the map, which is x distance and x degrees from true north as measured from the chart. Given a weather brief and the performance characteristics of the plane from the pilot’s operating handbook, calculate: true airspeed given indicated airspeed, altitude and temperature wind correction angle, given true course, true airspeed, wind direction and wind speed ground speed, given true course, true airspeed, wind direction and wind speed true heading given true course and wind correction angle magnetic heading given true heading and local magnetic variation time aloft given distance to travel and ground speed fuel consumed given time aloft and fuel consumption

The tool you’re taught to use to calculate all of this looks like this:

It’s basically a circular slide rule, that has a vector plotter on the back. The trigonometry is done by accurately drawing and measuring the triangle, the ratio problems (anything “per hour”) is done by rubbing a couple of logarithms together, and you’re on your own for the addition and subtraction. Ever used a slide rule? They don’t keep track of the decimal point for you. So you have to do these built-in sanity checks, like “Wait, no, the plane doesn’t even hold 70 gallons of gas, there’s no way I’ll burn that much in ten minutes.”

I learned how to do that before I took physics class, and surprised my physics teacher that I knew how to do “boat crossing a river” problems with a weird piece of cardboard. Later on, when I was teaching flight school, I taught that procedure to “It’s been 30 years since math class” boomers and “Trigonometry is next semester” teenagers. They all picked up on it without much problem, because “the wind is blowing you to the right” is a real thing they’ve felt in their own asses by now.

The other extreme is too busy infighting to take on anyone new.

I was taught that Jupiter had 17 moons, Saturn has 12 and Pluto has 1. Many more have been discovered since.

Then there’s the whole “different areas on your tongue taste different flavors.” Like you only taste sweet with the tip of your tongue, the middle tastes salty, etc. I remember being given various substances by my fifth grade teacher like sugar, coffee, lemon juice, table salt etc. and we tried putting them on different areas of our tongues and we were like “…no, we taste everything everywhere.”

I distinctly remember my fifth grade teacher trying to pull that.

Not while Ticketmaster exists.

I don’t remember one in TIS-100 or Infinifactory.