captain_aggravated
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast Took a temporary honorary demotion of one grade to honor Captain Kori.
- Comment on Futurama Hit & Run Demo Out Today 1 hour ago:
I was about to say, I loved Futurama, It’s run it’s course, I’m fine with Meanwhile being the series finale (especially since as broadcast it ended with them pushing the time loop button, and they aired the first episode after that) and I’m ready to move on.
- Comment on American public transit 4 hours ago:
I’m almost 40 and I’ve spent about 9 months during which there was public transport between me and my job, and I probably could have walked from Holt ave to Lewis street faster than the GTA bus.
- Comment on coping 4 hours ago:
Everyone driving slower than me is a moron, everyone driving faster than me is a maniac.
- Comment on coping 4 hours ago:
If he’s bigger than me: Yeah probably. I get off my ass to rake the yard or build furniture, I don’t work out.
If he’s richer than me: Yeah it’s almost certainly via white collar crime. I live below my means, I’m the son of an IT professional, I went to college on a grant and I taught flight school before I worked in a rapid prototyping lab. I’ve worn blue and white collars. I’ve written C++ and run a lathe for my pay.
If he’s smarter than me: That’s easy to believe with my 3.3 GPA. I was an honor’s student looked down upon by the AP and IB kids.
The man who looks better than me probably owns a mirror. I wear navy blue T-shirts and black gym shorts as a daily uniform because they’re easy to launder and I shave my neck because a neckbeard bothers me when I’m trying to sleep. Do you want your Lycoming overhauled or not, because I went to mechanic school and you didn’t. Thought so, that’ll be $30 grand.
- Comment on Just an FYI 6 days ago:
haiku aren’t that hard
It’s five, then seven, then five.
You’ll get used to it.
- Comment on 2m Moxon antenna for protesting 1 week ago:
Moxons are directional antennas though? You’d have to point the edge of the sign in the direction you’re transmitting?
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Not quite how that worked out.
Yes, the Ottoman empire did either outright cut off the spice trade to mainland Europe or heavily tax it, which caused Portugal and Spain to seek sea routes to the Far East.
The Portuguese claimed the route around Africa as theirs. It was long, but not too long. The route was known, and you don’t have to sail far from the coast the entire way.
To say Columbus was “commissioned” was a bit much. Columbus went to great lengths to approach the Spanish crown to propose his “going to the East by sailing West” plan, which was based on some bad math. Like he read an Arab scholar’s work on the subject which gave the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles, which he read as the shorter European miles, so he underestimated the size of the earth by about 1/3. The cartoon I was shown in elementary school depicted Columbus as the visionary who first thought the Earth was round, when it’s quite the opposite. It’s more like he was a crackpot small earther. But he did finally convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage. Three ships departed Lisbon in 1492, sailed down the African coast to the Canaries and then did something monumentally stupid: They made a right turn and headed due West straight out to sea.
Columbus, if not his men, deserved to sail out to sea and starve to death eight time zones East of Japan, but in the most impactful stroke of dumb luck in human history right about where he predicted Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands to be, he found Central America and the Caribbean. Columbus ended up making 3 more trips to the Caribbean, he saw the shores of Mexico, the mouth of the Orinoco river, was shipwrecked on Jamaica. He went to his death believing he had visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a New World. Credit for realizing “Look, we’ve sailed 400 miles down the coast, there’s no way this is Indonesia” goes to Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan actually achieved reaching the Spice islands by sailing west from Europe, though most of his men including Magellan himself died in the process and what few men remained completed a circumnavigation because starving on the way back across the Pacific sounded less fun than possibly dealing with the Portuguese.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 week ago:
Yes, I have Ball’s Complete Book Of Home Preserving (which is a terrible title, as the book contains no information about dehydrating, freeze drying, jerking or brewing, only water bath and pressure canning). It has a procedure for “berry” jelly where it lists half a dozen different kinds of berries and how to extract juice from them, to include elderberry, and then you use a quantity of said “berry” juice in a standard jelly recipe. Independent of this, I’ve found a beautyberry jelly recipe that resembles this procedure, so I feel okay canning it, and have done so for years now. I’m going to stop short of recommending it to anyone else. By all means, if you’ve got access to beautyberries, make the jelly, but can it at your own risk.
- Comment on i enjoy high fructose corn syrup too 1 week ago:
Every September, I make a year’s supply of beautyberry jelly.
I do something that I don’t recommend people do: I can it. I’m like 5 years in, and I haven’t had a problem yet. There’s a series of pages in my Ball canning recipe book that the beautyberry jelly recipe I use conforms pretty close to, but it isn’t USDA approved or otherwise published by some authority as safe for canning, I’m going to recommend you avoid this.
Beautyberries, if you’re not familiar with them, are a bush/shrub native to the American southeast. The plant looks like a bunch of stems with leaves that grow along them, along with clusters of tiny white flowers in the spring at the base of each pair of leaves, that turn into vivid purple berries in the fall. The leaves can be used as a mosquito repellent if rubbed on clothing, and the berries are edible…although they’re bitter and astringent. Boiling them in water to make an extract and making jelly from that extract results in a bright red jelly that tastes like strawberry and tea.
It’s something of a pain to harvest, so it pretty much isn’t commercially done.
- Comment on I will burn this fucker to the ground... internally 1 week ago:
It was real fucking fun arriving in the workforce college educated with computer literacy classes on my transcripts not knowing how to run MS Office because they changed it out from under me. Even if the ribbon interface is objectively superior, they just dumped it on people.
My father found, buried on Microsoft’s website, a tool (I think written in Silverlight because it was about that time) that simulated MS Office 2003, you could click on a function, and then it would play an animation about how to do that function in Office 2007. This wasn’t advertised and it wasn’t shipped on the disc with Office '07, which NEEDED a retraining tool.
Office '10 was different yet again, and they also shifted a lot from XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 and that’s when I switched to Linux.
- Comment on In everyway 1 week ago:
I got this joke backwards. Mask of Zorro came out when I was like, 10 so I didn’t see it until much later…after I’d seen Shrek 2. So throughout this live action Hollywood blockbuster I’m laughing that the main character sounds exactly like an orange cartoon cat.
- Comment on Who's your favorite female protagonist in a video game? (Add pic of character in response) 1 week ago:
Two occur to me: Chell from the Portal games, and Lufia from Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. And both of those almost don’t count.
I almost don’t want to count Chell because she’s almost not a character, but I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing as her.
Lufia is one of the rare SNES JRPGs not made by Squaresoft or Enix, it was published by Taito. Gameplay is similar to classic Final Fantasy, the story manages to be quite tragic. Lufia, the title character, is not the player character, Enter Your Name is the player character, and Lufia is a playable party member/his love interest/…well, play the game to find out. So there’s reasons why I hesitate to call her a “protagonist.”
I have to mention a fun thing that series did: Lufia 1 starts with a playable prologue/tutorial section where you play as some legendary heroes fighting an ultimate battle. Lufia 2 is a prequel, and it’s the story of those legendary heroes, which ends with that same ultimate battle as the final boss. In Lufia 1, the heroes speak very formally. They sound stalwart and brave and a bit old fashioned, as legendary heroes should. In Lufia 2, we know these characters more as real people, and the dialog treads the exact same ground but it’s much less formal, makes them sound less hypercompetent.
- Comment on I will be taking no followup questions. Thank you for your time 1 week ago:
I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court recently. It’s one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.
Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of “rescuing maidens from a giant” were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.
Then there’s the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of “Arkansas journalism” and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn’t understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn’t understand electricity…in apparently a couple years?
Me? I think I’m an above average candidate for this scenario, I’d die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.
- Comment on I will burn this fucker to the ground... internally 1 week ago:
To be fair, PDFs have always been complete and utter cockshit to deal with and how you deal with it has changed over time.
For awhile there, you used the Print dialog. Because the PDF authoring software was implemented like a printer driver. Because if you know the history of PDF, it makes a certain kind of sense to do it that way because the bones of PDF is PostScript. Except it’s a dogshit way of implementing the UI, because the user is trained to create a file, you click Save. To create a physical sheet of paper, you click Print. Now you’re asking to create a file, by clicking Print. Makes as much sense as the FCC’s website.
Some programs now implement it through the Save dialog, others have a “Save as PDF…” option in the File menu, and others have an “Export” and/or “Export As…” which I bet a lot of folks who know what that means and would know to look there would struggle to turn it into words.
- Comment on I will burn this fucker to the ground... internally 1 week ago:
There was a long time when the middle mouse button didn’t do anything, because the standard PC mouse was 2 buttons. I had a Logitech 3 button mouse where the middle button didn’t get much use. In I think RiscOS it had a function, then there are some actions like “both click” where you click both left and right buttons at the same time, which is sometimes also implemented as middle click. In Linux, middle clicking pastes from the primary buffer. And when you know what that means, it’s actually pretty damn handy.
- Comment on paint job 1 week ago:
When I was in high school, my girlfriend dyed her cat pink with cherry Kool-Aid. He didn’t seem impressed.
- Comment on Smöl 1 week ago:
it’s got room in its bones for marrow.
- Comment on Punch Time 1 week ago:
That’s something that occurred to me playing Breath of the Wild. A lot of the item names like “rushroom” or “armoranth” are pun-based. And this game was written in Japanese and translated to English, along with at least a dozen other languages. Did they have teams of multilingual people sitting around coming up with puns? It occurs to me there are things like “Swift Violet” that aren’t punny…in English at least. But then you’ve got Hot Footed Frog, and the frog model has red feet.
What about…there’s a Gerudo or two that you can rent sand seals from, and there’s a lot of seal-based puns. “Seal ya later” “Let’s Seal The Deal” etc. How was that implemented in Japanese, Russian and Portuguese? I imagine that in some cases you’d just drop it and put straightforward dialog there, but make another character quirky in a language where that does work.
What about in TOTK, the quest about exploring in underpants? That quest outright relies on two sentences that mean two specific things can be mistaken for each other, they would have had to translate “All other paths/in underpants” into like 20 languages. What a pain in the ass that had to be.
- Comment on Learn this one weird trick! 1 week ago:
Or, a small pair of pliers can open a brake bleed valve.
- Comment on This is Larry. 2 weeks ago:
Oh lah de fucking dah look at Mr. Fancy Pants with his cat that shits inside the box.
- Comment on These mugs are getting out of hand 2 weeks ago:
Okay so I think we can call that decided. The Council Of Internet Nonsense has spoken. A metric gallon is equal to 4 liters or 1.05669 US gallons. It has been COINed.
- Comment on These mugs are getting out of hand 2 weeks ago:
Or would a metric gallon be 4 liters?
A “metric ton” is 1000 kilograms, or 2200 pounds, which is a shade more than a short ton at 2,000 pounds.
A US gallon is 4 quarts, which is about equal to 3.8 liters. So if a metric gallon was 4 liters, it’d be just a shade more than a US gallon.
- Comment on These mugs are getting out of hand 2 weeks ago:
Now there are two of them?
- Comment on They're coming. 2 weeks ago:
Possum on the half shell. Dillo power!
- Comment on They're coming. 2 weeks ago:
My inner tarheel is screaming the solution to this problem. We’ll have the mother of all pig pickens!
- Comment on This pasta is creepy 2 weeks ago:
Specifically a haunted copy of Majora’s Mask.
- Comment on A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Erica by my side 2 weeks ago:
I’m gonna start calling my scratch awl a “trocar” just to be a little dark.
- Comment on Mmmm... Yeah. It checks out. 2 weeks ago:
I think my cat felidomorphizes me a little bit but she doesn’t think I’m a cat.
- Comment on Ah, ah, ah, yeah! 2 weeks ago:
My first word every morining is usually “Izzy!” likely followed by “Shut up” or “Calm down.” Because she’s going ballistic that I’m not 45 minutes early with her breakfast.
- Comment on EA CEO says company values will 'remain unchanged' under the new ownership of Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner's investment firm 2 weeks ago:
Desert Strike was my last.