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Topics - Turkey
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151
« on: August 03, 2016, 07:42:52 PM »
I've had some time off, so I've been going back to some movies I really liked or just missed out on. So far:
Moon
Seven Psychopaths
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Hail, Caesar!
No Country for Old Men
The Martian
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Usual Suspects
Any recommendations for the next one?
152
« on: August 02, 2016, 07:54:31 PM »
 It's pretty good.
153
« on: July 26, 2016, 05:37:39 PM »
Batman/Batgirl fucking was dumb, but besides that the adaptation was really faithful. The song in the tunnel was weird and the ending just didn't have the same feeling. But damn, it was cool to have Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy doing voices in this.
Despite being a near panel-for-panel adaptation, the graphic novel was still a better format for this story.
154
« on: July 24, 2016, 09:39:59 AM »
Memes, news, drama, etc
155
« on: July 09, 2016, 09:45:55 AM »
SERE school for a couple weeks.
Incommunicado for most of it. I know some of you are heartbroken, but you'll get through somehow.
156
« on: July 08, 2016, 06:20:15 PM »
Different guy this time. Why do people want mythic accounts?
157
« on: July 08, 2016, 05:32:28 PM »
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0141854Abstract
A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates. The full report is in the link. The most damning conclusion I've read so far is that it undermines the argument that black people are shot (armed or unarmed) at a higher rate than other ethnicities because they commit crime at a higher rate.
158
« on: July 07, 2016, 02:19:32 PM »
Maybe you've felt that way, or just feel exhausted or annoyed by the constant barrage of articles, videos, tweets, complaints, etc. on social media. I'm reposting a statement from a very politically active, liberal, Christian friend of mine because it's a sentiment that I've never seen on here, and our beliefs, biases, and viewpoints deserve to be challenged:
"So easy for white folks like ourselves to "put racism aside" because we can, we aren't faced with it every day of our lives.
TILL our black brothers and sisters are not killed in the streets by police at a rate vastly outsized for their portion of the population.
TILL our brothers and sisters are not kept out of homes by redlining.
TILL our brothers and sisters are not called "welfare cheats."
TILL our brothers and sisters are not arrested and thrown in prisons at rates larger than any other population.
TILL our brothers and sisters are not kept from jobs once they are out of prison.
TILL our brothers and sisters are not kept in schools that are more segregated than during Jim Crow, that perform worse than the "white" schools across our country.
TILL our brothers and sisters are not punished at different rates for drug offenses, even in "legalized" states.
TILL justice is served for our brothers and sisters.
TILL we stop being numb to others' pain and recognize that "hard work" isn't worth jack shit.
#Blacklivesmatter and it is up to us to trust the experiences of those around us and shout it and affirm it from the highest mountaintop. Because THAT is what Christ would do. CHRIST did not say "everyone," HE called on SPECIFIC groups of people that were marginalized, if that is our standard for what is truth. He affirmed their existence and power and centrality to the Kingdom. And we must do the same."
159
« on: July 04, 2016, 12:33:10 PM »
I'm talking about pot-infused drinks being served at places like Starbucks, sold as edibles or drinks in cafes or restaurants, etc.
Obviously still subject to DUI laws and such.
161
« on: July 01, 2016, 03:48:40 PM »
Feb 23, 2018 Starring John Boyega as Stacker Pentecost's son Directed by some guy Produced by Guillermo del Toro No word on Gipsy Danger or the original cast Source
162
« on: June 30, 2016, 03:57:58 PM »
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/29/more-than-100-nobel-laureates-take-on-greenpeace-over-gmo-stance/?tid=sm_fbScientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.
Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The World Health Organization estimates that 250 million people, suffer from VAD, including 40 percent of the children under five in the developing world. Based on UNICEF statistics, a total of one to two million preventable deaths occur annually as a result of VAD, because it compromises the immune system, putting babies and children at great risk. VAD itself is the leading cause of childhood blindness globally affecting 250,000 - 500,000 children each year. Half die within 12 months of losing their eyesight.
(...)
Virtually all crops and livestock have been genetically engineered in the broadest sense; there are no wild cows, and the cornfields of the United States reflect many centuries of plant modification through traditional breeding. Genetically modified crops started to become common in the mid-1990s; today, most of the corn, soybeans and cotton in the country have been modified to be resistant to insects or tolerant of herbicide, according to government statistics.
163
« on: June 28, 2016, 10:04:43 AM »
http://nerdist.com/game-of-thrones-creators-confirm-2-more-seasons-13-15-more-hours-of-story/“It’s two more seasons we’re talking about,” explained Benioff. “From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with. Call it 73 for now.”
“It’s not supposed to be an ongoing show, where every season it’s trying to figure out new story lines. We wanted it to be one giant story, without padding it out to add an extra 10 hours, or because people are still watching it. We wanted to something where, if people watched it end to end, it would make sense as one continuous story.” "Without padding" i.e., no character development or storytelling, just checking plot points off of a list and calling it a day.
164
« on: June 27, 2016, 05:05:09 PM »
Temporarily. I'm going to a survival school in a couple weeks and I want to avoid the crashes and withdrawal before wandering around hungry in the woods or getting the piss beaten out of me.
Should I just quit cold-turkey (ha) or wean off of it? I'm not really doing anything right now so I don't need caffeine at all except for workouts.
165
« on: June 23, 2016, 10:33:07 AM »
Just a reminder that all sale prices are fixed for the duration of the sale; flash and daily deals are gone, so there's no need to wait for a lower price. Don't forget to check for bundles that include a game you want for a potentially lower price, and remember that Steam wallet cards are 10% off, so you can load up a cart, go to a store and get close to the correct amount (they're sold in $10, $20, and $50 I believe) and save a bit extra if you're a legit peasant. http://store.steampowered.com/Other sales: https://www.gog.com/https://www.humblebundle.com/sonic-25th-anniversary-bundle
166
« on: June 22, 2016, 10:17:37 PM »
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/house-democrats-gun-bills-sit-in_us_576ab443e4b0c0252e77ecb8“For months, even for years, through seven sessions of Congress, I wondered, what would bring this body to take action?” Lewis said while Democrats slowly surrounded him at the microphone. “We have lost hundreds and thousands of innocent people to gun violence. Tiny little children. Babies. Students. And teachers. Mother and fathers. Sisters and brothers. Daughters and sons. Friends and neighbors. And what has this body done? Mr. Speaker, not one thing.” They've also failed to present any sort of coherent plan. Ban scary black guns? Ban people on the no-fly list (zero due process or accountability) from buying guns? Ban magazines with lots of rounds? I'm not particularly beholden to either camp, but the day guns are criminalized in America is the day would-be-mass-shooters realize it's incredibly easy to drive a car bomb through the front door of a crowded building. Reactionary politics is really little more than taking advantage of a tragic situation for an apparent moral/political highground, and it's repulsive.
167
« on: June 19, 2016, 02:23:18 PM »
 Post other excuses that make you feel better about your moral failings.
168
« on: June 19, 2016, 08:51:29 AM »
This seems like a subject a lot of conservatives and liberals fail to understand. The premise is that a larger bureaucracy becomes less efficient as it increases in size, eventually reaching some non-quantifiable asymptotic point where more money and manpower can no longer be justified by their results. I've talked briefly on here about the how conservative and progressive aren't opposites: conservatives believe the best path to social, economic, national, and personal betterment is through more limited government spending than liberal policies, allowing private industry and citizens to drive the nation's growth. This is similar to what is going on with the Brexit--an economic argument is that Britain is devoting too many resources to a bloated bureaucracy when they could benefit more from independence. A domestic example of this exponential curve of efficiency is seen in tuition costs. As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
(...)
As public spending to universities have increased (disproportionately higher than other public services), tuition costs and university administrative costs and staffing have skyrocketed, while professor salaries have stagnated.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
(...)
Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.
By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. It's true that a lot of uninformed conservatives use 'small government' as a cudgel anytime the government demonstrates its inefficiency, though the same can be said for any political party and its taglines. The reality of our situation is that the U.S. will never see some radical shift in size and power; a department may be defunded here or there, the military will always lose funding in peacetime (only to be rapidly built up again in wartime, reflecting the tuition example), and states will always be held to account for federal laws through withheld funding. What're your thoughts on the concept of a small government? Do you think it's even a relevant topic today, or do you feel otherwise, and that maybe a larger government is always more beneficial?
169
« on: June 15, 2016, 05:32:42 PM »
About 30 minutes in and it's not too bad so far tbh. The scotch I'm drinking might help.
They're just about to teleport to the planet. When does it start getting bad?
170
« on: June 14, 2016, 10:02:16 PM »
https://popehat.com/2015/12/07/talking-productively-about-guns/Read the article. Snippets below: (...)
If we had the "reasonable gun control" I keep hearing about, what guns would be limited? I'm arguably not a complete idiot, but I can't figure it out. I hear "nobody wants to take away all your guns" a lot — which seems demonstrably false — but what guns do gun-control advocates want to take away, or restrict? Most of the time I don't know and I suspect that the advocates don't know either.
That's because there's a terminology gap. Many people advocating for gun control mangle and misuse descriptive words about guns. No doubt some of them are being deliberately ambiguous, but I think most people just haven't educated themselves on the meaning of a relatively small array of terms. That's how you get a debate framed around gibberish like "multi-automatic round weapons" and the like. You get people using "semi-automatic" and "automatic" without knowing what they mean, and you get the term "assault weapon" thrown about as if it means more than whatever we choose to make it mean, which it does not.
(...)
Me: I don't want to take away dog owners' rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What's an "attack dog?"
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren't military dogs. In fact "military dogs" isn't a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don't be ridiculous. Nobody's trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn't own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you're talking about now.
Me: You're being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I'm not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don't need to own.
You: Can we?
(...)
I hear "my right not to be shot outweighs your right to own a gun." This strikes me as perfectly idiotic. But it's no more idiotic than an imagined right not to be criticized or offended, which is far more popular in modern America.
We've lost the plot. We don't know where rights come from, we don't know or care from whom they protect us, we don't know how to analyze proposed restrictions to them, and brick by brick we've built a culture that scorns rights in the face of real or imagined risks. It is therefore inevitable that talk about Second Amendment rights will be met with scorn or shrugs, and that discussions of what restrictions on rights are permissible will be mushy and unprincipled.
Last night the President of the United States — the President of the United States — suggested that people should be deprived of Second Amendment rights if the government, using secret criteria, in a secret process using secret facts, puts them onto a list that is almost entirely free of due process or judicial review. Because we're afraid, because they could be dangerous was his only justification; he didn't engage the due process issue at all. But he was merely sauntering down a smooth, comfortable, well-lit road paved by most Republicans and Democrats before him since the rise of "tough on crime" rhetoric and especially since 9/11. The President — and other Democrats — may hope that Americans will trust progressives not to overreach in restricting rights. That hope is patently misplaced; Democrats and mainstream progressives haven't been worth a squirt of hot piss on due process or criminal justice rights for more than a generation. In the Great War on Terror and the Great War on Drugs, they're like Bill Murray in Stripes: mildly counter-cultural and occasionally a little mouthy but enthusiastically using the same weapons in the same fight against the same perceived enemy.
171
« on: June 10, 2016, 03:26:17 PM »
No furniture, just an air mattress, a modem/router, and a laptop.
Which room should I turn into my BDSM dungeon?
172
« on: June 05, 2016, 09:03:29 PM »
Or is it just theft?
173
« on: June 03, 2016, 11:08:15 AM »
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/updates/2016/06/02/trump-literally-said-all-those-things/I don't normally just copy entire articles without commenting, but holy shit:This is a man who said that more countries should have nuclear weapons, including Saudi Arabia.
ANDERSON COOPER: Saudi Arabia, nuclear weapons?
TRUMP: Saudi Arabia, absolutely.
This is someone who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO – the countries that work with us to root out terrorists abroad before the strike us at home.
TRUMP: “We don't really need NATO in its current form. NATO is obsolete… if we have to walk, we walk.”
He believes we can treat the U.S. economy like one of his casinos and default on our debts to the rest of the world, which would cause an economic catastrophe far worse than anything we experienced in 2008.
TRUMP: “I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts... I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”
He has said that he would order our military to carry out torture...
TRUMP: “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work — torture works… Waterboarding is fine, but it’s not nearly tough enough, ok?”
and the murder of civilians who are related to suspected terrorists...
TRUMP: "The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families”
even though those are war crimes.
TRUMP: “They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me, If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
He says he doesn’t have to listen to our generals or ambassadors, because he has – quote – “a very good brain.”
TRUMP: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things...my primary consultant is myself”
He also said, “I know more about ISIS than the generals, believe me.”
TRUMP: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me.”
You know what? I don’t believe him.
TRUMP: “We don't even really know who the leader [of ISIS] is.”
He believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese...
TRUMP: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
and has the gall to say prisoners of war like John McCain aren’t heroes.
TRUMP: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured, ok? I hate to tell you.”
He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin...
TRUMP: "I will tell you, in terms of leadership, he's getting an 'A,' and our president is not doing so well.”
and picks fights with our friends – including the British prime minister…
TRUMP: "It looks like we are not going to have a very good relationship. Who knows?"
the mayor of London…
TRUMP: "Let's take an I.Q. test... I think they're very rude statements and frankly, tell him, I will remember those statements."
the German chancellor…
TRUMP: “What Merkel has done is incredible, it’s actually mind boggling. Everyone thought she was a really great leader and now she’s turned out to be this catastrophic leader. And she’ll be out if they don’t have a revolution.”
the president of Mexico…
TRUMP: “I don't know about the Hitler comparison [President Nieto made]. I hadn't heard that, but it's a terrible comparison. I'm not happy about that certainly. I don't want that comparison, but we have to be strong and we have to be vigilant”
and the Pope.
TRUMP: “I don’t think [the Pope] understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico. I think Mexico got him to [criticize the wall] it because they want to keep the border just the way it is. They’re making a fortune, and we’re losing.”
He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.
TRUMP: “I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, Miss Universe contest, which was a big, big, incredible event.”
And to top it off, he believes America is weak. An embarrassment.
TRUMP: "I think we've become very weak and ineffective."
He called our military a disaster.
TRUMP: “Our military is a disaster.”
He said we’re – quote – a “third-world country.”
TRUMP: “We have become a third world country, folks.”
That’s why it’s no small thing when he talks about leaving NATO or says he’ll stay neutral on Israel’s security.
TRUMP: “Let me be sort of a neutral guy.”
It’s no small thing when he calls Mexican immigrants rapists and murderers.
TRUMP: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
And it’s no small thing when he suggests that America should withdraw our military support for Japan, encourage them to get nuclear weapons...
TRUMP: “And frankly, the case could be made, that let them protect themselves against North Korea. They’d probably wipe them out pretty quick.”
and said this about a war between Japan and North Korea – and I quote – “If they do, they do. Good luck, enjoy yourself, folks.”
TRUMP: “And if they fight, you know what, that would be a terrible thing, terrible. Good luck folks, enjoy yourself…if they do, they do”
Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program. Ask him. It’ll become clear very quickly.
TRUMP: “When those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-size military nuclear capability ready to go." (Politifact: False.)
There’s no risk of people losing their lives if you blow up a golf-course deal. But it doesn’t work like that in world affairs. Just like being interviewed on the same episode of “60 Minutes” as Putin is not the same as actually dealing with Putin.
TRUMP: “I got to know him very well, because we were both on 60 minutes, we were stablemates and we did very well that night. You know that.”
He wants to start a trade war with China.
TRUMP: "These dummies say, 'Oh, that's a trade war. Trade war? We're losing $500 billion in trade with China. Who the hell cares if there's a trade war?”
And I have to say, I don’t understand Donald’s bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America. He praised China for the Tiananmen Square massacre; he said it showed strength.
TRUMP: “When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength."
He said, “You’ve got to give Kim Jong Un credit” for taking over North Korea – something he did by murdering everyone he saw as a threat, including his own uncle, which Donald described gleefully, like he was recapping an action movie.
TRUMP: "And you've got to give him credit. How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals…. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle. He wiped out this one, that one. I mean, this guy doesn't play games.”
And he said that, if he were grading Vladimir Putin as a leader, he’d give him an A.
TRUMP: "I will tell you, in terms of leadership, he's getting an 'A,'
What’s Trump’s [ISIS plan]? He won’t say. He is literally keeping it a secret. The secret, of course, is he has no idea what he’d do to stop ISIS.
TRUMP: “I do know what to do and I would know how to bring ISIS to the table or beyond that, defeat ISIS very quickly and I’m not going to tell you what is… All I can tell you it is a foolproof way of winning.”
Just look at the few things he actually has said on the subject. He actually said – quote – “maybe Syria should be a free zone for ISIS.” That’s right – let a terrorist group have control of a major country in the Middle East.
TRUMP: It's really rather amazing, maybe Syria should be a free zone for ISIS, let them fight and then you pick up the remnants.
Then he said we should send tens of thousands of American ground troops to the Middle East to fight ISIS.
TRUMP: "We really have no choice. We have to knock out ISIS. We have to knock the hell out of them… I would listen to the generals but I'm hearing numbers of 20,000 to 30,000. We have to knock them out fast."
He also refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against ISIS, which would mean mass civilian casualties.
TRUMP: “I’m never going to rule anything out—I wouldn’t want to say [if I’d use nuclear weapons against ISIS.]”
Trump says over and over again, “The world is laughing at us.” He’s been saying this for decades.
TRUMP (1999): "[Saudi Arabians] take such advantage of us with the oil... and they laugh at this country.
TRUMP (2010): "I know many of the people in China, I know many of the big business people, and they're laughing at us.”
TRUMP (2011): “We have become a laughingstock, the world’s whipping boy”
TRUMP (2012): “The world is laughing at us."
TRUMP (2013): “After Syria, our enemies are laughing!”
TRUMP (2014): “Mexican leadership has been laughing at us for many years”
TRUMP (2015): “The Persians are great negotiators. They are laughing at the stupidity of the deal we’re making”
TRUMP (2016): “We can't afford to be so nice and so foolish anymore. Our country is in trouble. ISIS is laughing at us.”
He bought full-page ads in newspapers across the country back in 1987, when Reagan was President, saying that America lacked a backbone and the world was – you guessed it – laughing at us.
TRUMP (1987): "The world is laughing at America's politicians as we protect ships we don't own, carrying oil we don't need, destined for allies who won't help… "Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."
And it matters when he makes fun of disabled people...
TRUMP: “Now the poor guy -- you oughta see this guy [imitating disabled reporter] ‘aaah, I don’t know what I said, aaah, I don’t remember.’”
calls women pigs...
TRUMP: “Does everybody know that pig named Rosie O’Donnell? She’s a disgusting pig, right?”
proposes banning an entire religion from our country...
TRUMP: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”
or plays coy with white supremacists.
TRUMP: "I don't know anything about what you're even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So I don't know. I don't know -- did he endorse me, or what's going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists."
174
« on: June 03, 2016, 10:52:41 AM »
http://airshowstuff.com/v4/2016/blue-angel-6-killed-in-crash-during-smyrna-tn-practice/Captain Jeff Kuss was practicing a split-s maneuver shortly after takeoff (a regular part of the Blue Angels airshow), in which he rolls inverted and levels out the opposite direction. He lost control and put the aircraft in a field rather than ejecting and letting it crash into a nearby bowling alley (this is largely speculation but has been supported by various accounts). Just saw these guys preflighting their jets on the way in to work yesterday. These guys haven't had a crash in over a decade, and I can't imagine what they and their families are going through right now. Coincidentally, the Air Force equivalent team, the Thunderbirds, also had a crash earlier yesterday morning after performing at a graduation ceremony in which the president was speaking; their pilot safely ejected.
175
« on: June 03, 2016, 10:13:06 AM »
So I'm making my way through the Nathan Drake collection to build up to Uncharted 4, and I figured I'd share some first impressions. Not a full review or a narrated playthrough like Verb's doing.
I'm only on Uncharted 1 right now, and I'm really hoping the series gets better from here.
Good:
-Great voice acting, animation, and writing (even if it's unoriginal)
-Solid pacing (the 'tutorial' stage transitions seamlessly into the normal game)
-Doesn't include unnecessary origin stuff or backstory info
Bad:
-The game is frustratingly linear
-The climbing is superior to the first Assassin Creed (released around the same time) but is linear and the camera is often locked in awkward places
-The shooting elements are mediocre and don't add anything to the game except to provide filler between puzzles
-Puzzles are...kind of stupid.
-The camera and lighting make it difficult to solve puzzles or figure out where to go
Overall it's a fun game but I'm just trying to blow through it in the hopes that the later games improve on these issues.
176
« on: June 03, 2016, 09:40:12 AM »
Kinda sucked, right?
Michael Fassbender was good, but beyond that the talented actors are completely wasted (Oscar Isaac is great, but his character is incredibly boring), and don't forget to include the JLaw dickriding that every movie she's in needs, despite the fact that she has one acting setting: pissed off rebel teenager. She basically does nothing in the movie, and her mutant powers are never used to accomplish anything. James McAvoy tries his damndest to keep a straight face during some of the stupidest Professor X writing in any X-Men movie, especially when he gets into a fist fight with goddamn Apocalypse. The action was almost entirely an actor floating in front of a green screen while yelling, the entire Weapon-X arc was filler, and Sansa Stark still can't emote to save her life.
Other stupid stuff:
-Prologue: huge pyramid is completely demolished by two conveniently place blocks, somehow
-50% of the movie is slow motion CGI scenes of dust and debris floating around
-JLaw's speech at the end
-Jean ex machina
-Magneto, a genius mutant with prolonged life did not realize there was metal in the ground
-Apocalypse can instantly disintegrate anything, but decides to go easy on the X-Men
-Psylocke's supercharged power is just...a slightly bigger purple sword thing?
-Olivia Munn was in the movie
-Bad guys' armor looked like cosplay
-Good guys fly from Alkali Lake (west coast USA) to Cairo in about 5 minutes
Last Stand/10
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« on: May 14, 2016, 11:53:27 AM »
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-aliens.html?_r=0 Known for her grasp of policy, Mrs. Clinton has spoken at length in her presidential campaign on topics as diverse as Alzheimer’s research and military tensions in the South China Sea. But it is her unusual knowledge about extraterrestrials that has struck a small but committed cohort of voters.
Mrs. Clinton has vowed that barring any threats to national security, she would open up government files on the subject, a shift from President Obama, who typically dismisses the topic as a joke. Her position has elated U.F.O. enthusiasts, who have declared Mrs. Clinton the first “E.T. candidate.”
“Hillary has embraced this issue with an absolutely unprecedented level of interest in American politics,” said Joseph G. Buchman, who has spent decades calling for government transparency about extraterrestrials.
Mrs. Clinton, a cautious candidate who often bemoans being the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, has shown surprising ease plunging into the discussion of the possibility of extraterrestrial beings.
178
« on: May 14, 2016, 08:58:39 AM »
If anyone else will be there over the course of the next week, let me know what you look like and where you'll be so I can avoid seeing you at all. Spoiler Unless your name is Rocketman.
179
« on: May 13, 2016, 03:25:00 PM »
Last event was yesterday, finished checking out today, and the graduation ceremony is in a couple weeks. In the meantime, I'm off to Orlando for 5 days.
Some of it sucked, most of it was a blast. It's the best worst thing to happen to me (flying wasn't even on my preference list when I got in, it's just what I was given). Next I'm off to Virginia for a year of aircraft-specific training and then a 3-year fleet tour (deployments).
AMA, etc.
180
« on: May 06, 2016, 04:59:36 PM »
I'm moving there soon, and the two places I was most interested in suddenly dropped out a few days before we plan to go see houses. If anyone lives there and knows of any prospective homes for rent around NAS Norfolk ($1,200-1,800/mo), let me know.
Or if not, just talk about places I should visit when I'm there.
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