Nuke

these days i only drink single malt bourbon. im not in my 20s any more and tequila is no longer for me.

looks like youtube relented, i can watch videos again.

looks like youtube finally committed seppuku. now blocking after 3 videos. ball is in your court adblockers. i will not watch youtube again unless i can block ads. especially when my adblocker is blocking over 300 items. thats a lot of script i dont want running in my browser.

there is a local custom why by local businesses and organizations put free snacks and sometimes booze out for their patrons in the prelude up till christmas. a custom i usually avoid like the plague for its uncanny ability to draw uncomfortable crowds. turns out today there is such a thing across the street from the place i for for my weekly therapy session. at first mom wanted to go to it. and initially im fine with it, its only across the street and a minor diversion from my usual routine. i told her i could drop her off and join her after my session (she has a mobility scooter, she could go to any of them by herself if she wanted). then she decided she didnt feel well and that she wanted to stay home. then i said in that case i probibly wouldn't go at all, as extra snacks are not worth the anxiety (not to mention the calories, i just lost 10 pounds, i dont want them back). then she changes her mind and decides she wants to go. its up in the air whether she goes or not. but it bugs the hell out of me that me not going is not an option.

so putting today's lego star wars advent calander model together imposed a challenge. a cat was on my desk. i knew if i dumped the parts out of the bag, the cat would scatter them to the four winds. so i did the only thing i could do, i assembled the ship in the bag without opening it. looks like yoda's ship from the clone wars. now i have to stand up all my minifigs that the cat fell with its tail. no jedi can resist the power of the cat side.

i can imagine a system where you bore out a vertical shaft in rock, and cap it with a prefab dome, sealed with concrete or whatever and an inner coating to make it air tight. you deploy some prefab metal decks and walls to create compartments. you put your farms and water reclamation at the top, these provide shielding from what makes it through the dome. this also works on lower gravity worlds, except scaled up and using an internal conical centrifuge to supplement local gravity.

the last season of for all mankind hit the nail on the head with that one. eventually you end up with a black market, and attempts to clamp down on it will result in a lot of violence. you are better off just letting people do their free trade in the open. make it possible to purchase space on your earth-mars shipments. some space will be reserved for this (you would of course need to pay for its share of the launch costs) so long as it doesnt endager the base or life support or some basic safety requirements, it should be allowed. if people are killing each other over vodka and beef jerky you have a problem.

urbanites always need fake nature a few minutes drive away, i never really understood that. i can just go out side and get the real thing. probibly necessary on mars because i can imagine the requirements for basic life support being more than a single individual can handle. so prospects for being a cave dwelling hermit on mars are not great.

you know you can build origami structures, weld them and turn them into spheres with explosives. process does require water though. that said you only have to hold one atmosphere of pressure and these could probibly hold many times that. a process for manufacturing reinforced concrete domes could also be used. there is one process where you lay your concrete flat and inflate a bladder to domify it, but i cant find video. other proceses involve having an inflated volume, building a rebar cage around it, and then pouring on the concrete. again water required. having prefab aluminum triangles with brackets welded on so you can connect them with bolts or some other fastener. id have these on the outside (also makes them stackable for transport) so you can coat the interior with several layers of resin. you can also have tiles with windows and airlocks that fit the pattern as well as a foundation plate. thing is you just need to build one, equiped for the production of the tiles. you could probibly stamp them from sheet stock with just a die press. really i think its a matter of putting a starship on its side, removing the tank bulkheads (or perhaps build them with hatches welded to them so you can just cut out a section of bulkhead plate and have a door and rooms and need not mod the tanks). just build the ship with hab conversion in mind. engines can be removed, put into storage for spares on other ships. tanks can also be used to store water or other liquid/gaseous consumables. bonus if equipped with dome manufacturing equipment. you see a lot of those on your way into the alaskan interior. saw at least half a dozen on a drive to fairbanks once.

yea probibly, she is quite fat. today she belly flopped right on top of my lego star wars advent calendar in an attempt to cuddle. she also knocked my coke off the desk.

like most food poisoning once you get it out of your system you are usually fine. she seems ok today. idk what she ate though, the other cat ate the same food and didnt have a problem. maybe she had some unauthorized fast food. i doubt it though, she is incredibly lazy.

i hear they used to use that song in the soviet union, as anti-american propaganda.

cats. yesterday i decided to give the floor a good cleaning. the house was starting to stink. this morning one of my cats managed to create no fewer than a dozen piles of vomit on the floor. there is some law of physics that says that no floor may stay clean for more than 24 hours. had it not been the cats it would have just as well been mom, or some unexpected visitor with mud boots (like the maintenance man for the building). this is the kind of bs that makes me not want to clean house.

launching a rocket still requires a lot of ground infrastructure. you might get the cost down a lot but launching from and landing at a floating installation requires that installation have a lot of industrial capacity, or a lot of storage, neither of which is easy to float. a rotating hab does not require the trip up and down the well. especially if were just talking a science installation to operate clockwork rovers on the surface. for an industrial hub, there are better locales for that (moon, mars and belt being a lot more accessible). for an agrarian colony it kind of works out well. if you can convince people to want to live on the rim of hell anyway. but at some point in the greater colonization of the solar system it makes sense to have a few bread baskets, and earth is finite. that is a lot further down the tech tree though. perhaps if airship to orbit ever works out, it will be well suited to a venusian application (you dont ever really want to land those things anyway).

judging by the 3 bands listed in recently played in winamp, that would be blackened death metal (behemoth), war metal (sodom), and early black metal which is really just thrash (venom). also a zztopified version of the pantera classic.

ive never been wary to spell it out in certain terms that i hate the holiday season. after much heel dragging i finally put the tree up and i spent the last week strategically sleeping during every free event in the paper that mom wants to go to but i cannot fathom why (its probibly the snacks). never mind that such crowds are a source of panic attacks for me, and they come so fast that i never get the recovery time an introvert needs. my opinion never really matters, she is dependent on me for all her social activities even though she is fully capable of doing it on her own. the only up side to all of this is that my racing heart might rupture in the process and end my suffering. bah humbug.

i dont really see a point in having a floating venus base. you have to do the equivalent of an earth launch and re entry to get there and back (to orbit), and there is no way to do any kind of resource extraction except from the atmosphere. probibly cant carry much mass, so even if you could make product from atmosphere, you could never launch it. at least on the moon or mars you can strip mine like mad and have materials for both colony expansion and export (presumably to elsewhere in the solar system).

i presume because mars is mostly co2. molecular mass is part of the equation.

so its a wing commander prequel?

i think a big problem with magboots is that the materials they stick to tend to be heavy and not suitable for spacecraft construction. magnets can stick to aluminum if they are spinning though, but that requires a more complicated and power hungry boot.

i think of it more as swimming in air. astronauts seem to have some techniques for controlling their orientation in the station. in vacuum you need thrusters or gyros like any other spacecraft. however i think they make do with whatever handholds and footholds exist on the outside since nobody really uses an mmu anymore.

the day youtube forces ads is the day i stop watching youtube. with ublock under firefox, there are no ads. there is also the bing trick, where if you search for specific videos on bing, you can watch them without ads. but were not there yet.

spacex knows how to antenna. the starlink dishes alone are evidence of that. they just need to make it stronger.

you cant put antennas behind armor though. position of said antennas are also critical because they set up the positional relationship between the booster and the tower. if the antenna is bent a few feet away from where its supposed to be, then the mechazilla arms will miss by that much. i assume its built like a cnc machine. anyone who owns a 3d printer knows what happens when something nudges the print bed mid print.

cold water always worked for me.