Superfluous J

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from a guy who knows a kid who's going with the girl who saw a moderator pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I think it's serious.

I've got nothing to ask him (except his favorite ice cream flavor or if he's tired today or other burning questions like that) but I'm curious to see his answers to whatever he is asked. Not expecting much, but I never really do. Hey it's gotten me this far.

Please don't post this on X, Elon might see it and feel attacked.

Because otherwise all you'd see is rehashing all the same things and people arguing about if we should or should not rehash all the old things. There's literally nothing left to say yet people are saying it anyway. Over and over and over.

I knew never updating voluntarily would save me some day. This is the first I heard of the Windows thing.

As someone who was adopted I can confirm, the joke is both funny and non-offensive.

News at 11.

I agree. I'm not talking about that though. I'm talking about what will inevitably happen to HarvesteR if he dares not now produce a complete KSP clone better than the original that will run on a phone. "But HARVESTER you PROMISED!" Just wait. It'll happen.

They also haven't said something along the lines of "We're going to try to do X" and then months later be called out because X isn't there. I'll talk to you then as well.

Just watched Beverly Hills Cop IV on Netflix. Not a great movie (though not a terrible one) but man that soundtrack. Which is pretty much the soundtrack from the first movie. Including this song.

Anger and vitriol when those intentions - which are taken as promises - don't pan out. At least that's my experience.

I grew up loving space, and spaceflight. I saw Star Wars in the theater and parents today would be shocked at how young I was allowed to watch people shooting each other and blowing each other up. I was *just* old enough to enjoy it but not old enough to realize that yeah, the Stormtroopers executed Luke's aunt and uncle in cold blood and one of them was running away on fire when they died. By the time I was 10, I was reading hard sci fi like Asimov and Heinlein, and before I could drive I'd read the first 3 Dune books, and while those were all great what I really found myself drawn to were the ones with realistic space flight, where travel times and moving targets meant complicated trajectories and multi-hour or -day burns to both speed up and slow down. I devoured the first two of Niven's Ringworld books (the third turned me off early and I never finished it) the entire Heechee Saga by Fredrick Pohl (Again, I was too young for a lot of the themes the first time I read it, but I still loved it), and one of my favorites was The Integral Trees - again by Larry Niven. The Integral Trees is like a primer for orbital maneuver planning. It takes place in a ring of breathable air orbiting a star, where there is no ground and the "Integral trees" are up to 100 km long, and stay aimed at (and away from) the star by tidal forces, catching organic matter in their endpoints in the wind that blows by because that air is orbiting the star slower or faster than the tree itself. Amazing thought put into those things. And the people who lived in this "smoke ring" know how to navigate it, not because of orbital mechanics but because of a mantra: "East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East, Port and Starboard bring you back." They learned Orbital Mechanics not by studying the sky, but by living in it. Anyway mumblty-mumble years later, I'm watching this Minecraft player on YouTube and he starts a new series where little green Minions launch themselves into space or explode trying. I was instantly transfixed. What a PERFECT mix of silly goofy fun and real, honest to goodness orbital mechanics. A friend of mine said it best when he told me, "It's as if someone asked me to describe the perfect game for me, and then they made Kerbal Space Program." I didn't get a career because of this game, or decide to try to become an astronaut or rocket scientist. It didn't get me to look at the skies more (I already did that!) or appreciate the cosmos (I did that too). What it DID do was allow me to participate in it in a way that I never could before. It was tangible. I wasn't imagining what it was like to go to another planet. I was DOING IT. I'm going to be frank here: The failure of KSP2 isn't that big a deal to me personally (though for literally everybody involved on all the sides of everything I wish it had done better) because I always knew I wouldn't play it anywhere near how much I played the original. Apparently if you do something for 10 thousand hours, you're an expert at it. Well I'm an expert at Kerbal Space Program and KSP2 can't teach me much more about orbital mechanics. Sure it could have applied those orbital mechanics in a unique way, but I've reached the end of the learning curve and - for me - that learning curve (which was more like a learning precipice) was where I derived my enjoyment of the game. Now that I know how to do everything I wanted to learn from the game... it's a bit boring, if that isn't blasphemous to say. And it's okay that it bores me. I got TEN FREAKING THOUSAND HOURS before I got bored. I orbited through a Mun arch. I landed inside the Tylo cave. I used Tylo to get a better encounter of Tylo (something my brain still refuses to believe is reasonable). I've flown on Jool and glided a dragonfly across Duna. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Oh wait wrong monologue. Anyway you get the idea. I've said before that really the only thing keeping me here is the community, but also tethering me to this forum the sheer mass of ten thousand hours of experiences that I can't really share with many other people than those here, and those who have left here never to be heard from again. So that's my KSP testimonial; what it is to me. It's not a game, really. It's a learning tool. The purpose of KSP to me was to learn how to play KSP and I did it. It took a hefty fraction of my life but I did it and now that I have all those skills... I don't really have much to do with them. Which is kinda sad when you think about it.

I don't know anyone who says you should watch those shows. Xena had Lucy Lawless so is inherently good, but yeah it was pretty campy. Hercules isn't worth the bandwidth to watch, even if the bandwidth is free. Though that does bring up TV shows, which I didn't even consider in my original post. So let's see... Lost - I decided in Season 1 (having not watched a single minute) that they had no idea where the show was going and were just making it up as they went. So glad I didn't bother, now that I know I was right. Star Trek Lower Decks - I watched 2 episodes, the pilot and the next episode after it. I only watched the 2nd one to make sure the pilot was bad but the show was good. It's way too "woo look at us we're in a cartoon!" for me. How I Met Your Mother - Pass. Big Bang Theory - Double Pass, because I won't watch Young Sheldon either.

We'll die in the cold darkness of space?