What did you do today?

[BA-Forums]

I watched the new bluey episode, "Surprise."

[SunlitZelkova]

2 hours ago, BA-Forums said:

I watched the new bluey episode, "Surprise."

Is Bluey interesting and engaging for adolescents and/or adults too?

I still watch The Backyardigans every now and then btw.

[Nuke]

slept mostly, got out of bed around 9:30 pm.

[BA-Forums]

21 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Is Bluey interesting and engaging for adolescents and/or adults too?

I still watch The Backyardigans every now and then btw.

ABSOLUTELY!

[BA-Forums]

drew some bluey art. might post it here, idk. also i got 7 victory royales at once lol i was bored.

[Kerbalsaurus]

I’m at our family’s Cranberry farm for Take Your Kid to Work Day. Walked out onto the bogs and got these pictures.

[BA-Forums]

36 minutes ago, Kerbalsaurus said:

I’m at our family’s Cranberry farm for Take Your Kid to Work Day. Walked out onto the bogs and got these pictures.

Wow!

[TheSaint]

On 4/25/2024 at 9:41 AM, Kerbalsaurus said:

I’m at our family’s Cranberry farm for Take Your Kid to Work Day. Walked out onto the bogs and got these pictures.

Mildly curious: Were you the parent or the kid?

Today I loaded 400 rounds of 9mm ammunition, cleaned the kitchen, and played a game of Ticket to Ride with my family. And consumed an adult dose of alcohol. In an appropriate order.

Tomorrow I am going to attend church, cook breakfast, and then attempt to duplicate Zankou Chicken for dinner. Pray for me.

[Kerbalsaurus]

6 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Mildly curious: Were you the parent or the kid?

The kid.

[tater]

Had lunch with, and got a tour of Houston with my wife’s PhD advisor. Last night was tiki bar with nasa people, and next is the Stones

[TheSaint]

16 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Today I loaded 400 rounds of 9mm ammunition, cleaned the kitchen, and played a game of Ticket to Ride with my family. And consumed an adult dose of alcohol. In an appropriate order.

Tomorrow I am going to attend church, cook breakfast, and then attempt to duplicate Zankou Chicken for dinner. Pray for me.

Okay, so far the Zankou duplication is going better than we could have imagined. Homemade pita, homemade tabbouleh, and homemade toum are all done. So far the biggest problem is stopping ourselves from eating all the tabbouleh and toum on the pita before the chicken is done.

[SunlitZelkova]

20 hours ago, TheSaint said:

Today I loaded 400 rounds of 9mm ammunition, cleaned the kitchen, and played a game of Ticket to Ride with my family. And consumed an adult dose of alcohol. In an appropriate order.

My mom bought me that game for me when I was like 9 or 10 and we never played it. It’s still in her game closet, so we’ll need to try it out some time.

Edited April 29 by SunlitZelkova

[TheSaint]

45 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

My mom bought me that game for me when I was like 9 or 10 and we never played it. It’s still in her game closet, so we’ll need to try it out some time.

It's a great game. We have the original version, Europe, and Switzerland. Last night was Europe, and Thing #2 beat me by 2 points.

Oh, and dinner was amazing. Now we're all sitting around in garlic-infused food coma.

Edited April 29 by TheSaint

[AstroWolfie]

I signed up for a miniature painting contest on Saturday, Star Wars Legion to be specific. I’m kitbashing some clone troopers to make a commander.

[LittleBitMore]

I went on a walk today to Subway, and while standing at an intersection, two teens were standing there also waiting at the intersection. After leaving them behind, a few minutes later one of them drives up to me in their car and says "you're my favorite character!" I then ask, "what??" and they repeat themselves and drive off with a thumbs up. Very surreal but a compliment I will be riding off the high from for months!

My best guess is that my outfit was certainly something today, considering I was wearing a white hoodie, a white shirt, gray summer shorts, heavy winter gloves, teal and gray shoes, headphones, and these massive iridescent skier sunglasses

Edited May 5 by LittleBitMore

[Rutabaga22]

I took my dogs for a walk because I thought it had stopped raining. Then it started thundering. I spent most of my day beyond that modding a new skyrim install because this came out. 
 

 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, Rutabaga22 said:

I took my dogs for a walk because I thought it had stopped raining. Then it started thundering

I had a similar day. Took a walk, and 2 minutes into it had to take shelter from a thunderstorm that lasted all of 5 minutes.

Then I went for ice cream and while standing in line, had another 5 minute shower interrupt an otherwise nice time. Luckily Handel's has awnings

[Ryaja]

It snowed today, its been mid 70's for the past few weeks but now there's snow. I guess that's Utah weather for you.

[Jacke]

I've been getting over a cold.  Will go out for a short walk soon.  Then I'll watch the Starliner launch.

EDIT: By the time I got back, Starliner launch was scrubbed.  Oh well, there's always next time.

Edited May 7 by Jacke

[SunlitZelkova]

I finished reading the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. When I say finished reading, I mean reading the arguments rather than the evidence, because the book is kind of self-defeating after a certain point.

It claims, with evidence, that arguments about how the organization of society developed, mainly that we went from tribes to city-states to empires (I’m paraphrasing there), come from philosophy and are not supported by modern day anthropological and archaeological evidence.

I think their theories are very effective when it comes to looking at North America, because it’s self-evident from data gathered as early as the 19th century that the ways different groups of people organized their society varied. The idea of idyllic tribes living among nature, oblivious to complexity, philosophy, and creativity, is very much a colonial stereotype.

It gets more difficult to believe when they try to reframe theories about places in China, Egypt, Eastern Europe, and Mesopotamia, mainly because it involves thinking about well known places in different ways.

The authors successfully illustrate how scientists during anthropology’s infancy were captive to their own biases in creating notions like “the state” and categorizing societies based on their mode of subsistence.

But it raises the question of whether these authors are captive to their own biases (one is an anarchist activist) in trying to paint a certain picture of history being a certain way or another.

Their arguments about the nature of how we organize society track and so does their criticism of “big history”’s presentation of human history.

I am just skeptical how historical evidence can be used to support a discussion of those arguments (from either side) when, as illustrated when it comes to how Caucasian scholars looked at indigenous American societies and history and how that influenced the popular view of them, everyone seems to be so beholden to their political bias.

It’s still a good book though, and I recommend it to everyone. Just be careful not to take the evidence too seriously. They make clear how big history likes to cherry pick information to paint a picture of tribes-to-empires, but it is possible they are doing so too.

[TheSaint]

Today I finished my latest reloading project: 4,000 rounds of 9mm FMJ for range/training. Took a couple of months, but now we should be set for 9mm for a couple of years. Oh, and I get to do the meme:

This is what people think 2,000 rounds of ammunition looks like:

This is what 2,000 rounds of ammunition actually looks like:

[SunlitZelkova]

Today (and yesterday) I attended the 2024 UFO Fest in McMinnville, Oregon. It was my first time going and being around any adults remotely interested in UFOs outside of my family.

There were a number of speaker events. I and my mother attended one with Ryan Graves, Lieutenant USN (ret), and one with Garrett M. Graff, journalist. I chose these two over the others specifically because they are outsiders to the usual Roswell crowd, and represent a neutral ground between denialists and true believers.

Graves' presentation was yesterday, and it was interesting. He runs a non-profit dedicated to gathering UFO/UAP data called Americans For Safe Aerospace. He encountered UAP himself and claims they were commonly seen in the military at least a few years before the 2017 video release.

He shared some interesting data, mainly in that none of the UFOs/UAPs appear to have pilots, only coming in the form of geometric shapes or points of light, sometimes surrounded by what looks like a plasma field, much to the disappointment of some in the audience. The number of military reports his organization collects is actually low due to new reporting procedures, with the next biggest categories being commercial and general aviation. Some are corroborated with ground reports. The details behind some of the sightings are weird, to say the least. His experience with it started during his time with VFA-11 during training off Virginia Beach. They were testing the AN/APG-79 AESA radar upgrade for the F/A-18F and would pick up swarms of odd objects. They thought it was a bug in the system, but continually found targets that weren't supposed to be in the restricted airspace. When they would go to look at them the AIM-9s would detect an IR signature and get a lock, but nothing would appear to be there. Eventually a visual sighting did occur in which a black sphere surrounded by glass buzzed two F-18s within 500 feet.

Idk if anyone remembers, but there have been "UAP" sightings underwater. I always thought that a little silly, and Graves shared what that was, because the incident was registered in his data. Basically a submarine was in the Atlantic and picked up what appeared to be a torpedo moving at 100 knots and tracking them. The captain ordered it to dive, and the target followed them down. The captain actually took it below the safe depth, and the target then approached within 100 yards of the sub before diving further. Graves says he doesn't know whether such incidents are common or not because the submarine community is tight lipped for obvious reasons, and also, he shared that there are operational considerations in why most of the UAP videos come from Navy aircraft rather than Air Force: the Air Force is often actually doing stuff during its missions over the US, while the Navy is simply training.

Graff's presentation was interesting too, but mainly talked about broad concepts of why the UAP is being taken seriously yet again. The gist of it is that after a certain event in 2001, the US became more interested in what was happening in its skies regardless of its affiliation, whereas as the military shrugged once it was obvious the craft weren't Soviet recon vehicles back in the 60s. The other reason he states is that the idea of there being life out there is taken a little more seriously now that we know exoplanets exist.

Neither of these speakers claimed to have definitive answers for what they are, and believed there is not a single answer but many.

Graves simply said he did not have the credentials to ascertain what they are; his mission is to collect data and deal with the stigma around reporting. He did address how Starlink can cause sightings, and described how many "point of light" sightings defy the behavior of a satellite. When asked if the famous video was of a bird (a hypothesis proposed by the members of this forum too), he said he didn't know, but he thought it unlikely due to pilots seeing birds everyday and being unlikely to mistake one for a UAP. He also mentioned that in that specific video the target appeared to come from the east, from the direction of the middle of the Atlantic, while in his experience birds mostly stay around the carrier or near land.

Graff categorized the explanations into four possible categories: Starlink/Venus, experimental drones from the usual suspects*, unknown atmospheric phenomena, and then the "really weird" aliens/interdimensional/time travel whatever. I listed the categories in order of most common to very rare if at all (according to him).

*He cites an alleged incident in which a UAP emerged from the water and then went airborne, which helped the US intelligence community to identify a new Chinese drone. It's another reason why the government is interested again.

While the speakers I listened to were pleasant, the rest of the people were... meh. Between the people soliciting festival attendees for off-topic propaganda purposes or the man who got up to ask Graff a question, only to question him about the "relevancy" of David Icke when it comes to the 2001 event (completely off topic in regard to the presentation, but Graff is an author of an oral history of that event), it's not a crowd I'd like to hang around. Oh, and unfortunately much of the audience (including my mother) were and remain convinced the government is hiding something, despite Graff's attempts to explain at how bad the US government is at keeping secrets (he's been reporting on national security matters for 20 years).

It was fun though. I got a lot of UFO goodies, had some good food and a UFO themed coffee, and attended a parade involving a number of local organizations dressing up as aliens or scifi characters.

I think a person's opinion about UFOs exists on a spectrum. On one end there is Carl Sagan, in the middle there is Jacques Vallee, and at the other end there is Eric Von Daniken (of course outliers in further directions beyond the ends exist too). I like to think I'm firmly in the middle, in that something is happening but it doesn't necessarily fall under the domain of science to investigate. It's more of a psychological and religious phenomena with philosophical implications, IMO. That's why I posted this here and don't plan to mention anything in the Tic-Tac UFO thread in the S&S section. I just don't find it worth discussing in a scientific context.

I think I got lucky in having two normal speakers to choose this time around. The other three were Roswell fanatics. It was a fun event, and I find the topic really interesting, but I don't think I'd attend again unless someone from the outside presents. The work of people like Graves is purported by himself and Graff to be encouraging a more nuanced view of the topic though, so perhaps more like them will be available to visit some day.

P.S. I'm sure some of you are giggling at me, a UFO believer, considering Roswell dudes to be the "insiders" corrupting the topic, and a former USN pilot and a journalist who contributes to big media to be the "outsiders" who can save it with wisdom. For the average UFO fan its no-name trailer park dudes who are the trustworthy outsiders and the government and media that are the swamp trying to keep people in the dark XD

[cubinator]

I bought some mealworms today and started a colony.

[BA-Forums]

I cooked a burger on a grill.

[AstroWolfie]

I’m gonna paint warhammer! Specifically an Infernus marine.

New page!