Don’t forget the classic: Suck off, Nazi Punks!

Not original to me. Totally stole it.

Novel inbound. Don’t think I’ve ever written this down.

I hadn’t heard of the big mountain lion from Florida, I’ll have to look into it. Nifty.

I have heard that the lions in Florida experienced a bad genetic bottleneck and are inbred and won’t survive long term without intervention. There has been discussion about bringing in fresh breeding stock to try and help them, don’t know if its been instituted.

I saw mine deep in the woods, about 10mi north of a place called Cougar Holler. (I heard about that holler after this.) I saw the cat in Skyline WMA in North Alabama. Was 2mi from a road, no trail, after dark, coming up the side of a holler.

On a flat spot up the side, almost to the top, I saw what looked like green headlights coming towards me. It was confusing because you couldn’t even get a four wheeler in there and it was quiet. Realized it was eyes as it got closer, we were moving towards each other. Got to about 20 yards and realized it was a giant cat. LED lamp, so color isn’t great/lot of green, but it looked like gold/tan fur and white belly. Its tail was proportionally shorter than a house cat and longer than a bobcat. End of the tail was squarish, almost tufted. Face was blocky and a little flatter than a common housecat. It was twice, maybe three times the size of a bobcat, so probably a juvenile.

The way it moved was like a snake slithering. It was up on a deadfall, and it kept sliding out of my light. It slid off the log towards me. At that point I drew my handgun and started growling and hissing. It stopped and stared at me and I kept moving towards it. It turned back the way it came and just casually slithered away. It wasn’t afraid of me, just no longer interested.

I know bobcats and house cats. This was not that.

I will never, ever, forget its eyes or the way it moved. The entire event is burned into my memory. Adrenaline was up, but I wasn’t scared, living in the moment, excited. Got the shakes when I made it back to my truck and sat down.

One of the peak experiences of my life.

Yup. Unfortunately, once released, the magic smoke is gone and cannot be replaced.

All electrical components contain magic smoke that was put into them at the time of manufacture. If that smoke is released, it doesn’t work anymore.

Some broken or malfunctioning machinery respond to incantations projected with emotion. Cuss a machine hard enough and it will start working again.

Another one I’ve personally experienced, but don’t know of any studies for: the main casting of machining equipment such as mills or lathes is a big crystal with unique properties. Each machine has different frequencies it resonates at when cutting. You can hear and feel the vibration when cutting and tune the machine/program for more efficient cutting and tool life. Sort of like taking a guitar that is out of tune and tuning it to a pleasant chord. Two identical machines will need different tunings. This tuning can change over time due to wear, temperature, humidity or maybe the phase of the moon.

Unrelated to machinery: there are mountain lions in the deep south in the deep woods. I had one check me out once. The state wildlife agency denies the modern existence of mountain lions and I didn’t believe in them until I was face to face with one. I had to growl and hiss at it to convince it that I wasn’t interesting.

I have a pi 4 server that hangs up after a few days. Tried to track down what was causing it but didn’t go to extremes. Most expedient solution was to force a reboot.

Have a cron job that reboots the pi at 3:00 AM each day. Easy work around, lazy was better.

Thanks for putting this into words. I’ve had a vague discontent and disgruntlement with superhero crap for a long time. While this isn’t the only reason I dislike superhero movies, this is a big part of it.

I do still like The Punisher movie with Jain, Dredd, The Crow, and a few others. Antiheros in general. They’re also more human and not as one dimensional.

“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”

That’s a good quote. Who is it from?

Yup. This is one area where machining and machine movement is still an art. It can be scienced but it’s expensive to model a machine that well and CAM software still needs a lot of handholding beyond 3ax moves. That will eventually change, I expect someone will slap some ‘AI’ into CAM. I wonder, however, if it won’t actually require something close to general AI for real world utility.

Welp. This will be stupid.

Having exported myself from the deep South to Yankee land, “Y’all have a good one!” never fails to brighten the day of someone working a cash register.

In general, folks up here really like southern politeness. They think sugar wouldn’t melt in my mouth. I get stopped in stores to talk all the time. Pretty frequently, they just give me a discount. I thought Yankees were supposed to be rude, but they’re actually really nice in public.

Ruger 10/22 for general varmint control and small game. Ruger wrangler .22 revolver for snakes and close up varmint control, works well with ratshot. Browning BPS 12 gauge for pretty much all shotgun needs.

1911 is also a damn fine handgun.

My presentation had the Russian video where the kid gets wrapped up around a bar. Also had the pictures from where the guy got wrapped around a chuck and there is an eyeball sitting on top of the pile.

The manual lathe is the most dangerous piece of equipment in a shop in terms of fatalities. They cannot be made ‘safe’. You can only train people how to use them safely and not put idiots on them.

I’ve seen the chuck key of shame used and support its use. My rule was one chuck key fuckup, second offense, immediate termination.

I used to have a safety presentation on lathes. It was called, “The Happy Fun Lathe Safety Presentation.” Kittens and puppies on the title and chock full of gore.

SPEAK UP, F**ET! FADDER CAN’T HEAR YOU!

Spacedicks was a terrible place full of terrible people, but I still feel like something has been lost.

Shh. Only dreams now.

Ehh. IDK if that would be bad or good for Linux. More choices against the possibility of weaker teams/poorer code. Even if things did fragment for a while, one version likely comes out on top and everyone migrates slowly back together.

Interwebs and tech seems to route around this sort of thing.

No clue how all this shakes out. Not real invested in this ideological/bureaucratic slap fight.

It’s always entertaining when Linus flames off.

Anna’s Archive for ebooks.

I mean, I have a home server setup with 32 terabytes of NAS in a RAID 5 running the *Arrs and Jellyfin pulling from Usenet. Also running Calibre and paying for Anna’s.

Like I told a friend that got huffy with me over how I do my sailing, “I been pirating since you had babyteeth.”

You can be prickly if you want, but increased piracy is a symptom of a service problem. If Netflix hadn’t gone to shit, I’d still be using it. I’m considering paying for Samsung’s art subscription for my TV.

I will pay a reasonable price for convenient media. Make it difficult or expensive enough, and I’ll sail the high seas. Time is money.