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Homercles

Certifiably Surly
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Everything posted by Homercles

  1. Y’all can argue about artificial sweeteners in diet soda all you want, but if you fucks with my HEB sparkling water I’ll cut a bitch. Believe the sweetener is sucralose, I drink about 50/50 of sweetened vs unsweetened versions during the day. I don’t know about poison, but combined with all the carbonation I fart enough complete with cows as a source of global warming…still don’t care.
  2. No experience as treatment but grew a ton of my own psilocybin in college. Wonderful stuff…with the right people, mindset, setting, and care. I have zero doubt that it could be used, correctly with a trained professional, to affect impactful change in a persons mental health. The question has been legality and insane barriers to even develop protocol for it. I didn’t watch the video but I know MDMA has proven helpful in small doses with therapy, and I’m sure it’s the same for psychedelics. The way your senses change is indescribable, almost like you finally found the autofocus button for a brief spell…or found a hidden room in your house. The most peaceful I’ve ever felt was watching the sunset while listening to Any Colour You Like on 5g with a close friend…and that memory of ‘everything will be all right’ still pops up in my mind occasionally. No doubt that would be useful to someone.
  3. I’ll throw in my $.02 though it seems I’m not an actual alcoholic but more of a person inclined to self medication…to which alcohol was the drug of choice for a few years. I can tell you where it started for me…the birth of my daughter, kiddo #2. It wasn’t her fault, but she was a very hard baby with digestive issues that affected her sleep and she cried A LOT. In addition I was already in grad school at the time, the added stress from not sleeping, and ultimately adjusting from ‘couple with a cute kiddo’ to ‘all hands on deck just to survive’ drove me to solace in a bottle. My wife made some serious comments and a semi-ultimatum, which got my attention and drove me to therapy. There I learned I have codependent tendencies and look for self worth through others (especially my wife) too much. I’m still that way but I’ve learned to (mostly) brush off the worst days without ‘rewarding’ myself with secret drinking. I still drink, so try to mostly stay away from this thread so I don’t dilute the awesomeness here, but nothing like I was and…more importantly…the reason that I drink when I choose to. My marriage has returned to as normal as can be with two full time working parents with two young kids, and thus my root problem was addressed. The ‘will I / won’t I’ voice is gone, and I can enjoy a few drinks socially without ‘well I started so let’s push it’ voice urging me on…I can have a glass of wine with dinner and not keep going once we get home. To Twice’s point: that’s what seems to separate problem drinkers from alcoholics. I was able to moderate after severe enough consequences. Now I still don’t consider myself a ‘normie’ as all these thoughts are always in the back of my mind, but I’m able to work through the trials of life without considering an alcohol escape as a ‘solution’ and having a drink isn’t a gateway to getting drunk 100% of the time…so for ME, I consider that victory over it. Your mileage may vary.
  4. Man I miss the Bass King dude, Leslie, Hoeks vs Roppolo’s at closing, Irish pub, those spray paint dudes blasting techno, etc. Probably romanticizing my 20’s, sixth was never an upscale howdy doody environment, and there were a lot fewer options across the city at the time I regularly hung out down there (2002-2005ish)…but I still miss it.
  5. Doing my occasional perusal of Fox News comments…they’re upset about all the money spent in equipment given to Ukraine. Funny how that works with the stupid tax break, wall, etc. Just like Tea Party bullshit with Obama.
  6. Y’all aren’t the only ones going ‘wtf’ this early in the season
  7. Don’t summon him to join the race
  8. Have you checked the servers for any Myanmar Muslim Hackers?
  9. Guess it’s time to add “Porterhouse’d” to the Surly Lexicon Wall alongside Slorch’d
  10. That was actually a good, even-handed breakdown. Pos rep. What I don’t understand about this is why, in the age of cheap microelectronics, do we not have hotbox detectors on the cars themselves? While the video of the burning bearings is wild, it’s possible it didn’t go by a defect detector during that 20+ mile run before the axle sheered off. Obviously stuff like dragging equipment and car counting needs to be done via trackside equipment, but hotbox should be relatively easy. I’m sure the answer is money
  11. Well it only took a little over six years for them to forget what happened with Tay…the tweet/chat bot that quickly turned into a racist insane person for spending too much time with TTomTerrific And of course this classic:
  12. Do we know what caused the original derailment?
  13. Distinct possibility that all these things are not necessarily China/foreign objects, and hopefully we aren’t shooting down every slow moving aerial object that’s unidentified.
  14. I live within walking distance of Breakaway/40XS here in Cedar Park, and I’m always jealous of those bastards who just taxi out of their hangar for the $100 hamburger. Of course there’s a whole other world of expenses and headaches, but I can dream. Highlight of my walks over there was a Blackhawk practicing some kind of low approach, was an impressive sight. Regarding that 30-hour Queen getting put down, sucks so hard. Always wanted one of those luggage tags made out of an aircraft skin but the price seems stupid for what they are.
  15. Yeah I hate playing God’s Gift when it matters. Hopefully GIA is rocking, can’t watch tonight
  16. Well yeah, it’s fluid (response to Ballgame)
  17. Again, it’ll deflate very slowly and take a long time (possibly days) to come down, all while it drifts into commercial airspace or outside territorial waters or onto power lines or whatever. They aren’t seriously pressurized like a balloon at home and are YUGE.
  18. Poking holes in large balloons doesn’t seem to work very well…at least not when you are trying to down it in a specific place. It’s unpredictable, which in the military is bad news. So it’s feasible but if emptying a few hundred rounds of 20mm doesn’t work well, I’d be surprised if a sidewinder with flechettes would be much better. But I’m sure you’re right insofar as Raytheon eyeing more money.
  19. There’s a reason they use the AIM-9x version…it’s not a ‘heat seeker’ in the traditional sense. It uses contrast imaging in the IR spectrum, of which a balloon/equipment in a -40C sky would stand out like a sore thumb. Also has the added benefit of not using active radar terminal guidance like an AMRAAM would, which is nice because the return from a balloon/equipment is tiny and limits what China can glean from the emissions signature. The main military intel I’d guess they can capture from a balloon vs satellite is signal data on the different radar modes of our fighters like the Raptor. Given the inverse square law, I’m sure they have all they need on stuff like NORAD and AWACS, but probably not shorter range stuff like fighters and missiles…and comms capture by amateurs shows the fighter jokes stating their radars have a hard time maintaining lock, so if anything China may be trying to build a library of data to update their RWR tech as we light it up trying to plot an intercept. I’d read that F15s have that Sniper/whatever pod that can do IRST and may be helping the Raptors figure out where they are to get within range of a Sidewinder lock. That’s better than giving radar info to China. There’s just no way they’re going to be able to engage visually at 600 knots…not without risking a $200M fighter and pilot. The awesome book Sled Driver has a paragraph where an SR-71 flies by a weather balloon. Granted it was Mach 3 but he flew by it so fast that it was gone in a blink. A fighter probably has a decent coffin corner at high altitude so they can’t just drop flaps and lazily do circles around it to engage visually, so using a sidewinder is the safest/cheapest/smartest way to take it out. TLDR: A modern sidewinder makes sense as it has the best approach to engaging the target in a safe, effective way without giving up more info on our radars/missiles than necessary.
  20. Ahh yea the Fermi Paradox…at once both sad and incredibly scary. Where are all the aliens? One of the possibilities is that the galaxy is controlled by a predatory species that waits until a planet evolves enough to be a threat, then extinguished the civilization. Others out there are shaking their heads at us announcing our presence with emissions. Aka ‘No news is good news’ Or The Great Filter theory that there lies something which advanced life has great difficulty moving past…and we better hope that it’s behind us (multi cellular life, an evolved brain, nearby supernovae, gamma ray burst, etc) and not ahead of us (destroying ourselves with nuclear war, some undiscovered tech that wipes us out, exhausting our planets resources, etc). Aka ‘if we discover advanced, dead life on another planet it’s horrible news’ Space you scary
  21. Thriller meets Squid Games
  22. Luckily they seem easily identifiable given they often have an American flag, cross or gun emoji in their profile name. And if not, they unironically use ‘woke’ regularly.
  23. Yep he’s indicative of a lot of formerly intelligent-appearing, reasonably thoughtful, well intentioned people that either got sucked in or decided to join in the grift machine. It’s sadly happened to some my friends IRL, but I’ve long given up on trying to reason and simply don’t see them anymore…not necessarily because I may disagree with their views, but I’ve got enough stress in my life without listening to someone rail against or hate ‘others’ while drowning themselves in self pity. I’m getting too old to humor that shit.
  24. Very well could be what happens to my Pokes too, come right back down to earth…especially without our #2 player for the rest of the season. Basketball doesn’t seem as streaky as baseball, but it’s not far behind.
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