Agiel

Had an amazing week last week, making excellent progress on my personal projects and getting a side-gig that puts me another step closer to my dream job, among other things. However recognising that fact kind of jinxed things and made the next week somewhat of a bummer. One of the nicest and most nurturing bosses I've ever had is leaving our company for greener pastures, as well as one of the old-timers in our department, which unfortunately leaves me and three other people in a department of about a dozen as the only old-timers since I started working here about two years ago. That on top of me scrambling to compile a résumé and portfolio material for an internal promotion for a position that was posted weeks ago but was only informed of just yesterday.

Sam Shepard:

It's a USAF F-15C Eagle. Frankly given France's love affair with protectionism the French would eat a jellyfish venom mousse at a Shenyang reception before buying another foreign-made fighter, the last time that happened being the F-8 Crusaders for their Clemenceau carriers back in the Cold War.

Fascinating video on Chinese military uniforms over the decades: I'd also like to point out that for some odd reason the original post of this thread keeps getting liked by low-post count users with tags consisting of random letters. NSA marking the topic as a communication of interest? Russian troll bots being sicked on me in some misguided attempt of gathering sensitive military documents? Who knows, but if this keeps up my like count will be in the five figures in no time.

A debate on the F-35. On one side is a former F-16, F/A-18, F-22, and F-35 driver, Marine Corps FAC, and TOPGUN instructor. On the other is an over the hill music producer*. Results are what you might expect: Part 1 Part 2 *Okay, maybe that's a bit unfair given that he used to work at the Pentagon, but he did suggest things as absurd as to produce the F-16 without a radar and was rather dismissive of the computer revolution in the '80s which produced JTIDS, JSTARS, and modern PGMs,

Had one of those nasty calf cramps in bed, which woke me up right quick this morning. Tried hiding my very noticeable limp when walking around at work today, my co-workers being quite sporty and not remarking on it when I passed by them.

Prepare for disappointment. Disappointment that a new low has been reached by the man? I somehow doubt that. Everything that has happened thus far is consistent to the opinion of the man my family and I have developed over the ~30 years we had to hear about him in the news.

Excerpt from WaPo piece detailing Trump's legal travails: I suppose his lashing out at Mueller of late is an indication that he knows he's in deep doodoo.

Could be worse. At least the US Navy doesn't name ships for their mother-in-law.

https://youtu.be/h-jfLIssw0E “Say what you will about Elon Musk, but with his new plan to bring people to Mars, nobody is a more creative serial killer.” July 25th can't come soon enough.

To me as dumbass ideas go it's up there with "the reason why the Engineers hate us is because two-thousand seventeen years ago we killed one of their own they sent back to Earth to teach us peace and love".

To the un-initiated, 'Busas are about as close as you can get to the bikes in Akira and Bubblegum Crisis in real life.

The relative silence over Liu Xiaobo's death reminds me of this opening from Norm Macdonald's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgFKLtv0ijw

From what I've seen Warface and Armored Warfare don't enjoy quite the growth War Thunder and World of Tanks have (probably only enough to keep the servers running, balance patches, and occasional content updates), and while parent company mail.ru is probably raking in a good bit of dough from VK I'm not sure they'd be willing to cannibalise the revenue from that division towards what is ostensibly a single-player RPG with very little to monetise post-release.

I played the beta and got the idea of it (and even got a free copy courtesy of a cousin who works at Blizzard) but there isn't really a ton there for me, who enjoys the official maximum 24-player TF2 games and sometimes those hacked 32-player 2fort and CP_Well cluster****s, or intimate co-op fare with my buddies like ArmA, pre-Siege Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, etc. Though I'll grant you I got pretty heavy into the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War competitive scene and waited with bated breath for patch notes with balance changes.

This 600mm ‘Bazooka’ Lens from 1955 is Rather Impressive

Given how the bottom keeps falling out for the Trump family as a result of their own corrosive nature, I think this serves as a useful allegory (with the Trump family as the warrior form Xenomorph):

I suppose their philosophy is to avoid a dogfight in the first place? More that if your strategy for coming out on top is based solely on air show acrobatics rather than things like numerical factors, support assets (i.e. AWACS, tankers, electronic warfare, etc.), and operational readiness (high-g maneuvers exact a great deal of stress on airframes; the rule of thumb is that if an aircraft pulls more than nine-Gs in the course of a flight then the aircraft is in need of a serious stand-down for deep maintenance by the ground crews) you're doing something wrong. In addition, departure of controlled flight manuevers, while flashy, actually have fairly little usefulness in furballs. The resulting loss of energy just to get on the six of a bandit means one is easy meat for his wingman (plus there's a high probability that the bandit can disengage quite easily since he has a major speed advantage, and as the pilot's adage goes: "Speed is life"). This video also demonstrates how counterproductive the Pugachev's Cobra is in reality:

Well this is unfortunate: Icewind Dale 2 can't be 'Enhanced' because the source code is lost.

*Warhammer minis in front of me* *Magnifying lamp, paints, Micron pens, ultra-fine brushes at the ready* *Takes a shot of vodka, rubs face vigourously, sucks in some air through nose, pause, takes another shot of vodka* "Okay, time to paint diamonds on my Harlequins."

The Eldar Panzer General game? Solid choice. The neverending chorus of 40K games seems to be "Space Marines, Space Marines, Spess Muhreens" so that was a rather refreshing change of pace (even if it was more than fifteen years ago). Best representation of the summoning of the Avatar of Khaine: And that guy who voices the Farseer should get an Oscar or something.

Basic physics would also have dictated that Frost Giants would have faced an evolutionary dead-end millennia ago due to the square-cube law. If one were to spontaneously manifest on a planet with similar gravity as ours then it would have dropped dead from a heart attack in an instant.

Another entertaining and insightful newsletter from Richard Aboulafia on aviation and Brexit and economic nationalism: