Striker879

Ah Woodstock! Sadly I was just a few years shy for that trip (see Paga ... those extra years you have on me could have been useful!!).

I'm not frozen! I'm ALIVE! This Tuesday morning on September 8, 2020 left me thrilled. Alert as can be about traveling south in a big hurry because the barrels load kept waking me again all night. The window to the west let in just enough air to feel Autumn's chill seems determined to stay. It's 7:00 AM MST and the Sun is due East with a mournful 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Low enough to freeze anyone who has no shelter or clothes to bare the low temperature. I opened the East window to let the Sun's warm rays in to make sure my thermometer is correct. Anyone else experiencing the sudden shift in temperature over the last 5 days? Shifted so far it's more like Winter's entering the scene early? I unrolled my Winter fart sack and slid it over the top of my Spring and Summer bed bag. I got just warmth to my toes in time to stop the pains from August's wanes where there be pains in two toes. :laugh: I Win! Aye ... there has been a sea change here too. That long finger of foul weather that spawned in your neck of the woods was almost extending as far east as here when I turned in. Booms of thunder were my alarm clock this AM. Weather radar loop showed that awful blue colour south of you Paga ... did you wake up to white ground?

This caught my eye. Cuz I used to eat Ketchup Mayonaise & Mustard Sandwiches. Mmmm Delicious . I guess now days it's kind of a social requirement to at least put a piece of ham on it ? Oh the sad state of social evolution :sad: Now I have this visual of Mk furtively pulling the kitchen blinds closed, and nervously glancing behind while pulling a knife out of the drawer ... Then the squirting and spreading begins!! What kind of bread ? There was a time when if you didn't say 12 Grain (you know ... the one with all the bark and twigs sticking out of it ... Euell Gibsons "Mmm, tastes like wild hickory nuts to me!!") I wouldn't be dropping by for lunch. Times change, and dietary habits need to follow. Euell's nuts are off limits, and the bark and twigs just cause plumbing problems. Whole wheat?? It's at the limit for me, but if it's good for you I'm in!!

This caught my eye. Cuz I used to eat Ketchup Mayonaise & Mustard Sandwiches. Mmmm Delicious . I guess now days it's kind of a social requirement to at least put a piece of ham on it ? Oh the sad state of social evolution :sad: Now I have this visual of Mk furtively pulling the kitchen blinds closed, and nervously glancing behind while pulling a knife out of the drawer ... Then the squirting and spreading begins!!

Are you practicing up for the gig that Paga and I have got? There's lots of room for more here at the top!

Could be ... Google to the rescue, Billy Mays!!

But wait .... that's not ALL!! If you call in the next 20 minutes we'll DOUBLE that ... yes you heard that right ... two adult body builders sets (each with it's own secret secret) and enough treats you won't have time for sleeping!! We have operators standing by for your call ... LOL ... what was that guys name that did the infomercials ... he died a while back, pretty young too.

The immutable rule aboard my vessels is a simple one ... everybody sits to do their business. Too many hard to reach spots around a vessel's head, so long before it became a habit at home it was a habit afloat (you'll love this other one ... Anything can be put into a marine head, provided you've swallowed it first!!). Ya I have the full meal deal all of the various plumbing not quite up to snuff anymore too. On the bright side I'm pretty good from the waist up!!

LOL ... have you come over to the "dark side" Paga. "Shiver me timbers, mind the gaff and get that mainsl' stowed afor the squall hits ya scurvy dogs!!" So I see I'm not the only one making frequent "pit stops" through the night. Ain't gettin' old grand?? - Edit - Forgot to mention I watched a few Jack Horner videos a few days ago ... pretty cool guy!

Did you happen to run into the Dude? Maybe a look down a different path ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i0DMbCKnAg&ab_channel=Beat-Club

Sounds intriguing ... I can say for certain I've never tried that flavour of chip (ginger ale yes, but I'm still partial to my Adam's Ale, when I'm not having coffee of course). - Edit - Was I on track with Late Lament? Yes! Gathered is what my memory served up. Gathering is correct Kettle Care makes the New York Cheddar chips. It says they are from a company in Oregon. I found them at a store that goes by the name of The Real Food Store when I was visiting near there. I had to go there because there wasn't a dentist who would take my insurance where I lived, so I could get a proper check up. Pretty sure I've seen Kettle Care (or something similarly named) in the grocery store. Now I'll just need a reminder on Thursday so I don't forget to look. You have had a Moody Blues sort of air about you lately Paga ... was tempted to not link them just for that reason.

Sounds intriguing ... I can say for certain I've never tried that flavour of chip (ginger ale yes, but I'm still partial to my Adam's Ale, when I'm not having coffee of course). - Edit - Was I on track with Late Lament?

Pretty sad, but doesn't seem to work with latest 1.2.0416 or any of custom skeletons from nexus. I've tried to add a parameter into oblivion.ini under General, seem no effect as well. Tried to install it as ESP. Still same crap. I'm looking for solution how to increase global grab power to be able to easily move any body & moveable object. If anyone knows if maybe there is a way to somehow edit it in construction set that will give results... Been a long time since I played around with this, but comparing one of my old character's Oblivion.ini and my latest guy's I see I've changed fMoveLimitMass=95 (old guy's) to fMoveLimitMass=195 and while I can't lift a body over my head or anything like that with a little work and determination I can usually get one up off the floor and onto a bed (with some one arm/one leg at a time fiddling). I use a derivative of the Growlf Universal Skeleton Nif (KillerMonkey99's Ragdoll version).

Can ya get any Applewood Smoked or Balsamic Vinegar Miss Vickies Niph ... all I've been able to find is Sea Salt 'n Vinegar or yucky old "Original" (and thanks, but I'll stick with my Adam's Ale, so I won't be raidin' the pop fridge).

Watch lights fade from every room ... or perhaps ...

You need to remember that in evolutionary terms we are still basically hunter gathers (who just don't do their own hunting or gathering anymore for the most part). All of those unbidden things that drive us were what got us to this point, allowed us to survive a population bottleneck in Africa that could have wiped us out, drove us to seek new lands to raise our families ... basically populate the entire planet. Even our microbiomes haven't been able to keep up with the changes we've thrust upon it (do you think we would have succeeded as a species with the dental problems that are endemic to us today ... we don't eat what we evolved eating for millions of years, and our mouth microbiomes reflect that change in diet). Much of what drives us in the directions we are hurtling today is the same basic inner drives that drove my ancestor 50,000 years ago. If 50,000 years isn't enough time to change the inner man I doubt we're likely to "fix" us in a few decades.

One of the problems raised by going fast is this ... OK now I need to stop (or at least slow down). As is often the case, what you gained at the apple bin you need to give back when you get to the oranges. Time is still your enemy. Or you could just keep on keeping on and snap some nice pictures as you streak by. I'm with you guys that it is a very interesting question ... have we been visited before? Some of the "artifacts" we see today (e.g. Nazca Lines) do make me wonder whether or not there was any actual contact. I'm picturing ancient humans seeing something in the sky that is so far beyond anything in their experience that they attribute it to Gods. We do have a fairly extensive history of creating monuments to the Gods (along with little buildings purposed to make sure the "important people" get to their version of heaven ... ya I'm looking at you pyramids). On Hey's question concerning faster than light or not, I wonder what doorways may open up once we can unify quantum and physical realms. What possibilities are hidden from us now in those rolled up dimensions of String theory (if it is in fact a true direction to unification)? Ya, I've done some reading of Brian Greene's work, watched some YouTubes: - a talk on his third book (second that I have read).

So many of those images are ones I remember first seeing on APOD ... break out the 3d glasses: Yogi And Friends In 3D I rarely missed the latest news from Spirit and Opportunity, reveled in their successes and waited out their trials and tribulations with sincere hope they would prevail. For some reason Curiosity hasn't grabbed the same "mind space" with me. Perhaps it's just me getting jaded, but it also could be that I've grown into the notion that Mars is unlikely to become a second home to mankind. Yes we will land there some day, and may even establish a permanent presence but Mars lacks one thing that is essential if the planet ever had any hope of becoming anything more than a scientific station ... a magnetosphere on the scale required to preserve an atmosphere dense enough for unaided surface breathing. You terraform and turn polar and below surface water reservoirs into a thicker atmosphere only to lose it to solar wind again. We'd once again be burning through a limited resource until we have depleted it. Who knows, maybe that is humanity's destiny ... to become the locusts of the galaxy.

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The best part is we even sent a roadmap along, in case they weren't quitre sure where the little piece of space junk that showed up came from. If they never got around to visiting our neck of the woods before finding Vger1 or 2, we did all we could to show them how to find us. I think Ellies dad (David Morse) summed up where I am with the question "Are we alone" ... "If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space"

I recently watched a YouTube on this British guy (some famous bike racer ... well famous to some but was the first I'd heard of him). He was going to a cotton mill to make his own custom bed sheets for his canal boat (British canals are like their roads, very narrow, thus the need for custom sheets), but he was making the cotton fabric first. Apparently the mill was the first cotton mill (sort of kicked off the industrial revolution) but it came at a time when Europe was just starting to recover from some pandemic (I'm at a disadvantage here ... I can recall details of what I've read far too long down the road, but if I watched it the brain doesn't file the info away in the same way). Anyway, what I do recall is that much of the workforce was women and children. They could be spared from the more physical labour intensive tasks like farming. These are knock-on effects to events that require changes to how we do things. Change what you do, and how you perceive the world follows. I tend to be a "looking down the road" sort even though I'm a very live in moment kinda' guy ... maybe a consequence of grandparenthood or just getting old. I didn't mean we are at a particular point in the "drive towards" a population driven collapse. Where I'm coming from is, at what point do we start to address something that has been building for quite some time? I remember discussions in the alternate geography course I took in high school (Urban Geography was the name of the course) where we were looking at the current (back then) population and where it was projected to go. It was approaching 4 billion back then (around '69 or maybe '70) and the talk was how we'd need to tap the bounty of the sea to feed everyone. Well maybe we haven't taken the last fish out of the sea yet, but we are certainly pushing things to the point where we're fishing places (and depths) that weren't considered back in my high school days. I read an article yesterday or maybe the day before about how we are about one month behind (compared to last year) the point where we (meaning the whole lot of us) have taken more from the planet than it "produces" in a year. Yes this is a derived stat, so it's only as accurate as the quality of the data fed into the calculation. Even if it's out by a month or more it is still offering us another perspective on our relationship with the place we all call home. Two months fudge factor still has us taking a year's worth from the planet in less than a year's time. I won't be around long enough to see the consequences, but my kids may be, and certainly my grandkids will. I can vividly remember going out into the back yard after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar suirface, looking up in wonder at the fact that there were two people from this planet on that distant orb. The fact that there were faces and names associated with the event gave it that universal renown. There had been plenty of unmanned craft on the moon before Neil and Buzz landed. They didn't capture the imagination of the masses as the machines weren't relatable to people who had no notion of what it took to send a machine to the moon, and failure just resulted in the lunar equivalent of a stove or fridge that no longer worked. A similar failure for Neil and Buzz would mean those faces wouldn't be seen here on earth ever again, and that is part of why the conquest of space outside of low earth orbit has lacked popularity. Even the human loses with the shuttles only brought out a sense of "they died for what". Low earth orbit doesn't have the allure of the moon (easily seen by anyone) or possibly Mars (where somebody points not far from the horizon and says "There ... that star that is reddish and not twinkling .. that's Mars). I watched the shuttle go over where I live once with a small telescope ... wasn't a big crowd of watchers even though the event had received some local media attention. Perhaps watching Neil step off the ladder and onto the moon's surface with Walter Cronkite keeping us apprised as it unfolded boosted my science passion, but I brought that with me to the television that night so it doesn't stem from the lunar landing. An interest in science isn't something for everybody, but I find the disinterest in science "movement" disappointing (if not disturbing). Very few of that crowd have any idea of how much we take for granted today began as technologies developed to put a man on the moon, or land a vehicle on Mars, or sent a probe outside of the solar system. I have a better picture in my mind of where Voyager 2 is headed than where we who remained behind are going.

LOL ... even without the Welcome to Earth title I knew the exact scene. Maybe not the most sophisticated flick in my collection but it's always on my summer watching list. "Hello boys ... I'm back!" You can blame me for any of the bad parts through the day. I spent yesterday getting all my ducks lined up for doing some fiberglass work on the dingy in the back yard. The gray gloomy clouds weren't a deterrent to getting the glass on, but the rain I kept seeing on the weather radar was. By afternoon I'd switched gears to thinking maybe chase the lawnmover around the yard instead. No sooner had the thought and the rain that the Flint crowd had shipped out earlier arrived. I did play some Oblivion though, so the day hasn't been a total loss.

Very true ... not much chance at getting elected on a "Reduce population" platform. Plus the rich guys bankrolling the candidates aren't going to go for it one bit. No way to achieve 10% net and 10% growth with a reduction in population. My general outlook is that if it's not in the best interests of some guy who is already richer than God, then it isn't going to happen. - Edit - Privateer Gemini Platinum ... it got me to dust off the joystick and give it a whirl.

Unless we go with the line from Independence Day ... "plausible deniability Mr President". :D Yeah, there is that... but still, you know there would be a Snowden in there somewhere. :smile: Especially after 70 years. Just being my usual me. At least I didn't go looking for a GIF clip of the line from the movie! Did you get any sun today on your side of the crick? The guys over Flint direction decided to send us some showers to wrap up the afternoon.

Unless we go with the line from Independence Day ... "plausible deniability Mr President".