Southloop [he/him]

Psh! Chicken!

I believe Ikki is the original “kuso-ge,” so be forewarned.

Yeah. I didn’t understand why myself. Everybody knows that’s going to be done by one putting their finger in the other’s bellybutton.

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The water at the time was around 40 Fahrenheit/9 Celsius. That gives you, if you survive the fall — which includes not inhaling water with the human gasp response when you hit the cold water or breaking you pelvis/legs/back on the at-that-height now concrete-consistency water (~20 feet/7 meters or above) — a rough seven minutes to get to shore and wrapped up nice, tight, and warm to prevent hypothermia.

Anything to help in tracking progress/communicate info on vaccines, long COVID treatments or prophylactic developments would really help in keeping hopes up.

Some immediate family has (thankfully non-life-threatening) brain lesions from LC and trying to find good info and manage the sources you do find trying to understand when you might one day be able to leave your cave to rejoin civilization can feel like watching the bombers go out, if you catch me drift.

They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.

The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.

To clarify, this is the AFQT which is a seperate subtest from the ASVAB and specifically for USAF service that you actually have to put a modicum of effort into, but for the good jobs — and by good I mean interesting, stimulating and potentially lucrative as a civvie — no. 30 won’t get you into special operations, specialized maintenance/aircrew, or the good “chair force” jobs like combat engineering, space, medical, scientific support, cyber, weather…etc. It’s also probably going to ding you for officer or hinder the climb to higher NCO, which is similarly equivalent to warrant officer in other services.

No, it’s going to be stuff like “light vehicle driver,” or “airport maintenance” where you ride around in the bed of a pickup and shoot a shotgun in the air to scare off birds. It used to not even qualify you to be a cop it’s so low.

Same in the US military. To fly anything is pretty stringently rigorous and high competition.

“Easiest” flight pipeline is probably the Army’s “High School-To-Flight School” which takes exceptional high schoolers and places them as warrant officer helicopter pilots. But in ten years of existence it’s only produced maybe 80 pilots.

Conversely, for Navy Aviation (say, fast jets for example) you have to graduate in the top 50% of your class from a top 200 university, preferably with a BS, within a certain seated height and uncorrected vision acuity, pass the officer qualification test, the aviator qualification test, officer school with a high proficiency, two years of flight school finishing in the top 20%, select fast fixed-wing jets, hopefully find an open seat, then qualify on catapult and cable retrieval. All for a total of about 1800 seats. After that it’s trying to qualify and be elected to Top Gun and hope it doesn’t ruin your career.

I miss Wild America.

Oh, no, nobody buying these things in the US can afford them. These things roll off the lot powered more because of subprime lending than gasoline.

Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.

Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

Yes! The Harvard Family Health Guide or the American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide! And my dad always bought every new edition of the Green Beret Medical Handbook!

The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.

There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).

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I started flying as a kid and remember getting mad at the GPS messing with my uptake on map reading in Boy Scouts and driving class. I also remember thinking to myself how grateful I was it’d never leave the cockpit and invade my daily life.

Books, sketchpads, knitting or some other portable craft, table games like flick football and pocket chess, crystal radios. Plenty to do to pass time. There’s nothing on my phone that’s new.

I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.

Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.