I don’t know what this is.

Yank special brew is called malt liquor, sits between 5% and 12% abv, and is typically sold in 40oz bottles.

Also called a fotie (FOE-dee) or a lando (because Billy Dee williams, the actor who played lando calrissian also did ads for colt45 malt liquor)

This is 42 ounces?

The Official Walter Simonson Page’s post

Aug 6, 2015

Star Wars 53 cover. Pen and India ink. 10 x 15. 1981.

I posted this cover because it represents something to me of the fun of comics back in the day. Maybe this sort of thing is still being done. No idea. But this issue of Star Wars began life as an issue of John Carter of Mars penciled by Carmine Infantino. :-) That title was canceled with an issue unpublished. And Marvel, in an effort to save a few bucks, mandated that the issue should be turned into a Star Wars story. It actually became two issues of Star Wars. I don’t remember if the John Carter story was two issues or if we merely stretched it out in order to convert the issue into an acceptable SW story.

The basic idea was to use as many of the JC pages as possible with as few changes as possible. Some extra pages had to be done and some panels altered to a greater or lesser degree to get everything to fit together. That was my job, along with the covers.

Chris Claremont wrote the issues and, I presume, wrote the original JC story. I’ve forgotten. I don’t know that it was the best way to make comics, but it was an interesting intellectual puzzle to try to solve in a readeable fashion. And it was the second time I got to do something like that. I’d helped Steven Grant convert an issue of Tarzan into a couple of Battlestar Galacticas a little earlier. It was fun, challenging, interesting and curious to do, whatever the final outcome.

I chose this cover because the issues had these giant stormtroopers in them, stormtroopers that I presume never appeared in any Star Wars stuff again. And we had giant stormtroopers in the issue in the first place because they were converted Tharks. ;-)

Find an open source project that’s coded in your language of choice that you both care about (edit – or that looks interesting to you, at least) and want to add functionality to.

Download a working copy, then, since you’re learning with this, pretend the repo doesn’t exist anymore and you’re on your on with your self-imposed assignment.

Figure out what functionality you want to add, start with changing or augmenting something simple, and figure out where that would go in the existing code, and make it happen.

See if you can manage to Google search your way past any errors you run into, preferably alternating between ai answers and things like stack overflow posts, only instead of copy-pasting the code that errors out (or the solution code you get from ai or posts) actually step through things and figure out what the “solution” code is doing differently and ask yourself why and how that makes a difference or has a different effect from the code that generated the error in the first place. Then decide whether it’s actually likely to fix the error or not. If you think it’s going to? Try using it.

If it works, make sure you understand why.

If it doesn’t, try to figure out why not.

Keep going until you have a working new feature.

Then try a more complicated feature.

After a few of those, try tackling some of the bugs in the repo.

The war on Christmas CANNOT END until Christmas ceases its illegal occupation of November.

We are once again calling on the Claus regime to return to their side of the borders outlined in the Black Friday agreement.

What’s the thing Elon does where he keeps his head lower, but looks up at the most extreme angle-of-eyeballs he can?

AND it doesn’t matter WHAT the other airport let you do because what they let you do has everything to do with THEIR policies and scanner capabilities and whatever CURRENT airport you’re in follows a policy written with the equipment THEY have in mind.

Airport A lets you keep your laptop in the bag because their scanner is powerful enough to see through circuitboards and batteries to tell whether there’s C4 or whatever wedged in there or not, airport B has a “laptops out of bags and power it on for me please” because the scanner in airport B can’t see through all the semi-precious metals in the circuitboards and battery plates, but they’re pretty sure you can’t wedge enough C4 or whatever in there between the scan-blocking parts to do anything and still be able to turn the thing on.

But airport B does know what airport A does or has and it doesn’t matter because they don’t have it.

It’s shitty and we should have standardized if we were going to do it all, but I’m betting some actuary somewhere has actual statistics on the semi-effectiveness of having differing policies and the confusion that sows.

On paper it’s probably theoretically harder plan around a system you don’t know, or something.

Wait, what?

Like, at the time? Or still?

I respectfully disagree on the TSA, anecdotally.

I know a few people who applied there simply because it WAS a job in their area that paid more than minimum wage and, at least until recently, by virtue of being a government job, it was more likely to actually care about federal protections for employees with disabilities than, say, retail work, which only gives the minimum required number of fucks, and only then when someone is watching or has a lawyer handy.

Also, a significantly larger amount of the population has unfortunately accepted the questionable stipulations of the patriot act than have decided due process is simply too much work, so I feel that’s a distance of an order or three of legal magnitude, comparison-wise.

I’m not saying everyone who works for the TSA is there due to lack of other options, but given it’s ubiquity and level of employee turnover in airport towns, at least SOME them are.

In theory that means they have newer scanners.

I say in theory because for sanity’s sake I hope that’s the case, but I also know how they’ve historically worked thanks to the likes of Bruce Schneier.

This is based on the TYPE of scanner each checkpoint has and that frequently differs from airport to airport.

The problem is, most of THEM don’t even know that, so yeah, you appear mind-bogglingly stupid to them and they look needlessly arcane and possibly deliberately cruel and rude to you.

Alambre

New kinds of water, you say? The marketing department is already on it and boy have I got news for you!

I personally feel like anyone who’s not a bigot IS by nature a feminist at least in a solidarity for the ENTIRE human race sense, but keep in mind, this is coming from my perspective as a male, so I might be missing something by virtue of it not regularly impacting me personally.

I’d love a less-abused word, personally.

As a guy, I don’t think I’d WANT to call myself a feminist, lest I be incorrectly associated with the likes of Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, or a whole host of other clearly NON-feminists who hid behind the word to cover their actions.

or lost to the changing tastes of a new generation of media consumers

This is the part that just baffles me.

I rarely see anything but vitriol for anything anymore and it usually seems almost wholly unwarranted at the levels it’s offered at.

I’m beginning to think it’s not that people actually dislike the stuff that comes out, they’re just so programmed to nitpick EVERYTHING that they don’t remember how to enjoy something without finding fault. Or they don’t want to risk saying they liked something only to have someone call their very right to an opinion in question. Or… I don’t know. It well and truly confuses me.

People have been trying to make it a thing for a while. I don’t know whether or not it started at a news outlet, but multiple news outlets have picked it up, so…

This is the first complaint I’ve seen about any of the new Star Trek shows that didn’t use the word “Woke” as a pejorative term. I’m impressed and appreciative of your well-thought-out take on it.

You actually do have some decent points, but I’m still an unabashed fan of the new stuff, especially Discovery/SNW.

It IS different, in all of the ways you describe, but every new trek has been a stylistic departure from the previous ones in some way, shape , or form, and I’ve been taking the plot armor Mary sue-ing as one piece of that. (Something DS9 also has to a degree, but they definitely held to the “difficult moral choices” aspect in spite of it).

Thanks for your opinion and insight.

Eek. Then every time the water line from the water heater got to room temperature because it’s been six minutes since you last ran the bidet, it’d say “water not found” because the standing water in the water line was “out of date”.

Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.

Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.

You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?

Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.

Not in the US.

On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.

The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…

We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.

Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.

Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.

A few bad people who hate others because they think putting others down means they win picked a fight on the playground. They got other people on the playground to join them because they yelled the loudest and some kids thought that the louder you yelled, the more right you were. The people they were yelling about just wanted to be on the playground too, but the yelling people didn’t want them on the playground, so despite the fact that they didn’t want to, the people being yelled at played a competitive game against the people who were yelling.

After a long long long time (LOTS of sleeps) the yelling bad people won against the people they were yelling at.

The yelling people didn’t know what to do then. They only knew how to be angry and they couldn’t find anything else or anyone else to yell at and people were starting to leave their team because all the excitement was gone and there wasn’t a competitive game to play anymore.

So the bad yelling people panicked and started randomly picking other, smaller groups of people on the playground to yell about. They made up things about them and told lies.

It didn’t work at first, and they tried telling lies about lots of different groups of people one after another, and eventually they started picking on some people who were JUST different enough that some of their old yelling teammates who got bored and left believed those lies and joined the yelling again. There was SO much yelling and it was so much louder that it was impossible for anyone near the yelling people to hear the truth.

And that’s how we got from “abortion as an issue” to “trans people as an issue”.