misterhand

what the hell is marmite? sounds like a new alloy or possibly the 143rd element off the periodic table. is it radioactive?

come on, how do you think i feel rereading some of the shit i say here? several times lately ive redefined my own idea of the concept of asshole. the only reason i even say some of this shit is im trying to follow through on that whole live here now thing and saying what i think when i think it with relatively little reconsideration. something i normally don't do when face to face. sometimes articulating an unquestioned asshole opinion i hold makes me reconsider it, think about why i have that attitude, and, sometimes, slink away embarrassed. sometimes i get pissed off, rant, want to unsay it, and leave it standing just to see how badly i just made an ass out of myself. and i DO love being provocative..... no you don't sound pompous generally you sound like somebody's mom. people who write in all about apocalyptic hate of god and rant about military they know nothing about? now THATS pompous.

...fruit loops? FRUIT LOOPS? hey whatever you been smoking, hook me up..... personally i thought it just tasted kind of like a leather beverage, myself. not really food, not really a coffee-ish substance, too strong to write off as flavored water, too weak to chew. whats a man from boston to do? cheap coffee of course.

You seem to have found the wrong classroom, and are building your own. Just as a strong process can dampen the most talented workers, remember it does enhance the vast majority of the others, and most talented folks can figure out how to use the process. Building your own is harder, but you'll learn an incredible amount from it. you know you're not the first person to tell me that. for awhile i was hanging out with another similar freak to myself but 10 years older, said the same damn thing. he was mostly disgusted with me for wasting myself in the menial work i was doing at the time and couldnt understand why i hadnt picked an organization, company, college, whatever, gone to the top and made it mine already. he did tell me that the rough path ive chosen will however make me a much richer man for the experience. i think the coolest thing anyone ever said to me was a friend looking at my latest junk-drawer digital creation 3 years ago. (homebuilt portable mp3 player built out of junk pc parts, a boom box, some duct tape, hot glue and plastic scraps complete with 5 gig drive and stripped down build of win98, running winamp on an old sega game gear screen hot glued to the case.....)....shook his head and said jesus dude if you had a direction you'd be fucking dangerous. some time later a customer leaving the office at the sheet metal shop where i worked as a laborer saw my toy sitting there on my Bridgeport turret doing its thing, examined it, and asked me what it was. i told him. he said "what are you DOING here?" i didnt have an answer, so, after awhile, i left. i still don't know where im expected to be, so i wound up on a dz. i still dont have anything more than a vague life plan im just sort of winging it and paying my way as i go. suggestions are welcome.

The ability to communicate to folks that there are problems with their system, without saying the fact that they have one sucks, is extremely valuable. It's the only way to truly change systems. i think what you just said probably makes more sense than anything else anyone's said on this long and convoluted thread. only catch: i cant recall ever hearing about a system actually changing for the better based on constructive criticism. they usually change for the worse to satisfy screaming idiots claims of entitlement and threats to sue. this is why so much of my paycheck is going to feed some crack whore and her 19 illegitimate children and the system encourages her to keep breeding on my dime cause the more she breeds the more she gets paid. (note: ive actually overheard welfare mother next door instructing daughter how best to get more money by breeding more and hiding existence of boyfriend so it looks like you're even poorer. ) this is why im disgusted with systems.

if a dog attacks me and sinks its teeth into my arm i dont care if its a police dog or lassie, im drawing my blade and killing it on the spot. top o the food chain. sorry. of course i also know better than to get drunk and pick a fight with a police dog in the first place.....if the dog started it, the dog dies. if the guy started it, hes just plain stupid and deserves what he gets. 2 thumbs up to the dog for dedication to duty. hope he at least got a biscuit and a good brushdown afterwards.

bwahahaha rotflmao rule #1 for me is never take myself too seriously. there are people out there to whom i look like an idiot. myself among them. just for that post zenister, i will buy you beer someday if ever we walk the same dz.

oof. well said. i guess i have no ideals, at least none i expect anyone but myself to live up to. i expect nothing of anyone which is why when i see real solid people standing for whats right/what they believe in i can at least respect it and leave it be.... i can't do military service. not only does the idea of "serving" anyone or anything rankle on my selfish arrogant feral soul, but i'm just too damn off-the-charts individualistic to be inserted into anything like rank-and-file, always have been. back in school i was often right off the top of their testing charts leaving them wondering what the hell to do with me....he's in 4th grade and already feeding himself college-level material? this doesnt fit into the lesson plan. i was inventing my own electronic weaponry, stunners and such improvised out of reworked wall adapter transformers and, more lethally, banks of flash camera strobe capacitors, when everyone else in science class was happily learning the light bulb goes here, the battery goes there, the wire goes here, this is plus and this is minus and they both need to touch for the light to go on..... this sort of thing does NOT teach you much respect for others. i taught that to myself out of empathy and my own sense of decency. so when you're this far ahead of the curve you can't rejoin it even if you know where the curve is and want to downgrade yourself that far. you feel like a modified alien hybrid utterly out of place among the other kids whose biggest mental stretch is writing a paper without spelling mistakes. my biggest mental stretch at the time was reading and utterly enjoying steven hawking's "a brief history of time". now THERES a vast mind makes me look like forrest gump.... read orson scott card's "enders game" someday. its about bright kids, one in particular. i was the real thing. all i ever heard about as a kid in school was how i was the next doogie howser and would be graduating from yale by the age of 16 at this rate. i sucked at math, always have, but came with freak talents for understanding and applying things 15 years beyond my current level. after years of misery in nursery/sorry, high school i dropped out and decided to self-educate by way of school of hard knocks where nobody's trying to make me march in step with the others because my uniqueness breaks the nice orderly symmetry of the classroom and we cant have that..... its been fun instructive and rewarding. it brought me to a drop zone. i was amazed to discover going through aff that im not limited to their schedule, they'll advance me as fast as i can do it? hell yeah! money and time issues dictated how fast i got my a-license, but i had it within a few weeks and have been jumping my ass off and glutting myself on terabytes of info about skydiving ever since. i plan to earn a living in the sport, with time. believe it or not i still sometimes wish i was capable of having the military experience and being a part of it. i can't. but i have the highest respect for those who can. its the institution itself that makes me paranoid as all hell.

we are the military. you will lower your shields and surrender your ships. we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. your culture will adapt to service....us. resistance is futile. obviously not all military personnel wind up dehumanized like my coastie acquaintance. hell, half the people on my home dz seem to be ex-military. but the glazed eyes and fanatic expressions on the plastic faces of the people in the recruitment spots on tv put me off the idea permanently. you see the same look on the faces of crack addicts and rabid religious fundamentallists being mindfucked by jesus and billy graham. the guy i knew in the navy damn near got court martialed once, for causing damage to government property. his crime? he fell asleep in the sun and got a bad sunburn. sorry folks, can not will not think of myself as "property". of anyone or anything. if thats what i'd have to do to experience this esprit de corps of yours i want no part of it. i derive plenty satisfaction from being a skilled corporate mercenary selling my tech skills to the highest bidder in the private sector. if the company i work for gets all personal on me, i take a hike. i worked at a place once where they instituted a new corporate philosophy. you must wholeheartedly spout the rant fed to you by the teamthink consultant or you're not welcome to work here anymore. you are not an employee anymore you are to consider yourself a "team member". you don't have a shift supervisor anymore, you are to refer to him as your "team leader". our once-a-month voluntary shift meeting to discuss production issues is now to be referred to as the "team meeting". although attending it is still voluntary, we will be instituting "accountability" for those who choose not to attend. if we do not see the 98% participation we expect, non-volunteers will be held accountable. after deliberately blowing off the mandatory volunteering right to the point of "accountability" i finally went to my only "team meeting" where i pointed out some facts. 1: it is not "the team" fixing this robot. it is ME. 2: it is not "the team" driving this forklift. it is ME. 3: you are renting my time by the hour. this does not include the right to edit my work ethic and mental state as you see fit. i don't see a "team" here i see a shift of employees getting mindfucked by their employer. mandatory volunteering of my own time? sorry, my newspeak doublethink skills are a little rusty. pardon me while i tell you to go fuck yourself. i quit. i then got another job paying far more for the same skills at a much smaller company where they don't tell me what im supposed to think of myself as or otherwise try to tamper with my thinking. they consider themselves lucky to find someone with the specialized skills ive acquired, they didnt even try to force me to jump through the same hoops they make all other employees jump through before hiring. (work for them through a temp agency for at least a year at far less pay...if they like you theyll hire you AFTER working you for a year on starvation wages).... when i signed on their front desk secretary said we only hire through the temp agency, you may go through them first. i said and i may not. i can fix your sidels. i know what those skills are worth to you and i know you need sidel techs and are losing thousands of dollars for every day you try to operate without one. i have what you need and i expect you to pay for it....no free samples. either hire me at full pay with no hoop jumping or i take my skills and sell them elsewhere. 2 weeks later i started as a sidel tech there at the top of the pay scale right off the bat. and they don't fuck with my mind. they leave me the fuck alone because i work the magic they need.....i show up and suddenly the machines run for me. they showed me some fucking respect and i repay that by making damn sure their plant stays running. im quite proud of this relationship. if i joined the military so far as i know i can't manage it that way. if it means im to consider myself the property of my government, forget about it. i do it MY way or i hit the highway. if it means i'd have to live and believe slogans like "there is no "I" in team" and "army of one" and "be all you can be" and if it means i'd have to be able to mouth those slogans with heartfelt enthusiasm, again, no can do. organizations, if they have any use for me at all, need me a hell of a lot more than i need THEM. this means _I_ dictate the conditions. so far as i know, in the military i don't dictate anything. i obey or else. if im wrong, someone please tell me. i understand these days the military is a lot more relaxed than they used to be and have even vaguely considered it as a possible career path a couple times recently....at 26 im a bit old to be joining up but if they could use an automation mechanics and software freak pay decent and not fuck with me we might be able to work something out....i understand they DO offer lots of ways to get into fields otherwise closed to me. if the reward was worth it, hell, i'd join. but not if it includes posession of me or my mind. i'm selling services, im not selling ME.

let me get this straight. if i live in britain, and some waste of flesh breaks into my house, i come downstairs and there he is with a crowbar and maybe a gun.....i shoot him in my own home defending my life and that of my kids, one of the few situations where im totally justified in killing this asshole without warning and with extreme prejudice, and ill be the one to go to prison for defending myself? this kind of legal insanity has no doubt contributed to a lot of unmourned intruder corpses unreported in britain. when your own government will punish you for defending yourself without permission its time to get a new government. or just keep them out of the loop. if YOU know it wasnt murder and you KNOW youll be crucified for it, why bother reporting it? bury it in a swamp somewhere and go back to your wife and kids. knowing you saved them both from the intruder and your own psychotic government. this is why i love america. i wake up with a stranger in my living room i am going to KILL him immediately as brutally as possible, no hesitation. the police here would take one look at the scene and go "yup, self defense. good show." i know this for sure because last time it happened, i DID try to kill the guy. with extreme prejudice. guy had mace in my eyes but i had a grip on his clothes and just kept strangling his ass till he kicked me broke free and ran. wish i'd had a chance to finish the job and i sincerely hope i permanently damaged his larynx. i went after him with an ax handle. cops showed up behind me guns drawn and told me drop the weapon. i dropped it and said no problem with you guys i just want HIM....pointed to where the guy was disappearing over a fence. cops saw my bloody face and i explained what happened, they got all helpful. thanks guys! look on the bright side....when civilization finishes degenerating you'll once again be free to defend yourself without being punished. in the meantime with your govenment doing its best to render you a helpless embryo dependent on them for everything including basic physical safety, i wish you good luck.

for which, in due time, when i get the chance, i will stick my tongue out at him and kick him in the squishy. its not your fault, i won't hold it against you.

grrrr how bout i just go fuck myself. scuse me ill need privacy for this.....

PG PG PG what the hell is this pg i keep seeing mentioned? i scanned the thread looking for explanation there is none. whats the difference between pg tips and mamby pamby crud? which crud? what tips? tips of what? im not scared of dying. im scared of not knowing what the fuck these tea people are talking about.

here's a thought. skydivers are all really warriors fighting against the debilitating effects of settling for less. its a war against banality, stagnant lives and that dark cold brittleness of personality ive seen in so many people who spend their lives in hair curlers or wife-beaters angry in front of the tv sucking up megadoses of bud lite and jerry springer. we are the first class of warrior without a human enemy. the best battles are bloodless and our weapons are silly looking aircraft with whimsical names and textile projectiles, neon colored nylon and string. its an elite community. how many current active jumpers are there, worldwide? grand total alive today, in existence? 40,000? 50? much less perhaps? if you took every jumper in the known universe and gathered them all together in one place at one time it would be one huge party but you could fit the entire species (including all variant subspecies, birdmen BASE freaks even the skyray guys if you can call that skydiving) in one stadium at one time. this is not as elite as, say, being an astronaut, but its damn close. each and every one there brought there because they had the balls to say "yeah but i think i can fly" and back it up. i find it changes your life being one of those people other people only read about or see on tv. we have a new plant manager where i work. he doesnt really do anything with my subdepartment so aside from meeting him i'd barely spoken to him since he took over the plant. running into him recently he offered the generic greeting "had a good weekend?" i was thinking of the 3 recent jumps, semisuccessful freefly attempts, downwind adventure on a downsized canopy i landed perfectly, so much wild detail in so short a time. everyone else at work has long known i jump...i absently answered "hell yeah 3 more jumps lately". he said "jumps"? oh, shit. here we go again. i forgot he doesnt know. now im going to have to go through the usual "first time talking to a skydiver syndrome" whuffos get when you let out what you do in your spare time. im beginning to find it better to just hide it. saves hours of questions and answers. so i said "out of an airplane." in a tone indicating end of conversation and started walking away. it evaded the usual questions and kept his response brief. he looked startled, did a double take and his eyes bugged out at me and he said "WHAT!?!" call me juvenile call me a newbie call me what you will i still enjoy that shit. it may by now be normal for me to jump and im just another 100-jump wonder with old gear and no skills but to everyone else i know off-dz it makes me look like a rock star astronaut. i don't really care what i look like though anymore. i care about getting more airtime and skills so i don't look quite so silly up there trying to keep up with the veterans. i'd rather be close to the bottom of the skydiving totem pole than at the top of any other. that said, i think this afternoon i'll jump if possible, and make my day extraordinary. again. upgrading my reality one jump at a time.

personally i wonder exactly how DO they extract all the individuality and volition out of military personnel anyway? (sarcasm/satire here) is it like being assimilated by the borg or is it more like what the skeksies did to the podlings in the dark crystal? shine a purple light into the eyes and the person just drains out leaving behind a brush cut hairstyle and the slogan "unit corps god country"?` in all seriousness i have occasionally wished i could join the military but the sight of the mindless thousand yard stare in the eyes of all the military poster children in the recruitment ads on tv thats supposed to be somehow inspiring scares the shit out of me. i like my individuality and personality and choose NOT to be broken down and remade into somebody's wet dream of a compliant eager droid. everyone ive personally known who joined up, any branch, (ive known navy, coasties, air force, a marine and now a friend is about to join the army.... they all came back changed in a negative way. the friend who became a coastie turned from just another cool acquaintance to this prick with a buzz cut who always speaks in that projected "i am authority you will comply" voice they teach police, like everyone he deals with now is just "the subject" instead of a person. people he used to 4:20 with got threatened with arrest if they let him see it because he is now part of the federal govenment enforcement effort and cannot allow such things to go unpunished in his vicinity if he knows about it. i think he's still allowed to smile while on furlough or whatever they call time off, but he probably has to keep track of the number of occurrences and file an accountability report with his superior officers. hes not a human anymore he is a Federal Enforcing Officer and he gives me the creeps.

oh. ok, thank you..... i don;t know anything about tea, it just seemed one of those things cultured people did so i wondered why and bought some earl grey. i eventually nuked it cause i couldnt seem to get anything more than tinted water with a tea smell. it came out stronger but still somehow wrong. the boiling water i originally tried pouring on was, you guessed it, nuked. which makes it as wrong as the hot tap on the coffee machine. i'll try doing it the old school method of actually bringing the water to a rolling boil over an actual heat source like they used to back when everyone used real fire for cooking on.

i feel like im in a war and just had someone right around the corner get nailed within earshot. i havent seen or had anyone i know go in yet. i'm not looking forward to it. the 20$ or so to get to altitude isnt the real price for this. that just pays for gas and otter parts. the real price is....holly. you know ive seen so many subcultures, based on costume or attitude or occupation or activity.... this is the only one ive seen that has people burning so brightly. i think being this close to the abyss makes people appreciate what really matters....friends around a fire, blue sky, white clouds, that breeze that smells like a storm, walking away from a close call having navigated out of danger by the seat of your pants without a scratch laughing and talking to friends "daaamn did you see that? close one....cmon lets get a beer" if it isnt being challenged and risked life has no vividity. when im not jumping life off the dz looks gray by comparison. the japanese have a word: "zanshin" which doesnt exactly translate but i guess it comes across as a particularly lively expression of emotional intensity and focussed will. skydiving has more zanshin than anything else ive ever seen. you only get to live once, right? and you're the only one who gets to read your whole story, right? i refuse to settle for coffee table reading when i can have a glorious story full of life and light and friends and danger and learning and activity. i think skydiving itself is a big defiant "NO!" shouted in the face of human mortality. a blood clot could drop me like a bad habit tomorrow. a random psycho could bag me with a .357 tomorrow on the interstate cause his coffee got cold on him. a gust of wind could collapse my canopy at 60 feet and drop me like a rock. i could screw up tomorrow and get knocked out in freefall, never wake up, game over insert coin. until then im immortal. i skydive. i can fly. how can anything daunt me now? in 150 years there will be nothing left of any of us here now but dust knickknacks in attics old papers and memories. life itself is a temporary condition of otherwise inanimate matter. if i live long enough i'll get to see everyone i ever cared about disappear into eternity. i refuse to die regretting the things i did not do because i was afraid to live that intensely. but if i died tomorrow, i'd die a happy man. because i skydive. and because even doing a solo, i do not skydive alone. goodbye holly.

space travel without heavy industry....?

im reading further on the website. the site says the cockpits in both craft are identical anyway. in any case im thinking more about it and kinda starting to change my mind. this thing's mission is a lot simpler than a shuttle and its whole concept of operation is, too. no roboarms, payload bays or solid boosters, no life support systems needed big enough to feed a living space the size of a small hotel room, no science stations study hardware or any of the crap not essential to actually flying the thing.....and since its more of a glider than a ballistic missile like a old school shuttle i bet actual flightpath avionics and fuel management are a lot simpler too. i mean what the hell, our dz's otter has all this crap built into the dash, 60's 70's vintage gps, loran, god knows what else i cant identify....its all junk. we get perfect spot every time cause the pilot refitted it with a high end garmin gps stuck on the windshield with a suction cup. i have more processing power in my cellphone than on the entire old school shuttle's flight deck. and my own old car's antique gauges and com hardware are junk too....i got a digital tach beats hell out a speedo and i just ripped out my old 40-channel cb. hadn't touched it in 5 years it was useless compared to a cellphone. i'll tell you this though....if that cockpit in the pic IS the real thing it raises the possibility of blue collar astronauts...forklift operator, cdl license, airline pilot, orbital cargo shuttle pilot? it'd be nice if space became accessible to lesser humans than the squeaky clean workaholic yuppie perfect plastic human-looking types who get into space now. i mean right now if you aren't physically perfect and you didnt get straight a's in school from the age of 5 and a stellar record in the military and 18 doctorates from wherever you aren't getting into space unless you plunk down 20 million and BUY your way right past all the bullshit and lance bass's failure says even THATS difficult to do. i still doubt i'll ever be able to buy a ticket to orbit in my lifetime but every once in awhile i see something like this or the latest space elevator effort that makes me wonder. imagine how different the world would be with a space-travel industry equivalent to today's airline/airport systems. all i ask is a job driving forklift in the warehouse for wal-mart's outlet at the strip mall in aristarchus crater near the silicate refinery and transient's dorms. maybe in the next 50 years.....

fewer, yeah, but this pic looks like something i built back in high school. you ever read about what it takes to make even the simplest computer hardware hardened for space?i read it took way long time to even get 8086 stuff from years ago spaceproofed...which is why the old shuttle still looks like something out of the late 70's. no gui, no boxes bars or mice.... not even dual displays mind you....one backlight driver circuit failure and he's blind...... ok maybe their display is massively overbuilt with triple redundant everything, but...... too little information to make the call, really. its either a bogus pic or its so advanced i don't know what im looking at. but im not buying it. i bet if this thing actually becomes the next shuttle and we see lots and lots of media of it once its in daily use i bet the cockpit doesnt look anything like what they will later tell us was a "concept photo".

thats got to be a photoshop job. i mean gimme a break. somehow i have a hard time dealing with the idea of the next gen spacecraft having a cockpit whose sum total controls are simpler than the latest mech combat simulator. and whats the wrist mount alti doing inside the cockpit? to tell you how high you are in the split second before ejecting?if its a spacecraft its pressurized, so the alti does nothing but indicate you do have pressure....and in any case it just doesnt make any sense....a wrist mount reads up to 12k and is useful a few k beyond that but no more. that'd be like building a lamborghini whose speedo only reads up to 5 mph. something tells me this is a mock glory shot intended to look cool but tell nobody anything about the spacecraft itself. can you say intellectual property protection? i know almost nothing about aerospace industries in general but i also have a hard time buying the idea that the company to build the next gen shuttle is so hard up for money they'd regulate anything with a 5$ radioshack kitchen timer. this is not exactly s-rated electronics we're looking at here. risk a multimillion dollar prototype spacecraft because you're too cheap or strapped for cash to buy/build real gauges? something does not compute.

earl grey, but im just getting into it and am not sure best way to drink it yet. havent arrived at a formula. i added too much cream once and got this nasty ass substance....taken black it just seems somehow insubstantial even if brewed in the micro for 10 minutes. now coffee i have a formula for...2 tablespoons o' instant coffee in huge mug nuked for 3 minutes 2 scoopps o sugar and one blop (thats a measurement.....one blop, two blops, you get the idea) one blop o milk. its the soup that eats like a meal my cat got ahold of some i didnt finish and took off like a model rocket leaving a cat shaped hole in a nearby cinderblock wall and burnout marks on the carpet. how am i going to explain this to the landlord

A Marine is a higher life form that a soldier and we take offense at being demoted to "soldier" status. Quote Marines know a glory that no other simple soldier could ever understand; and know that God has a special place in Heaven just for them. the only thing you got right is that Marines are better than soldiers. The proof is obvious, look at who got the better dress uniform. whoa. ok. you claim to be a higher lifeform by virtue of membership in an organization....huh? um, you might be a bit fitter than the average human but so far as i know joining the military, any branch, doesnt modify your basic structure. you think that by virtue solely of your membership in this organization you are entitled to a position of special honor next to the creator of the universe. huh. i suppose the word "humility" is unknown to you...? and last but not least you think you can judge a man based on how cool his UNIFORM is? ....theres more than one person in here with issues. christ.

Sometimes it's hard to see sarcasm and irony when it's done with a light touch; it's easy to confuse that with sincerity re:sinker: or when its done in the form of what i thought was a particularly psycho-sounding rant, myself. although im not clear if you took exception to the first big one or the second little one. i have another even more evil rant about telemarketers and the joys of chainsaws but im not posting it for fear of legal repercussions. your reaction tells me that last one was good enough to put in my book. cool.

ow, stop doing that! i have a grapefruit. clark, where are you?