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thecholma · 2 days ago

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had the state pave over the memorial for the 49 Pulse Nightclub massacre victims.

Members of the community responded

🌈💙❤️💛🩷💜🩵💚💛🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️✌🏻🤟🏻

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thecholma · 7 days ago

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I saw this on Facebook and had to look it up. It really happened, albeit the details are different. From Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story:

"On the evening of MD-46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two month," said Garriott. "It even had the flight controllers puzzled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Helen, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only accomplice, but his role would be carefully disguised.

It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been recorded before fight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Skylab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their billfolds, awaiting the right moment.

"For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be widely known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two natural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife's recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper."

Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, "I'll have something for you on the next pass, Bob." Crippen replied, "Roger that, Owen." Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:

Skylab (a female voice): "Gad, I don't see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback berween these speakers.... Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (s sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you reading Skylab?"

Capcom: "Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had difficulty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?"

Skylab: "Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven't talked with you for a while. Isn't that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn't had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I'd bring one up. Over"

Capcom: "Roger, Skylab. Someone's gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?"

Skylab: "Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were looking down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh..... See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I'm not supposed to be on the radio."

"Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crippen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center," Garriott said. "What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air-to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen's voice on a 'family conversation' from our home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob's comments in real time, as everyone could hear?

"No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twenty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best 'gotcha' ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!"

Crippen recalled: "That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing.

Everybody in the MOCR, or the control room, was looking like, What the hell is going on?' We did a good job. It was fun. Working those missions got to be tough. We did all kinds of things to try to come up with levity. That was a nice one that the crew got that the ground control didn't know about."

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thecholma · 7 days ago

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currently going absolutely feral over this rn

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thecholma · 7 days ago

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C R O W T I M E ! "Fac vitum et tempus unum cum gaudio" ~ "Make time for the things that make you feel alive" should be a motto for everyone!

Grim Reaper Part 1

Grim Reaper Part 2

It's the Hound Knight again, AT LAST!

Check out my Patreon for the 2 bonus panels.

My stuff :

✧Read Namesake✧ ✧Read Crow Time✧ ✧Store✧ ✧Patreon✧

#secondlina art #crow time

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thecholma · 7 days ago

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i see nobody talking about this here but apparently prageru released a program about slavery and colonialism and I kid you not, the line "it's better to be taken as a slave than killed" is said.

i think we all know it's extremely dangerous to dilute the severity and generational effects slavery had on black Americans as we are STILL impacted by it and its components like Jim Crow and segregation.

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thecholma · 7 days ago

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I love Firefox, but COME ON, Mozilla! WTF? Keep this fake-A.I. bullshit out of the browser! All A.I. does is burn energy and waste water in the data centers running these things.

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

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thecholma · 8 days ago

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Where did you get the ideas for wizard’s manual. What is the closest earth variant irl? And are there any assignments that wizards get just in passsing (like someone brings them a problem)

Where did the concept of the Manual come from? It was ... kind of an accident.

When I was initially training to be a psych nurse, I noticed (as so many other nurses continue to do, sometimes on a daily basis) how very, uh, clueless human beings could be about their own bodies, and the kinds of things you should and shouldn't do to them. (For example: I think it was Massachusetts General Hospital that once had, inside the entrance to its medical or nursing school, a big glass case full of things that people had put into their bodies and could not get out again without professional assistance. Some of them were mindboggling.*)

It was possibly in response to one of these situations that one of my colleagues, during my early months of practice, said, "God, don't you wish people came with, I don't know, some kind of instruction manual? So that they wouldn't do stuff like this to themselves." And we all laughed and agreed.

So time went by and I eventually gave up nursing and started writing full time. Initially, shortly after my first book came out, and more so after it quickly pulled down my first nomination for the Astounding award, people started asking me "What are you doing next?".

At that point I had no damn idea what kind of book was going to come next. (Especially as I was also then doing my first animation work for Hanna-Barbera—scroll down to the bottom of the list here to the entries for 1979, 1980 and 1981 and you'll see what I was up to.) But then, without warning, something changed.

It essentially started with a joke. The phrase "So You Want To Be A..." was a trope that originally went back to the once well-known series of career books published by Harper & Row in the 1950s and 1960s: "So You Want To Be A Physicist", "...A Dentist", "...A Teacher," etc etc. Every school library and public library had at least some of these.

And one day, under circumstances that I can no longer remember—because seriously, it's pushing fifty years ago now—that phrase came up for consideration for some reason, and the word "wizard" collided with it and attached itself to the end of it. "So You Want To Be A Wizard." Funny title, right?

Except that concept then somehow rear-ended the "manual for clueless human beings" concept... and the resulting crash compressed it into a different shape, and scattered fragmentary questions all over the landscape. What if there was a manual? Not just one that tells you the secrets of human life, tells you why things really happen, but also what you have to do to make them happen... if you're a wizard?

And if there was such a book, how did it work? Where did it come from? Who made it? Why did they make it? How did they make it?

...So I started writing the book that tells about that book. (Even then I couldn't resist playing around with meta. The version of SYWTBAW (and of the Manual) that Nita finds in her local library lists somebody called "Hearnssen" as the author... which is this guy. His dad, Hearn, is there behind him.)

...Writing the book took about six months in 1981-82. After the usual time spent finding it a publisher and getting the editing and other pre-publication work done, the book came out in 1983. But there's no question that the Young Wizards books' quick entry into publication was largely thanks to the success of the first of the Middle Kingdoms books: in which the characters have their own (if very different) style of wizardry. ...And writing for Scooby-Doo provided the money necessary to keep me afloat while that work was going on—which is why one of Kit's and Nita's local supervisory wizards is named after one of my story editors at H-B.

Now, as for other Manual-based issues: There are no IRL variants that function the way true Manuals do. In the print format popular in many places on Earth, Manuals change size and shape as required by the data they're carrying, and their interiors also change to reflect changes in the world around them. Our home reality being what it is, I would have some serious concerns if I observed a book behaving that way. ...Meanwhile, in terms of what we've seen in the series so far, even on Earth there are cultural differences in the way wizards get the vital information they need to use the Speech on the world around them. Some don't use "solid" manuals at all, but hear Manual data as speech or song (as whales do) or in-mind dialogue (as, for example, many Irish wizards do).

There's more information on this on the (admittedly presently incomplete) Wizard's Manual page at the now-being-revised Errantry Concordance wiki. (See also the section on "Contributions, assumptions, periodicals and plug-ins", which discusses how some Earth-based data is "assumed" into the Manual.)

Finally: absolutely there are wizards who've elected to do mostly consulting work. Like all their cousins, they naturally go where the Powers that Be send them when problems come up to which they're the preferred solution. But if they find they have a gift for assisting other wizards in solving problems that are proving unusually thorny, naturally the Powers encourage them to get right on with that as a sort of sub-specialty.

Anyway: hope all this has helped. :)