Charcoal!? H'wat!?

My solution: Weld the doors on the pod shut.

Fixed it!

Or the modern digital camera's interaction with low earth orbit environments. Astronauts are not chosen for their stupidity. Of course, it is possible that the astronaut just doesn't know that you can't take 10 minute exposures at ISO 64,000 but all else being equal that seems unlikely.

Did it occur to you that the conditions in Earth orbit may not be the exact same as in your back yard?

Well to be fair, there have been many 5-star generals since Pershing. George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry "Hap" Arnold, and Omar Bradley have all been awarded the 5-star rank, from 1944 to 1950. Omar Bradley was the last, and Hap Arnold was a 5-star of both the Army and the USAF; he is the…

Yeah, I'm gonna call bullshit on that. Being in the military, I know that they use thousands upon thousands of different databases for everything, and not a goddamn one of them talks to each other. It's quite possibly the most frustrating thing in the planet. I doubt the SIPR databases are any more connected. People…

Replied to approve. Not that I approve of D-Gar. That whole place sucks.

Well, fuck. That sucks.

For Sale: Williams F1 car. Ran when last parked. Smoking hot deal!

"Wrecked 'er? I disaster!"

And if I were paying $15 a month for that, I'd be ok with it too. But yeah. $145. And we had very strict bandwidth caps. And we had to re-login to the service every 4 hours, so all your downloads had better be done within 4 hours!

And that was pretty good, considering. This is what it was like more often.

I was in Iraq for a year, and let me tell you, you haven't seen shitty, god-awful internet until you've seen Jackal Wireless. $145 a month for this! That was an honest to god speed test from July of 2010.

Shit like that is why I joined the Navy in the first place. I got to see stuff even more awesome than that on a near-daily basis. I consider myself a very lucky man to have experienced it.

Not night shots, night landings. I read a book that described the act of landing on an aircraft carrier at night; memory has faded but it basically read like this: Put yourself in a 10x10 room, and clear out a little empty area in the middle of it. Put a postage stamp in the middle of the area on the floor. Now, back…

Goddammit. I've seen that episode. New. On TV. This is what my life has come to.

Sadly, I saw that episode. Yeah, I know, I know. Anyway, turns out Mama cat was gettin' a little sumpin'-sumpin' on the side from the [black] cat next door. The dad, who is either very loving or very stupid - or both - loves them anyway.

Oh, they knew better. I've been part of a crew that was threatened with horrible things if they didn't beam straight rays of sunshine up INSURV's assholes. It's awful for morale, but officers don't care about morale, and the vast majority of officers are too stupid to realize that an enlisted crew that fucking hates…

FWIW, all Naval messages are in all caps. It's a vestige of the days when naval communiques were transmitted via radio teletype, which didn't have the capacity for lower-case levels. It's all done by satellite and email now, but the all-caps thing remains.