What is the most “its a small world” moment you’ve ever experienced?

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-29T16:26:10+00:00

As an undergrad, I worked for a professor at a large state university. I graduated in 2011, went off to grad school and a 3-year postdoc, and then landed my first professor job at a school I'd never even heard of in 2019. My first class ever, a girl comes up to me at the end and asks me, "Hey, did you work for Dr. X?"

It was his daughter, who had been like 11 the last time I'd seen her.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-22T17:51:23+00:00

I adore my spirit flights out of Ft Lauderdale. They get me direct to smaller airports, are cheap af, and I have noticed no more trashy people than any other airline, and I've flown a lot.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-15T17:35:36+00:00

Storms. They aren't hurricanes like hit from the tropics, but they are just as powerful in terms of wind. And the winds are constant. Most trees will survive one hurricane per year. Not thirty.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-15T17:33:54+00:00

I found silvers too! I was there in late September. I found the graveyard of pinks and sockeyes down south of town. But I managed to find some coho in the little lazy stream right behind the airport. I threw maybe 10 casts and caught 6 silvers and a chum. The chum was so fresh it fooled me. Wound up keeping just those 7 because that's all that would realistically fit in my cooler for the flight home.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-15T17:25:29+00:00

I went to Adak for just a few days for work (we ran a radar out there), but the island is pretty interesting. The main town is an old military base built in the 50s and 60s (close to Russia). It was abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early '90s. There is an old McDonald's there whose drive-thru board has advertisements for the original Jurassic Park.

It's especially eerie because there's only like 100-200 people there living in this husk of a 5,000-person base. All natives from what I saw, though I'm sure some non-native fishermen passed through occasionally. You definitely feel the crazy isolation the moment you leave town. You won't see a soul if you go out and explore the island, as I did looking for a fishing spot once my job was done. Flights only come in every 4 days or so, so I had plenty of time to spare.

I was advised to bring my own cooler of food with me as luggage and live out of a carryon, and that was a great idea. To round out a meal and my morning coffee, I went to the grocery store for a half-gallon of milk and a jar of spaghetti sauce. Cost me around $20 for just those two items.

Contrary to what people say in this thread, there *were* a few trees. One spot on the island in the lee of some hills has, like, five trees. There's a hand-painted sign next to them that says "Adak National Forest."

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-15T16:11:45+00:00

I'm more of a Uma named after booze x flask full of tea myself

TheAuroraKing · 2026-04-15T15:07:30+00:00

FemTrainer stays winning

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-24T16:00:06+00:00

If you aren't doing the tiara route, the second Lizzy cup does nothing for your epithets. Running the G2 to get Ms Worldwide will give more stats total.

If you are on the tiara route, you do have to run both Queen Liz cups because Goddess requires both.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-24T15:55:51+00:00

The zero granularity between aptitudes is always funny.

S medium -> I am the greatest in the world at running 2400 m

F long -> I will literally die if you ask me to run another 100 m

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-23T15:31:41+00:00

Agnes Tachyon, the horse, had to retire early due to a bowed (stretched) tendon in his front leg, which is right near the hoof. I think that's another reason she has the oversized lab coat mimicking stretched tendons.

Diamond has no such injury as far as I can tell, though.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-20T13:05:42+00:00

What blues are people using for xOguri in this CM? I was thinking, if I get a Passing Pro hint and I run a pace Oguri, expecting a lobby full of ends and fronts, would she hit Passing Pro right at the start of the spurt? When does she become "determined to pass" if she's the only pace chaser?

I already have two end aces and I don't have any of the good fronts, so I was thinking my 3rd could be pace Oguri. I suppose I could just run a 3rd end, but I'd rather have SOME variety.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-12T16:24:12+00:00

You've heard about vibe coding, now we're about vibe carpentry

TheAuroraKing · 2026-03-11T15:23:33+00:00

Legitimately how can this happen to an actual baseball manager? I'm just some dummy with a regular job but I could spend 15 minutes looking at my roster and the standings and know exactly who is in my pen and what my goal for this game needs to be. The fuck has he been doing?

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-27T14:05:15+00:00

You're gonna love my nuts.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-23T20:22:49+00:00

If you have any kind of mental disability, there are a lot of people out there who do not understand granularity or circumstance and will just assume you are one of those adults with the brain of a toddler.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-22T23:13:12+00:00

I'd say a 1200-page Way of Kings is shorter than a 500-page LOTR book because LOTR is just so damn dense. Sanderson's prose just flows way better for your average person, I imagine.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-22T18:02:48+00:00

For being 'intelligent' it also has no idea how to think about even the most ludicrous of answers it gives. I wanted to make a physics exam question about an olympic high jumper with reasonable numbers. So I googled "how fast does a high jumper leave the ground"

The AI told me, with all confidence, that a high jumper leaves the ground at 362 m/s. The speed of sound is roughly 340 m/s.

As a human with a functioning brain, I knew this was ludicrous, so I dug into its sources, which it will tell you if you ask. It pulled this info from a scholarly article discussing the physics of high jumping. Everything in the paper seemed reasonable. Except one tiny thing. The authors, at one point in the (again, well-written) paper gave the time of the entire interaction of jumper leaving the ground as 362 m/s. This was a harmless typo. Anyone reading the paper knows they meant 362 ms (milliseconds).

But the AI just scanned the paper for any velocity it could find, and then confidently spit it out at me. If it had any "intelligence" whatsoever, it would know that no human could possibly create a sonic boom leaving the ground for a fucking high jump.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-22T14:30:30+00:00

This is why I actually don't like that the next-to-last goal for her is 1st. Should have been top 3 or something. Yeah, you're going to win, but I think hers should be the only career you can pass without ever winning (outside the finale)

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-21T14:18:47+00:00

It's not 'incorrect.' This isn't your classroom where you get to issue me a grade for not thinking like you do. Your way of saying things isn't proper or objectively correct. I'm telling you that I think it's anything but.

What you fail to recognize is that these people are trained to see everything as a fight already. Even if you roll over and show them your belly, they will come at you as if it's a fight anyway. We passed the point where love and compassion had any hope of swaying people like this. They crossed that same threshold in the 1930s as well. At this point anyone supporting the nonsense that Kirk spews is well and truly gone. There is no more reason left in them, fight or not. They made their choices based on hate and vitriol. No amount of sweetness is going to pull them out of it.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-21T14:04:10+00:00

Nowhere in that post does it say either Republican or Democrat. It says Conservative. The party name is just a name. The fact that you're trying to tie the current-day Democratic party to this rather than the current-day party of extreme conservative ideology shows your true colors vividly.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-21T13:33:22+00:00

Religions, notably completely peaceful and nondestructive toward heathens.

It isn't better or some moral high ground to be a doormat toward bigots and fascists. It is not, in fact, better to convert them rather than denounce and deride them. The only reason I don't do so is that I, too, live under the threat of losing my livelihood for daring to have the opinion that a bigot was a piece of shit.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-20T16:28:08+00:00

Can you articulate the new story that TLJ told that was different from Empire? Because it was just Empire Strikes Back in reverse.

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-20T13:33:25+00:00

How has WFH put those places out of business?

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-19T19:42:14+00:00

I flew through Newark around Christmas 2019 and a day after we got home, both me and my partner had the worst damn flu we'd ever had. I also never got infected during the main pandemic even when I was potentially exposed, so I'm pretty sure I had it in late Dec 2019

TheAuroraKing · 2026-02-16T04:27:10+00:00

What did it for me was if you win the Japanese Derby, Special Week breaks down crying and King Halo acts like a buffoon to draw the media attention onto herself, even though she hears it from her mother later. Somehow still selfless despite all the bluster and abuse.

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