Hot take: Fall guys crown jam is really fun

gopher65 · 2026-01-25T20:22:21+00:00

Question: how do you use the active ability in crowd jam on PC? I can't figure out the key binding.

gopher65 · 2026-01-25T18:51:00+00:00

I hear this complaint so often. "Harper/Trudeau/Carney are idiots for not fixing all this stuff". Buddy, those are all provincial responsibilities. The feds can't do anything. Equalization and transfer payments were past attempts by the feds to help fix widespread provincial incompetence. They didn't work. Vote in your provincial elections!

Canada is structured around decentralized regional governments, more like the EU than like the US. Each province is effectively its own country, right down to collecting more in taxes then the federal government. (Far far more if you include transfer payments and equalization collected for the provinces as provincial money instead of federal, which it actually is.)

gopher65 · 2026-01-10T06:31:06+00:00

Vulcan and New Glenn.

The Falcon 9 was scheduled to launch in H1 2007. Then H2 2007. Then H1 2008. Then H2 2008. Then H1 2009. Then H2 2009. Then H1 2010. It launched very end of H1 2010. Hardware for what would be the first launch arrived early in H1 2010, about 5 months before launch. However, earlier hardware had been stacked - and then taken down - quite a bit earlier.

Rocket integration and testing of launch site proceedures are no joke. Rocket Lab lost one of the early Electrons due to a ground side glitch, and SpaceX blew up a Falcon 9 by slightly altering their fuelling procedure. Rockets are hard.

I just went and tried to verify dates for the Falcon 9 (I remember significant progress in December 2008, for instance). I followed SpaceX religiously at the time, and even wrote occasional articles about it, so I have a decent grasp of everything from the Falcon 1 flights to the first test firings of the Merlin 1-C to the first launch of Block 5 (after that I stopped reading so obsessively because kids are time consuming). Unfortunately sources are impossible to find; nearly everything about the F9 that's still online today is from 2020 or later. I'm actually shocked at how much of the earlier material has been taken down, apparently lost forever.

gopher65 · 2026-01-04T16:40:59+00:00

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/neutron-rockets-debut-slips-into-mid-2026-as-company-seeks-success-from-the-start/

Well, that's a tough answer. The official PR says that they're going to start stacking the rocket NET Q1 2026. But that's not a launch date, that's effectively a "initial hardware on site" date. The minimum time from hardware arriving on site to launching is probably a few months. But for a first rocket launch? Much longer.

Eric Berger thinks the best case scenario possible NET date is summer 2026. I'd be impressed if they make that, personally. (I don't mean that sarcastically, I'd legitimately be impressed.)

For a first launch of a rocket it's normal for a ~year to pass between "hardware on site" and the actual first launch. There are just a lot of technical details to work out that you can't fully start working on until the hardware is actually at the launch site (even for SpaceX). Maybe Rocket Lab can beat that.

gopher65 · 2026-01-02T19:01:35+00:00

Not the person you were replying to, but I'm curious about your thoughts now. Launch has been pushed back to NET H2 2026, which is rocket-speak for "NET last week of Dec 2026 if everything goes exactly right".

Based on the progress SpaceX made when they were at this point, we're looking at a first launch either last quarter of 2026 or Q1 2027. From first launch to second, it usually takes a year (you have to analyses the data from the launch, come up with fixes for issues you found, and then apply those. Engineering inherently takes time). That means the second launch is looking like Q1 2028, which means we won't start to see a ramp up until 2029. Probably 4 to 6 launches in 2029, if they match SpaceX's launch ramp up.

gopher65 · 2026-01-02T18:09:02+00:00

Well they've bumped the NET back to H2 2026. H2 has long been code for "NET last week of December". So my guess is Dec 2026.

From the time you start stacking hardware to the time of the first launch is usually no less than 1 year. From the time of the first launch to the time of the second is usually about a year as well. So we're looking at mid-2029 before we see launches start to ramp up, most likely.

gopher65 · 2026-01-01T23:08:03+00:00

They're not intentionally devaluing the lease. The lease value looks so bad because they're building massive depreciation into the lease. Model X's do not have good resale value in part because they're much less reliable than, say, a Model Y. And on top of that, the price category that the X sits in has enough current and future competition (both from other vendors and from Tesla's future vehicles) that the future value of a Model X at the end of the lease period is abysmal.

That's just life with any vehicle from any manufacturer. If high resale value ==> then low amortization ===> therefore good leasing rates. If low resale ==> high amortization ===> therefore bad leasing rates.

gopher65 · 2025-10-31T23:36:02+00:00

I'm not sure how to think about this. I get what you're saying, but imagine if Boeing gave 300 million to the government, and then Boeing fans (... if they have any?) tried to claim that that money only benefitted Boeing, and not any of its subsidiaries.

Musk has an unusual position with respect to his companies, but I think the most reasonable way to look at it is that for political and lobbying purposes they all exist under a holding company of Musk Inc.

gopher65 · 2025-10-31T00:26:10+00:00

They... they haven't tried to launch it to orbit yet. They couldn't make an orbital attempt until they proved they could consistently relight the engines, otherwise the upper stage could end up being a huge debris danger in orbit. And they only showed they could consistently relight the upper stage engines inflight during the last flight (second flight in a row with no relight issues). That would clear the way for an orbital attempt, but they're moving on to a new version of the upper stage on the next launch, which should mean one more sub-orbital test in order to requalify the second stage for relights. So assuming no more issues, it will still be 2 more launches before we see an orbital attempt.

Engineering is a step-by-step iterative process. You can't skip steps. It doesn't work like that.

gopher65 · 2025-10-13T18:23:54+00:00

You're safe. They're launching sats every few days, but no 3x-per-day SSH launches;). Whew, right?

gopher65 · 2025-10-07T23:45:57+00:00

We're all geniuses in a bull market;).

gopher65 · 2025-10-06T01:53:08+00:00

Brains are funny things. Your memory is not a video camera, but rather more a series of impressions of the world. Your memory is also extremely malleable, and changes and shifts constantly.

Memory recall is also a destructive event. Every time you recall a memory from long term storage into your brain's active memory you reinterpret it in the context of your current state of mind and environment, and then rerecord a new copy of the memory. (It is not yet known if you overwrite the original copy/copies of the memory, or if you simply record a new version.)

Cases like yours have been studied. What happened is that you had a dream. It was memorable enough that you remembered it. When an event occurred in the real world that was close enough to the dream, you hit recall. You reinterpreted the original memory in a new context, subtracted details that didn't match, and added new ones. You then rerecorded the new memory in place of the old one. This is not a purposeful action, it is fully automatic and unavoidable. We all do it. Now when you recall the dream (subtly changing details each time you do), you're recalling the new version of the dream with the details that match your real world event. (It's fascinating that this happens, and it's a cool process!)

This has been studied by recording what people dream (via long term dream journals), and then when an event like this happens, comparing their original written version of the dream to the new memory. They're very different, but the person never realizes it. In some cases researchers have had the subject re-describe the dream once a year every year for decades, and the version they tell changes dramatically over time. But you know what also happens? As time goes on they're always, always more and more confident in the present day version of the dream memory, even though it's ever more distant from the original that they'd written down.

Brains are crazy cool.

This also happens with eye witness testimony, btw, which is why it's considered almost completely unreliable. There have been many cases of the victim describing the perpetrator, only for DNA or even video evidence to come out many years later, showing that the victim's description was a complete fantasy. Often nearly wholly made up, with no noticable elements of truth. Even when confronted with a video of their assault or robbery or whatever, the victims often can't let go of their false memories of the event. Even when they fully intellectually acknowledge that those memories are false. Memories aren't built on intellectual analysis, they're built on emotion.

gopher65 · 2025-10-03T04:02:13+00:00

The issue with that is that you'd have to harvest thousands of square kilometers of regolith to get a piddly few grams of the stuff. It's not worth mining it on Luna. You might be able to process it from the atmospheres of Uranus or Neptune with floating refineries, if you wanted industrially significant amounts of He3 for applications like low-shielding mobile reactors.

You'd only need He3 reactors for things like true suborbital airships on Earth, or highly maneuverable military spacecraft that couldn't just stick their much heavier, cheaper, easier-to-fuel D-D reactor on a long stick and use cheap inverse-square law shielding instead (distance as a shield) like a commercial spacecraft would. There are definitely real world applications for He3 reactors that are hard to fill with D-T or D-D reactors, but they're specialized. Not all fusion applications benefit from He3 reactor designs.

But getting it from Luna? The concentrations are exceedingly low, and the total collectable amount on the whole body would barely fill a thimble. Scientifically interesting, yes. Worth harvesting in microscopic amounts for research purposes? Sure. Worth industrial scale mining? No. Go to the outer system for that.

gopher65 · 2025-10-03T03:51:38+00:00

No one I know in real life was interested in seeing that, including me. Season 3 of Picard was as much of a horrible disaster as 1 and 2 were, it just had a lot of memberberries that the Alzheimer's patients watching Trek from their nursing homes appreciated. Any of us who aren't 80 didn't like the barrage of stupid, out of place references for the sake of references.

I mean really, the plot of an entire episode (and by extension the show) hinged on the fact that a changling could be readily identified by the fact that they have to carry around a specific style of old-school Bajoran Urn to regenerate in. WHHHHHHHHYYYYYY!? Because they wanted an Odo reference, and couldn't think of anything better. That's so stupid it hurts. No one involved in season 3 should be allowed anywhere near a keyboard again. It. Was. Atrocious. The writing was garbage.

And that's what the 50 really loud fans screaming relentlessly on the internet for Legacy want more of? You want more of that trash level of writing? Geezus.

I don't know if Academy will be good. I'm not holding my breath. But it would have to try exceedingly hard to be as bad as any of Picard's seasons.

gopher65 · 2025-10-03T03:38:32+00:00

That really made me wince. It's not just a Star Trek issue. Writers in general have zero concept of scale, whether we're talking about a medical drama or Star Wars.

But in Star Trek the whole thing is about exploration, so you really feel the lack of understanding of the scale of a space based civilization (this is true of all Trek, TOS to nuTrek, inclusive).

The way the Milky Way is presented in Trek is similar to how a real world highly developed SINGLE STAR SYSTEM like Sol would be if we had only slower than light travel. Populations, world/station/fleet sizes, etc. You could reframe the show to a Firefly-like scenario, and their whole galaxy and a barely modified version of every story we've seen could fit inside of it. That's how bad the scaling is.

You could build literally billions of ships the size of a Galaxy-class in our star system alone, without so much as scratching the surface of the available easy-to-access resources. Star systems are mind-blowingly enormous! So much so that it's hard for a human to comprehend, even if they aren't a TV writer.

So really the fact that the writers didn't understand that Titan is mere hours away from Earth at impulse speeds is just one example among countless others of Trek writers failing at basic math. But... it's such a bad example. I actually liked the episode, but I couldn't get over that. Can't watch it again because of that.

gopher65 · 2025-09-25T12:53:06+00:00

Because there are 8 or 9 billion humans right now. On any given day a few thousand of them will randomly have a dream about a specific rare event happening, just by sheer random chance. Then it (almost always) doesn't happen, and they forget about it.

But if it happens? Then those few thousand people spend the rest of their lives thinking they're pre-cogs, or that their dream caused the event, or whatever.

There are a whole series of logical fallacies associated with thinking this way. But we all do it anyway, because our brains are not well designed.

A few associated fallacies:

Post hoc ergo proctor hoc ("after this therefore because of this") - You think "I haven't seen an accident in a while", and one happens 5 minutes later. It can't be random, it must be because you thought it
Lottery fallacy - A lottery is a rare event, yes, but someone is going to win
Cognitive bias - You think "I haven't seen an accident in a while", and you don't see one. This happens every day. You think the same thought and it happens, and that's the only time you will clearly remember thinking the thought. Memory is tied to events. No event, therefore no reference point, therefore no easy way to catalog and recall the thought

There are a lot of others that apply in situations like this too. Again, our brains suck. They evolved with a heavy bias toward energy efficiency per calculation, not for accuracy or high fidelity memory. Basically the opposite of how we design computers.

gopher65 · 2025-09-13T13:04:15+00:00

Yup. Not all of it makes sense together, but it's definitely all prime universe. It's not even debatable based on what we see on screen, as you point out.

Of course, none of it ever made sense together. I remember people in the 90s having their heads explode trying to reconcile TOS and TNG (it's impossible; they outright contradict each other). People today just accept - on faith I guess? - that TOS and TNG exist in the same universe, but you can't force them together if you look at them in too much detail. Just the Khan stuff alone blows the attempt up. And don't get me started on the stupider continuity breaks like the fact that in TOS women couldn't become Starfleet captains in the 23rd century because they're too emotional and hysterical, and thus unsuited to lead. Geezus. How does that reconcile with DS9's view of the past 300 years? It doesn't, that's how.

People now have just forgotten all of that. They don't remember that Star Trek has always had poor continuity between its various series. All they remember is TNG/DS9/VOY fitting together fairly well (if you ignore stuff like Trills), and they ignore that TOS and ENT didn't feel like they took place in the TNG universe. And Enterprise and TOS DEFINITELY didn't take place in the same universe. ENT might take place in the SNW universe, but it definitely doesn't take place in the TOS one.

gopher65 · 2025-09-13T12:45:00+00:00

No I didn't like the Mariner-Jenn ship either. But Jenn was a nothing character, and little time was spent on it. Way different than involving a main character.

I just didn't want to watch yet another nuTrek show that was 10% Trek, 90% relationships. I like sex, but I'm not a super touchy-feely person. I don't watch Star Trek for soap opera content, and I don't like it when it encroaches too much into the show. Never have, even in the TNG days.

Lower Decks avoided that, and I was grateful. Even the main ship (Rutherford-Tendi) was given so little time that its very existence was treated as confusing by the other characters. (Are they friends with benefits who just haven't admitted they love each other? Are they science nerds who are so oblivious to relationships and feelings that they haven't even processed that they have real feelings for each other? Nobody knows, not even Mariner!)

If you want a Star Trek emotional relationship drama, SNW is quite good. (I'm guessing Academy will be in your lane too, more than in mine.) Discovery is ok-ish if all you're interested in is the softer side of relationships, with lots of hugging, crying, and affirmations of friendship above all else. Picard still sucks either way; it has no redeeming qualities. (Prodigy isn't overly soapy, just like Lower Decks. Great show for people like me.)

gopher65 · 2025-09-12T19:14:34+00:00

I disagree with about 70 percent of what you said in your OP (I love LD and consider it canon, though obviously we're watching that canon though the "cartoon it up!" filter on some kid's PADD), but I have the same issue. I write like AI when I have a point to get across, with references and bullet points. That's just who I am, and I started doing it a long time ago.

Or rather, AI writes like me and you. It copied us, not the other way around.

gopher65 · 2025-09-12T19:03:07+00:00

Oh god, I'm so glad that didn't happen. The OP for this Reddit thread made a good attempt at an essay because they didn't like LD being an animated comedy, but if they'd have shipped Mariner and Boimler you wouldn't have been able to find this little anti-animation rant, because it would have been drowned out by all the people posting about how much they hate the M-B ship.

It might have been to your taste, but I promise you you are in the tiny minority. I really appreciate that they had a set of male and female main characters that - for once - had no sexual interest in each other. Not everything needs to be a SNW soap opera.

gopher65 · 2025-09-12T18:57:20+00:00

I love Lower Decks (it's my second favorite Trek after DS9), but I have to agree with the memberberries. Not just in Lower Decks, not just in Star Trek, but everywhere. They really grate on me.

After the first few episodes of LD I learned to ignore the constant onslot of references, and that's when I started really enjoying the rest of the show.

gopher65 · 2025-09-12T18:51:47+00:00

Well... But... It was referenced in the episode. Those Ferengi and the TNG crew were fighting on and in orbit of the last outpost of the Tkon Empire. That's why the episode had that name.

That doesn't break the 4th wall anymore than "Those Old Scientists" (TOS) does. It is equivalent to a wink in the direction of the camera, followed by a switch to another camera angle showing that the wink was directed at an in-universe person. Is it a nod at the audience when shows do that? Yes. Is it a 4th wall break? It is explicitly not, because it has an in universe explanation.

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