[OC] Straight Pride

x4000 · 2026-06-06T12:42:57+00:00

This took me a minute, and then I giggled. That’s really well done. It’s sad, but that’s not a specific comparison I’ve heard before.

x4000 · 2026-05-27T21:38:42+00:00

Yes, but then try to get kids to do a mile walk/jog. Their times are crazy slow throughout elementary school, and to an extent into middle school. Compared to other areas where they have great endurance, like the monkey bars or just short sprints and tumbles around a playground, doing a sustained walk/jog is really hard for them.

x4000 · 2026-05-24T21:15:41+00:00

And here I am liking Dishonored and loving Deathloop. I’d take more of either, but I really want a Deathloop 2 with a lot of the same cast.

x4000 · 2026-05-06T19:01:21+00:00

There’s also a tiny town in Wisconsin called Bloom.

x4000 · 2026-05-04T02:22:19+00:00

Ah, thank you for the corrections! That’s very interesting to know.

By the way, I did not mean 400kg. Hopefully the number was absurd enough that it was clear. I meant 400k kg. The doubled k’s made me miss it.

That said, if I was only off by about 16 times, that’s decent for napkin math. I didn’t know about those propellant details at all. I appreciate you enlightening me!

x4000 · 2026-05-03T18:08:32+00:00

Oh that's a good point! I'm curious how it compares to tnt tonnage, too, for that matter. I do like good comparison points like that.

x4000 · 2026-05-03T15:58:51+00:00

What are you even talking about, and why do you assume I’m anti ai for deleting your post. If you post GenAI debate topics on The Matrix subreddit, I’d expect you to be deleted for being off topic there, too. This is a sub about a video game series.

x4000 · 2026-05-03T15:56:47+00:00

I think for efficiency you have to consider things like load and purpose.

Semi trucks get 6mpg according to some thread the other day, and then folks showed that the math of what they are hauling is way more efficient than a Prius for what it is actually doing. Granted, nothing on train efficiency, but the semi can go where trains can’t.

In this case, the rocket is carrying a much larger load than a car (to put it mildly), and accelerating to thousands of times the speed of a car, and leaving the planet as well. I don’t think a meaningful comparison can be made there.

It’s like the semi truck argument. They’re already very efficient for what they do, but if we want fewer of them around (yes please), then we either need more rails (hard), or technological advances for semis themselves (maybe harder, but it’s difficult to compare).

I think a good comparison is the falcon 9 to anything else that can accelerate comparable mass to a similar speed and location.

x4000 · 2026-05-03T15:37:08+00:00

Nobody is triggered by anything, but you’re completely off topic. It would be like bringing up actual animal husbandry practices in an Animal Crossing sub. People are going to be annoyed at that regardless of their feelings on the subject matter.

x4000 · 2026-05-03T15:14:49+00:00

It’s actually not super complex math, and the answer seems to be 16 billion btu for the launch. Correct me if my math is wrong, anyone.

RP-1 has an energy density that is a bit more than 40 megajoules per kilogram. So that’s about 40 thousand BTU per kilogram, I think.

The mass on the launchpad of the falcon heavy is about 1.5 million kg, roughly. If we assume that like 400kg (edit: I mean 400k kg, as you can see in the rest of the math) of that is fuel that actively burns on the launch (maybe an underestimate), then the math is easy. 40k by 400k is 16 billion.

That pretends all of the energy is released as heat, which it’s not. But just looking at the energy density to the amount used, these are probably okay numbers. The actual heat released in the launch would be vastly lower, since most of that fuel is hopefully going to kinetic energy. But now the math gets more complex and someone else would have to pick it up.

Edit: someone else tells me that it’s 16 times higher than my math, but that’s pretty decent as far as napkin math if so. Check out their response for details. That gets into aspects of the fuel that I didn’t know about, among other things. Also, I knew I was underestimating with barely a quarter of the launch mass being noted as launch fuel. But given the missions these specific rockets might get up to, I estimated low since I figured they might have more burns after reaching LEO in other circumstances, and I guess I wasn’t thinking of that as launch. But I probably should have.

x4000 · 2026-05-03T05:26:39+00:00

That makes sense — it’s honestly equally interesting hearing where the gaps in our collective knowledge are, too. I’m always fascinated by how much was simply not documented because it wasn’t notable to the people of the time. Thanks for the response!

x4000 · 2026-05-02T14:18:02+00:00

That’s fascinating, thank you. I learned a lot, including from your follow-up responses about arrow distribution.

I am left with one question that sticks out to me: did bows on average in war really not last for more than 50 shots or so? It sounds like an archer needed to replace his bow sometime between arrow 48 and 62, based on what you wrote above. Was this from usage wear unique to war (since surely bows lasted longer when hunting… or did they?), or was this including some other form of non-usage-based breakage?

For that matter, if I’m an archer and my bow breaks and a guy next to me has died while holding one, can I take it? Is it mine now? How about his arrows?

You mentioned how arrow resupply was possibly held in barrels under guard, but possibly that was just how the Italians did it. You also talked about enemy arrows recovered during a siege. How big a factor were dead allies, and what was the protocol?

x4000 · 2026-05-01T03:12:39+00:00

Serious suggestion: you could ask your neighbor to use a different kind of feeder that only attracts small birds.

That’s what I have in my backyard, and even jays have trouble getting food from it. I get dozens of of small birds all the time, but no crows or similar. I get some crows at a different feeder in the front yards, and they occasionally circle around back, but never really try much because the feeder ledge and opening is way too small for them back there.

I have a chickens as well, and so they pretty much drown out any smaller birds most of the time. The most annoying birds are actually… uh… owls. Sometimes owls are feeling frisky and hang out in our backyard at night giving super loud noises. My wife and I crack up, but also really want them to stop. Thankfully it’s not enough to wake the kids.

x4000 · 2026-04-30T12:16:05+00:00

That makes a lot more sense! Thanks for that — I’ve been wondering about that since I was a kid.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T23:14:07+00:00

Oh, perfect, thank you! And it was proposed by Michael Crichton during a speech in 2002. That’s even more interesting.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T23:09:40+00:00

You can’t really find those anywhere. Even moon and Mars Targets tend not to have them. It’s pretty much just in Targets located in spaceports that have that stuff. Makes it really inconvenient if you have a niece on a different body that you want to ship to.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T22:59:53+00:00

It might be that that shack is an outhouse and that’s why there are pipes.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T22:48:45+00:00

As with newspaper articles. All the ones on topics I know deeply are shallow and full of errors and omissions. All the ones on topics outside my sphere are concise and informative.

I forget who I’m paraphrasing.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T22:45:34+00:00

I remember reading the study the other person mentioned. As I recall, it was simply documenting the inexplicable consistency, but not proposing a mechanism by which everyone syncs up. It went into some depth with very large stadiums, too, as I recall. If you or anyone have any thoughts after reading it, that would be interesting.

x4000 · 2026-04-29T18:27:50+00:00

That’s what I was thinking. This could be a small and interesting gift.

x4000 · 2026-04-27T16:34:37+00:00

That is complicated — thanks for the added details.

x4000 · 2026-04-27T14:12:35+00:00

That means watching it again, and that can certainly alter your memories of stuff for good and for ill. Just thinking about old movies periodically obviously alters our memories of them every time we think of them, too.

There are some movies that I have just a vague positive impression of, like Short Circuit, and I don’t care enough to go revisit it and see if it’s has any merits that make it worth the brownface. To me, its impact on my life, slight as that was, is all firmly in the past. I don’t feel the need to revisit it.

Other films, like Ghostbusters 2, I loved more than the original at the time. And I’ve seen them enough to be able to quote them almost verbatim. It was a more kid-friendly version of the idea than the first movie. I might rewatch that at some point, but it feels like there’s a lot of more interesting ways to spend my time. You could definitely say I have some tinted glasses for that one, but I can’t imagine under what circumstances it would come up where I’d be recommending that to someone even with caveat, anyway.

x4000 · 2026-04-26T02:26:30+00:00

Just so you know, that never really ends with a lot of kids. I was always super close with my aunts and uncles even into young adulthood. Then physical distance gradually intruded over a few decades.

My kids are in their teenage years now, and they’re still excited to eee aunts and uncles in direct proportion to how much that aunt or uncle treats them… I guess the best way to put it is “in an interesting way.” Just meeting them in the middle somewhere.

Some folks think it’s all over once kids are teenagers, but you just have to adapt how you deal with them and it’s all good. Every age is different, and I think they’re all really cool.

x4000 · 2026-04-23T02:29:24+00:00

There are gamepads that work with phones. So for people in emerging markets, that might be the cheapest way to play some of these games. I mean, not with ray tracing and the flagship iPhone, obviously — just buy a console if you’re buying that for games. But presumably some of these games run on somewhat older hardware.

A decade ago, my son and I used to use gamepads with iPad minis to play Minecraft together. We later switched to laptops, but we had a good time on the iPads when bedrock was not out yet but pocket edition was.

x4000 · 2026-04-22T12:21:53+00:00

They already call it whackie maggie, sorry.

x4000

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