efaardvark

At the risk of adding to the clutter JPL has an online store selling items related to the robotic missions they do there. The Mars rovers for instance. I have a lot of that kind of stuff as well. (But I’m not selling )

I'm interested in your journey regarding reading material. I've actually partially followed the same path as you are on but I have absolutely no free time and the time I do have has unfortunately had to be allocated to higher priorities than advancing my Japanese reading skills. I've randomly found a few books at the library that contain mostly/only kana and there's places online that contain a bit of material at my (i.e. gradeschool) level of Japanese reading. You might check out places like tadoku.org. If you find other such places then I would be interested in hearing about it/them as well. (I also have the problem that I'm old enough that furigana in light novels is often too small or too faint to read so that's an additional barrier for me.) I've always been a big reader of English material and I while I'm not conversational I can understand quite a bit of spoken Japanese as well. When watching anime I prefer Japanese-language audio and I often forgo subs. Though I doubt I could even pass the reading part of the JLPT-N5 due to my abysmal kanji skills I can read katakana and hiragana no problem so I think if I could find more reading material that minimizes kanji I could make some progress on the Japanese side.

YKYITFW drone deliveries have been a real thing for years...

Mid 80's. I had just graduated HS a couple years earlier and still a couple years from starting anything like a career. No cellphones. No Internet. The original IBM PC (8088 [email protected], 16KByytes RAM, CGA graphics) was still selling well, to those who could afford the $1500 for it. Real money back then.. about what a cheap car cost. Max was amazing to a lot of people.

This is one of those loaded questions like "do you believe in aliens" so let me take a moment to make my position clear. First, yes, climate change is a thing. Certainly some and perhaps most of it is caused by humans. It isn't just CO2 either. We've diverted and/or polluted most of the fresh water on the planet, paved over, burned, or otherwise molested huge tracts of natural biomes that might have otherwise offset the CO2 emissions and taken care of at least some of the pollution, and come up with stupid schemes like consumerism that trade the planet's life-support infrastructure for quick but unsustainable profit. If we're supposed to be the caretakers of this planet then we're doing it all wrong. Second, we barely know anything about how all this is going to turn out. We started this grand experiment without the faintest clue, and the people making money off it have used their wealth to hinder the people trying to figure out which levers have what effect in controlling - or at least predicting - the outcome in detail. We're making progress, but it is an uphill battle against the moneyed interests and their pet political rodents. But I don't think the planet is doomed. In fact, "the planet" will do just fine in a physical sense. It won't go back to the way it was, true, but that's always been the case. Long ago a bit of biology discovered photosynthesis and released huge amounts of a toxic gas called oxygen into the planet's atmosphere. It killed off 99% of the species alive on the planet back then and "the earth" has never recovered. Fortunately for us. To be sure, the current life inhabiting the planet is having quite a lot of problems of course, but there were pre-historic episodes that were even worse and life survived, (re)diversified, and bounced back after adapting to the new conditions. I'm sure it wasn't fun for the species that lived through those times either but the physical earth is certainly not in jeopardy. Nor will it turn into another Venus, or Waterworld, or another iceball. Life in some form will certainly continue on no matter what we do, and for better or worse it will just as certainly include a large number of humans. The changes we've made so far just aren't extreme enough to kill us all. If you want to do that it would take an asteroid, or at least a full-scale nuclear war/winter. What is likely to happen is that we will continue down a path of economic and ecologic chaos caused by shifting weather patterns. We won't be able to grow food where we used to. With our current lack of understanding of the changes we're making right now it'll have to be a somewhat inefficient trial-and-error process to find the new places where our staples like corn, rice, and wheat will be able to grow well. Until we figure that out our crop yields will be lower and so food will be less available and more expensive. Animal species that used to live in certain areas will also have to move with the climate to new places to live. This includes humans. Islands will disappear. Water will disappear from some areas and become overabundant in others. We'll likely find that a lot of us won't be able to take ready availability of necessities like food and water for granted. (It doesn't help that idiots like the Russians are deciding now is the time to attack a place like Ukraine and taking most of the wheat production for eastern Europe offline. Crazy Eddie lives in Putin.) We likely will wind up with less land to share among us to live upon. We'll lose a lot of economic value (houses, bridges, roads, power lines, etc.) as well as human lives to more extreme "natural" disasters such as floods, hurricanes, disease, and droughts. Even famines will be a thing, especially for the less well off humans who won't have the economic means to move or adapt. Overall humans will have it much easier than most other species but because of the speed of the changes that are occurring the normal pace of evolution and migration will have to be assisted for non-humans. Us humans have made things even harder for natural adaption by erecting barriers like cities, roads, fences, and farms to plant and animal migrations. We'll have to take a more active hand in things if we want to avoid losing a lot (more) of the species that we share the planet with. Whether we are smart enough, or care enough, to provide that assistance is something we'll have to find out about ourselves. We'll also have to deal with "unexpected" problems like disease migrations as climate changes allow disease-causing organisms to move into new breeding grounds where already-stressed plants and animals (including humans) are less able to defend themselves from infection. A lot of that is already happening. It will get worse before we can possibly understand things enough to start making it better. I could go on. The rabbit hole on this one is deep and we're only just beginning to understand what effect the physical changes that we've made and continue to make will have. The good news is that we actually are starting to understand things, and with understanding will come the ability to make the necessary social, legal, and economic modifications to the way we live to undo - or at least mitigate - the changes that we have brought about. NASA and other scientific agencies worldwide have a whole fleet of spacecraft and many programs designed to monitor current conditions worldwide and feed data to thousands of scientists worldwide who are working to fix the problem(s). I'm sure we'll figure something out. In the meantime, blame people like the Koch brothers and their minions for profiting from the activities causing the changes and hindering the process of understanding and mitigation.

Looks like the first patch for KSP2 since being released to EA is out.. https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/215095-patch-one-is-go/

Got a refrigerator magnet and a sicker for Korea's KPLO mission, otherwise known as "Korean Lunar Pathfinder Orbiter"... (The spacecraft is Korean but NASA has a super-sensitive "ShadowCam" instrument aboard and JPL's Deep Space Network is providing communications and data processing for the mission.)

I've said before that I'm not big on "best" or "favorites" so here's my list... Nagisa - and then Ushio! - in Clannad of course. I'd also nominate Setsuko from Grave of the Fireflies. Also Otonashi in Angel Beats. I mean, they all get killed - many, many times - but when he dies for real before entering the Angel Beats world. And then again when they all "graduate". Gotta at least mention Kaori from Your Lie In April and Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop as well. And finally since it said "best" and not saddest I have to point out that Clementine's death in Overlord was pretty satisfying.

Started Adachi to Shimamura. Thought it was going to be yuri along the lines of Sakura Trick but after 3 episodes I'm actually getting a kind of Denpa Onna vibe for some reason.

Surface to Air - Threshold (Some of their early stuff is good too.) "Star One The Eye of Ra - But every line is an AI generated image"

Welcome! hmmmm.... I guess I would recommend Boku dake ga Inai Machi or maybe Another. (But stay away from Another if you don't like gore... the first episode contains a rather gruesome death-by-umbrella scene.)

about 10 minutes; depends on traffic sometimes I have to wait for spacecraft to cross the road traffic

I can't take my dog to the pond anymore because the ducks keep attacking him. That's what I get for buying a pure bread dog.

Hollow - Threshold

I liked the way every episode had a kininarimasu moment.

The first one was basically a SimCity remake. I did SimCity to death back in the day. I had the original for the Commodore Amiga, the Loki version for Linux, and even a version for the Palm Pilot PDA. I had to drop the habit due to Electronic Arts shenanigans but the original Cities: Skylines was there to take up where SC left off. I’ve been playing the Steam version of C:S (+ various DLC) for a while now.

So apparently Cities: Skylines II was announced. I liked the first one but I really have no idea what the second one is about. The announcement trailer didn't really say anything useful about gameplay. "Later this year" for the release date.

The players avatars were supposed to have been changed by the mirrors be the same as their real-life appearance. (Just one of many inconsistencies in that series.)

I think you missed.. But then there's Liz.. Guess she's the exception that proves the rule.

I've also got a Brother MFD. Mine's a MFC-9840CDW. Had it since 2009(ish?) Still working well. The scanner part has a scan-to-network feature so scans automatically appear in a folder on my Synology NAS. I've used the FAX part extensively too. The only thing about the printer that I have issues with is that it takes forever to wake up on the first print of the day. I have much the same issue however so I can't be too critical of that. I like it. I hope it never breaks since replacing it would be extremely expensive these days.