efaardvark

Maybe different aliens? Or maybe the same aliens! Maybe their civilization was so advanced that all their socks were made of plastic so they lost them in the Great Lid Catastrophy as well. I wonder if maybe they have a dryer research team at Area 51 as well?

Got a replacement spinny drive for my NAS drive that's going bad.. .. and a second M.2 SSD for my computer.. Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.

I did a little googling.. that rabbit hole is deep. Apparently the Cassini probe that NASA sent to Saturn found plastics - perhaps tupperware - on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. Since humans have not yet ventured that far except with robotic probes this may be evidence of occupation by the aliens, maybe as a base for dishwasher fabrication or perhaps as a relay station for the lids being sent back. We don't know for sure since the Cassini probe failed a few years ago (official cover story) and we haven't yet sent astronauts or another probe to follow up. But to answer your question, my guess would be probably the Grey, since insects and reptiles don't do well in cold temperatures.

Blast from the past... Has it really been over a decade?

Indeed. The truth is there's this planet out there with a very advanced civilization on it. They did something very stupid and embarrassing that among other things resulted in the near complete destruction of all the lids on the planet, as well as the ability to create more. Their plan to fix the situation was to manufacture dishwashing machines with teleporters in them and sell them to unsuspecting Earthings to steal all of our lids. NASA of course has known about this since we landed on the Moon. Yes, we did land on the moon but the government didn't want to create a panic about aliens stealing our lids so they manufactured that cover story about a severe flaw in the design of the Apollo rocket and the creation of the Hollywood movie set in Area 51 to fake the landings. The film production facility is of course a lie as well but it made a good cover story for the construction of a dishwasher research facility. They now have a number of alien dishwashers there and are studying them intently to try to duplicate the teleportation technology, so far without real success. To date they've only been able to transfer lids between "dishwashers" here on earth. Even that much can't be reliably duplicated. Occasionally the lid transported will disappear entirely, winding up who knows where, but sometimes the lid gets replaced in transit with a different lid entirely! Clearly we still have a lot to learn about this alien technology. ( Save this post as I expect it will be deleted soon. )

Feeling a little bit apprehensive. Got an email from my network storage saying the reidentification count (IDNF) on one of the drives therein is climbing. (Basically the drive is failing.) Not surprising since the warranty expired almost 2 years ago and you know how things tend to start breaking when the warranty expires, right? Because of that I'd already been thinking that maybe I should be shopping for replacements so went ahead and ordered a new drive but the timing kind of sucks. I had other plans for this weekend. I'd also been hoping to do a deeper dive on the current market before pulling out my wallet but I hadn't yet gotten a round tuit. (Though Blackblaze is always a good place to start.) Well, hopefully the old drive hangs in there and the new one gets here in time to install it Friday night and at least start the rebuild / reintegration process. Actually I'm not so worried about the drive failing per-se. It's in a RAID1 (mirror) configuration with another drive in the NAS so even if it fails completely the data is still safe on the other drive. One of the problems with multi-drive setups however - at least the cheap ones that I can afford - is that after you've replaced the failed drive then you have to read ALL the data on the other (good) drive(s) to rebuild the array and copy the data to the new drive. If your other drive is old (like mine) then every once in a while this brief period of intense use can stress that drive enough to fail as well. Not likely <knock knock> and I do have an offline backup but it would definitely mess up the weekend.

I'd go with the dinos as well. The Romans in particular were notorious for coming up with a number of nasty ways to kill people , often simply for entertainment. Definitely the train, if I have the time. Living at the bottom of the ocean or on the surface of Mars?

Yes, proper placement and intensity was often part of the art of the whack. Someone untutored in the art could shake a malfunctioning device, kick it, beat it up all day without "fixing" it. Finally in desperation one would have to call maintenance. The guy from maintenance would come up, take a look at the symptoms, maybe ask a few questions, then give it the right <thwack> in the right place and there you go, instant fix. Guess that's why he was paid the big bucks.

Good luck! There's a bunch of weird sh..tuff going on out there these days, economically speaking. I don't think anyone really knows how the next decade or so is going to play out but you could do worse than meeting it on your own terms.

I beg to differ. Back then the rationale for the whack had a valid backing in physics. Now with everything being low-voltage silicon components wave-soldered onto circuit boards it's just tradition. Probably also a bit of exasperated venting. I'll admit that part hasn't changed.

So we're back to violence towards recalcitrant consumer electronics?

What do you call it when a cat wins first place at a dog show? It’s a cat-has-trophy! Did you hear about the casino restaurant that feeds its cows cannabis? Yeah, some gamblers prefer high steaks.

… is a dim star in the Northern Crown that periodically explodes as a nova. It last exploded in 1946. It’s about to do it again. https://blogs.nasa.gov/Watch_the_Skies/2024/02/27/view-nova-explosion-new-star-in-northern-crown/

They say that no two people see color the exact same way, so really, color is just a pigment of your imagination. What did the buffalo say to his son who was leaving for college? Bison.

Why couldn’t the pony sing in the choir? He was a little horse.

Found a lion "wandering around" just at the edge of my town in C:S. He growled at me when I got close. Nice kitty!

I'm addicted to brake fluid, but it's OK because I can stop at any time. I can't stand Russian dolls. They're so full of themselves.

What do gamers and musicians have in common? Their fans are super noisy.

Not really feeling a lot of the newer stuff so I'm re-watching some of my older memorables. Today's binge was Shinrei Tantei Yakumo. I like the end theme, "Missing You". The show's not bad either.

Browsing around on Steam & found The Crust. Looks to be a builder game but space-based. Might be something I could get into. Not yet released but something I'll keep my eye on.

What is it with deckbuilder games on steam these days? (aka "roguelike", eg. Slay the Spire.) Seems like suddenly I'm seeing a new one every time I browse Steam. If I search for "roguelike" I get 11,000 hits. (Which is kinda annoying if I'm trying to find old-school Rogue-like games such as the original Rogue, Angband, Moria, etc.) Are they really that popular? Somebody must have figured out how to make money with them.

Did some exploration of a large cold ocean biome. Not ready to tackle that yet.. .. but I did find a geode perfectly placed at the bottom of the ocean. If you find one like this, strip off the basalt, calcite, and uncracked amethyst, and just leave the cracked blocks for the amethyst clusters to grow on. That makes harvesting the shards super easy, especially if you have a high-efficiency pick and/or the aqua affinity buff.

Could be Ore Monogatari. Except for the magic bit. He douses himself with water and saves his friends from a building that's on fire but it's a romcom so no magic. One of the earlier episodes like 4 or 5 IIRC. Do you have a character description or two or more of the plot? Might help narrow it down.