…i used to lead a monthly hundred-mile canyon-run which would turn out a broad spectrum of sportcars and exotics, some of which were trailer queens…
…it was always interesting to see how show car owners respond to the opportunity to drive their car the way it was meant to be driven, some of whom embraced the opportunity and others who delicately babied their way around the loop or bailed-out early…
…dogpile introduced me to google when it was a brand-new service: i noticed that all the best results increasingly came from the same search engine, so eventually i cut out the middleman and just started using google directly…
…how times have changed; i haven’t used google for years…
…almost fourty years ago, pulse-dial 300-baud modem from my apple //e running VT-52 terminal emulation into a mainframe shell account: just green monochrome text displaying an rn client, you had to be very strategic about what you chose to display because with that kind of bandwidth characters scrolled across the screen slightly slower than your natural reading pace and significantly slower than skimming past anything you weren’t interested in reading…
…most early usenet clients routinely displayed profound boilerplate warning of posts costing thousands of dollars in computing time, which were pretty intimidating to neophyte users!..
…also, jiggle it to check if you’re in neutral, then jiggle it again just to be sure: ooh, now you’re stopped at a light, better jiggle it…
(okay, that’s an easy tease, but as a compulsive habit it really does help cultivate kinesthetic proficiency through tactile feeback)
…hot tub time machine; absurdly better film than its pitch had any right to be…
…microsoft applications have an annoying habit of auto-replacing my dashes with emdashes; i don’t even know how to type an emdash…
…tildes reminds me a bit of usenet culture before the eternal september…
…i disassembled the factory radio in my 1990 geo prizm and soldered an auxilliary cable onto the pre-amplification stage traces; it worked pretty well suspending a portable CD player from the rearview mirror for shock protection back in the days before memory buffers were a thing, even better with those little vinyl bands installed around the disc edge for additional gyroscopic stability…
…this is its best use case: something very specific but with waaaay too niche to justify its production cost, like an image for one scene of one session of one group of four players…
…if you have the economy of scale for publication, real art by real artists is often (but not always) definitively stronger…
…when i trained as a rescue diver, i learned that it’s not drowning unless you die: if you survive, it’s a near-drowning…
…for fine drafting, rotation is the last thing you want: that chisel-tip is precious, lead holders are love, lead holders are life…
…pretty much this: you’ll be fined for anything other than well-groomed grass growing in your yard…
…i climbed onto the roof of the press box over kyle field and peed into the open air hundreds of feet below: it evaporated before hitting the ground…
…the craziest part was that it wasn’t there throughout the entire show: during that particular set, it loomed up from nowhere behind the stage and then lurched out over the crowd, or at least those of us who had pushed up front on the floor…
…i’ve seen some pretty epic shows by some pretty epic bands, but the last time i saw muse play, i did not expect to see a F*CKING HUNDRED-FOOT MECHA lunge out from the stage…
…i tie back my hair or tuck it behind my ears when i eat…
…ah, i can’t recall whether rivendell included two separators, but it was also packaged in sub-boxes with separate instruction books, which made teamwork a snap…
…we (my wife + myself) were so disappointed by barad-dûr afterward!..we didn’t buy it, so we haven’t built it, but based on the photos it’s neither inspired nor crafted to the same exceptional standard as rivendell…
…why does it include three pry-tools?..
…i don’t know if i have very interesting stories about the folks who dug in; mostly that ferraris have a reputation for not keeping up with the group on account of breakdowns when driven hard…more entertaining were the rally-star trailer queens which slowed down to crawl over every cattleguard or fresh roadwork for fear of marring their pristine clearcoats while the exotic road cars flew right through, welcoming the well-earned miles…
…a lot of us drive open-topped in light rain - as long as you keep moving the cabin stays fairly dry - but we’ve been caught in torrential downpours a couple of times and come through soaked to the bone before managing to pull off and raise our various tops and targas…next sunny day, you open everything up, let it dry out completely, and follow-up with a detail if it still bothers you…
…when a group of twenty or thirty high-profile cars pull into a small town fuel station, it can draw a lot of attention, positive and negative, but not so much when we pull into a remote roadhouse since those tend to be more common destinations…
…for folks really into the scene, the real rock stars were cars driven in open road races, not the trailer queens: it’s a modest culture which respects real-world capability and experience more than flashy showmanship…use it or lose it, as they say…