Both of your guesses I would put into Resignation. “I can’t do anything about it, so why bother?” Why bother checking the fuel for contaminants, it’s always clean anyway. Why bother standing up to the aircraft owner, I’m gonna have to fly the mission anyway whether or not I think it’s safe.

The other is Impulsivity, the tendency to do things at the spur of the moment without thinking anything through. Jumping into the plane to fly off somewhere without planning the flight, reacting to a problem by instantly doing the first thing that comes to mind instead of working the problem, etc.

I can also say I’ve had my fun with the game and move on.

Recall the core was supposed to be the business end of a nuclear bomb, it was supposed to be near criticality so that a nuclear explosion could be triggered. They were measuring just how close to criticality it was. I don’t fully understand why they were doing that; could be anything from refining nuclear bomb design to developing safety procedures, aka “Don’t store this next to this much beryllium.”

In the first case, Harry Doghlian was stacking bricks. The instruments read he was close to criticality as he started to place one last brick, so he had achieved the goal of the experiment, and then he dropped the brick. Doghlian died from failure of imagination, his experimental apparatus did not account for clumsiness. Also in the room was a military private named Robert Hemmerly acting as a security guard, who was also exposed and died 33 years later from leukemia.

In the second case, Louis Slotin was closing a hemispheric shell. As designed, there were supposed to be shims that wouldn’t let the shell completely close. He removed these shims and instead used the blade of a screwdriver. Which slipped. Once again, the test apparatus did not account for clumsiness…or it did, but the safety measures were defeated.

Slotin was apparently prone to bravado, he had done this test/demonstration about a dozen times for small crowds; there were seven other people in the room with him including someone looking over his shoulder. While part of the scientific method is repeating experiments, I’m not convinced he wasn’t just showing off.

In the human factors chapter of flight school we teach about the five hazardous attitudes. Slotin demonstrated three of the five:

Anti-authority. The removal of the shims was not authorized, but he did it anyway.

Macho. Most accounts I’ve read make a point to mention the blue jeans and snakeskin boots he wore, suggesting a cowboy attitude.

Invulnerability. Slotin knew Doghlian personally and had visited Doghlian in the hospital as he lay literally falling apart at the cellular level…and then went to work to take the safety shims out of his radiation test apparatus. What kind of man does that? One who thinks it can’t happen to him. How’d that work out?

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to look up what the other two hazardous attitudes are.

Further experiments with the demon core were done via robotic remote control with personnel a quarter mile away. Somebody finally said “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be doing criticality experiments with our bare hands.”

The Demon Core was a sphere of plutonium intended to be used as part of a nuclear bomb dropped on Japan. It wasn’t used for this purpose, and instead nuclear physicists used it in various experiments. Two of which involved approaching criticality.

One experiment involved stacking bricks made of some neutron reflecting material, like beryllium or something, around the core. Reflecting neutrons back at the plutonium would cause more fission events to occur; if it hits a certain threshold called criticality it it will release a considerable amount of radiation and heat. The goal was to get close to, but not exceed, that limit. The scientist was about to place one more brick when his instruments told him it would go critical if the brick was placed, so he started to back off…and dropped the brick.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of dazzling blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the brick away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

A short time later, another scientist started a similar experiment, this time enclosing the core in two half-spherical metal shells. If the core was completely surrounded by the shells, it would go critical. He used the blade of a flathead screwdriver to almost, but not quite, close the shells. Then the screwdriver slipped and the shells fully closed.

The core went critical, releasing a wave of heat and a blast of blinding blue light. Thinking quickly, the scientist smacked the upper shell away with his hand. He spent the next couple weeks dying of radiation sickness.

Decades later, youtube hair and beard model Kyle Hill released a video detailing this story, and it has since become something of a sensation on the internet. Images of the demon core in its “closing the shells” configuration is often used as shorthand for something that is exceedingly needlessly reckless. Some of the humor comes from if ya know, ya know, some of it is based in the justaposition of teh high intelligence required to do nuclear physics, with the negligent stupidity of putting nothing between you and a long ugly painful death but the blade of a screwdriver.

I’m sure in 1985, plutonium is available in every corner drug store.

I would end up with a farm that took all day to water, and never enough time to go down in any mine far enough to find iridium enough to make sprinklers out of, and then stop playing.

Or, they knew what they were doing.

pretty okay, just had a shower and I’m chilling on the couch with my cat. She is steadily purring. comfort level is around a 7.8, maybe 7.9.

I bought HL1’s GOTY edition when it came out.

writing headlines like that should earn a nice lengthy face tazing.

A grill should run on charcoal. It needs to get very hot and that’s literally it.

There’s a universe where I attach some electronic controller with a PID loop or something to a smoker, to maintain consistent temperatures via damper control. I’m not buying that off the shelf built into the machine though.

Because KIA takes way too much room on the page.

Corporate fuckery is not a good smell to gamers. Smells like month old genital pus.

Just starting an article by explaining “Unknown Worlds Entertainment has been acquired by Somebody Interactive, the parent company of Hunka Chunka Studios and Rumpy Pumpy Inc” and we’re already suspicious, because corporate acquisition means the game now has more parasites to fund - layers of upper management, investors, etc.

Then we hear about major names that are the people that had the vision for the original game being replaced “immediately” in a press release full of bullshit corpowank marketing boilerplate…it means this game is almost certainly going to be cancelled, the studio shut down and the staff laid off, probably after a lot of players have purchased the game in early access.

There’s quite a bit of overlap in Subnautica and KSP’s player bases, and we’ve already had our asses burned by Take Two Interactive.

So, I’m not going to be joining any early access campaign. I’m not paying for the game before it is finished, I’m not playtesting it for free, I’m not pre-ordering anything and I’m not buying any merch, and there’s a reasonable chance I’m not buying the game at all, because it has already been smeared with the aforementioned month old genital pus.

I don’t think I want to buy games from companies that have parent companies. Parent companies make everything fucking suck.

I just like the idea of lampooning the vapidness of the whole trend, and I don’t know whether it would be more effective to stencil LIVE LAUGH LOVE in impact font on diamond plate or to put things like “Obey Consume Submit” in the girly handwriting font.

I don’t know if I can say if I use my table saw or my router table more. If I do have to make curved cuts or something I haul out one of my jigsaws.

I want to label my toilet /dev/null now.

I saw the first one, enjoyed it…not sure I could explain the plot or what happened in it. At the time having the dinosaurs brought to life was spectacle enough; they could have made a movie about the park working correctly and it would have sold tickets.

I watched the second and third one back to back with a girl. They were alright. I don’t care to see them again. I’m not watching any more of them.

Yeah, in my shop a band saw would be used for resawing as much as anything. RIght now I resaw with my table saw, which…isn’t great. I don’t do much intricate scrollwork, or if I do, out comes the jigsaw. It’s what I rough cut the bottom arched piece of this with.

I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.

So I don’t fucking buy them.

If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.

I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:

• The government looks at the petition and says “No we’re not going to consider that.”
• The government says “We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing.”
• The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
• The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.

But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.

I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.

Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.

I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.