Lion ponderings

 It was a lethargic 2321 miles in 2020, but lions prefer to think of them as higher quality than running to BART stations.  Strava went to a paid model in May & embargoed all the lion kingdom's data except the annual total.  The lion kingdom went back to the spreadsheet it used before 2014.  The total lion paw distance is over 18000 miles.  Lions have traveled farther by paw in the last 6 years than all the traveling by paw they did in their 1st 35 years.

Wonder Heroine 84 has 2 better moments, but as the lion kingdom slowly grinds through it, it's boring torture.   Finally finished Wonder Heroine 84.  It was brutal & it took a replay to figure out the premise was her wishing for her old boyfriend to come back to life.  Then of course, there was the middle aged costar.  Women of lion age in a movie are horrific.  The wall is not surmountable by any means known to biology. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn5diLXaWLY The lion kingdom's mane fascination with the roman Thermopolia is how equivalent it was to anything today. The outside of the counter was curved, exactly like some kind of modern architecture. The only difference was the only building material of the time being stone. Lions wonder if the countertop was as uneven in 87AD or if it was distorted by time. There was no running water or electricity. It wasn't very sanitary. Light would have only come from fires. Every day, someone woke up & cooked in this stone world, expecting it to always be the same. The party ended in 87AD. Whoever worked there was frozen in ash. The skeleton was still manely intact. Paintings of the time were the modern day TV. They did the same function. The internet claimed the dog painting was either a virtual guard dog or marked a place to keep pets on a leash, but lions suspect they ate dogs. They also ate snails. Being an agrarian civilization, t...

  Lions believe everyone who ever lived has experienced the same exponential acceleration in technology that we're witnessing, from their own frame of reference. The most primitive roman soldiers witnessed exponential progress, resulting in medical breakthroughs which allowed them to outlive their ancestors by centuries. We only see them in absolute prehistoric conditions because we see them only in the universe where they all died. Seeing a world of accelerating technological progress is an artifact of having multiple universes & only seeing the universes where we have bodies. Accelerating technological progress has always existed in some parallel universes, back to egyptian times & times where we only have records of civilization collapses. Similarly, there are civilizations in other universes which only have records of our time as a period of no progress & collapse, with all of us dying very shortly. Would imagine history to everyone who ever lived looks the same...

XMas lights.  No-one was getting out of there by car.

 It's the time of year when we revisit Flintridge CA as it appeared in 1946.  The hills were leveled to make room for more houses.  The right side of this street is now next to JPL.

It should have been a lion, back in 1986. Howard the Duck was the 1st movie based on a Marvel superhero, but it was a bit ahead of its time. It took half a century for the lion kingdom to finally realize none of it was shot in Ohio. It was all shot in San Francisco, like most movies about Ohio. 1 scene from the duck planet is lake Merritt which has been horizontally flipped. Dynatechnics was a building in Novato. The ultralight scenes were on the Petaluma river. The all night diner was an outdoor set in Napa. The nuclear power plant was the Rancho Seco plant. It was still operational, when the movie was made. After watching it so many times 30 years ago, all those years pounding the streets of SOMA were actually spent living in the movie. Still hard to believe it's not Cleveland or the duck planet, because the lighting is so different.

Thus ends another generation X story. He was part of the exodus of 2001 & went to Pennsylvania. He owned a house & worked remotely for several years. He had a cozy shop, did many projects, started picking up electonics, before finally having to move to go back to commuting. He may have eventually moved back to Calif* or Arizona. There is an exodus now, as evidenced by Elon moving. The media doesn't like to cover it because if Calif* loses, the democratic party loses. The exodus of 2001 & subsequent crush migration back in 2014 are why lions don't see the current exodus lasting. It's not that the standard of living in Calif* ever rebounds from what forced everyone to leave. It's that everywhere else spirals down a lot faster.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/12/10/spectators-watch-the-final-fiery-moments-of-the-starship-test-flight  There weren't many wide shots of the landing, but this video shows just how slowly the ship descended under flap control, why the landing burn was started so low compared to a Falcon 9, & why the final flip has to be as fast as possible. Not many people appreciated how slowly it would descend under fin control. When it's horizontal, it's descending slowly. When it's vertical, it's rapidly accelerating down. They have to minimize the downward acceleration to minimize the fuel required for landing. The faster it can flip & get the engines pointing down, the less downward acceleration the engines have to make up for. They're not just using the fins to reduce re-entry heating or to save on reaction control thrust, but to shorten the landing burn far beyond what a Falcon 9 could do. NASA spent years & lives trying to perfect lifting bodies that coul...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-BkkrRg-o... The official webcast, starting at the launch. Rewatch it over & over, looking at the flaps & engines in different panels. Pretty stressful with no-one announcing the engine cutoffs. Pretty exciting seeing something bigger than a space shuttle heading uphill under its own power. Apparently, the exciting engine outs during ascent were planned, hence no flight termination. The engine outs during the landing weren't planned, hence the RUD. It was surprisingly not a parabolic trajectory. It was powered all the way to apogee rather than coasting like spaceship 2, then slammed the nose down right after apogee. Expected it to start tumbling out of control, but it somehow arrested the flip just in time. Apparently, the nose is so light even with the header tank that just a tiny twitch of the nose flap was required to keep it level. The nose flaps were almost all the way up during descent. It was another nail biter when 2 engines reign...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5aXqcPlrsY This one came closest to what lions envision. It would be a low garage on the left, a low bedroom on the right, & a large high ceiling shop in the center. The shop would have the kitchen. To be sure, the steel construction is extremely ugly but it's the only way lions could afford a significant indoor space. The porch makes it look a lot better & saves on air conditioning. Lions always imagined having either the giant living room in Tomb Raider 1 or the beauty & the beast castle. What made the beast castle was really the artwork rather than the floorplan. It was always a large barnlike space flanked by rooms.

  A stuck spacebar joins this year's failures. The millennial internet has no solutions besides voting for Biden. This keyboard was not a coveted buckling spring but a cherry & still ridiculously expensive. The cherry mechanism is some kind of inexpensive compromise for the chinese factories between domes & buckling springs. The lion kingdom found it frustratingly light for its paws. Retensioned some of the springs in the worst keys, manely the CAPS LOCK. Eventually, they may all be retensioned. That overcame the spacebar sticking & should buy more time. While the lion kingdom truly wishes it had the $100 for a buckling spring keyboard, the ongoing repairs on such a thing would be worse.