Powershell (Ble?)

 Every few weeks PowerShell has this nag-line that there is a newer version, and I don't know the command-line in powershell to update itself, and I could not use it if I did.

So here I am, on powershell 7.4.0 preview 6, except Google says the latest version is 7.3.8.

Packages? What Packages?
(I like packages, hmm)

Whut?

Untrusted what?

See, cuz there's the nagging suspicion that the official Powershell download-site has been glommed onto and spoofed by eveil hackers.

I get suspicious when 7.38 is the latest (not 7.4) and Powershell invites me to download packages no one trusts.

crap.

------------------

Every update, every couple weeks or so, I use powershell to run the command I copied from the internet:

wevtutil el | Foreach-Object -Parallel {wevtutil cl "$_"}

Which brings up a note in my head, to learn wtf "Wevtutil" does.

Or at least "el" ("the")

------------

Yesterday, BG3, camp 2.5 (past the two fakes and into the real one) 

Orin's murder never appeared, Shadowheart never felt unclean, no romance.

Player was a high-elf-cleric, mirroring Shadowheart.

*today* Orin's murdered-victim's corpse is there but Shadowheart isn't feeling sad, she's doing her James-Bond-line ("well, hello, Lover.")

I think the romance scene is borked again, but I'll edit this if some miracle happens.

And if this is true (I don't know yet) I'll replace my patch3-hotfix#3 (The one I renamed to kickstart the love scene).

If any of this is confusing, I swear they designed it that way, it kills hours with entertaining confusion. Tedious boredom, more like.

Ah, Sh*t. (Work, slave, and for what? geez)

Osi.PROC_CAMPDEBUG_QueueNight(“NIGHT_Shadowheart_Skinnydipping_9f583304-0a1a-498c-acf9-3c8dcc30ee3d”, 1) in a downloaded morph of the game (so you have a console)

Or buy another game (shs) beeecause, the files I just installed BLOCK playing the game.

But wait! (*yawn*) Click on the executable file directly, and ignore the launcher.

(I only have to find out the actual console key, which is usually "tilde" (~) but doesn't do jackshit.)

Hmm, an entire professionally written page saying NOTHING about Anything:

https://www.pcgamesn.com/baldurs-gate-3/console-commands

*This?* oooooh. OK

"OSI (etc)"

"Eh, sonny? Talk to my Grandson"

"OSI(yada bla)"

"o..k"

NOW after all that HOE (hell on earth) did it WORK??!!
(I'll edit this later)

That huge gigantic Biggie-number prolly got patched or changed, 

but (hell) I gotta try,

 to at least prove to my self that all this shit is old stinky shit that doesn't work anymore.

Well, the game went all topsy turvy and the enemies got first crack at player.

Old feeble enemies. Crappy enemies.
And the main star of the show, Aylin, was suddenly an enemy.

What's the point after that?

Let player be first and she mops the floor, but with some crap going on she's last, and every pissant with a spell can attack freely.

I'm not convinced that the company making the game wants ANY mods. 

-----

I've been reading and reading (mostly reddit), and they're superbombastic, padding their reddit-parts.

But apparently there are unwritten rules in the game, and I might have broken one.

Did I talk to the wrong person, or NOT talk to someone I was supposed to?

is the phrase "We almost had a romance" a death-knell, a game-ender, or only a warning, a checkpoint?

Bah.

I hate Jaheira but my sixth sense tells me she is involved somehow.

But it takes three hours or so to meet her in the game.

My latest thing is skipping her authoritarian chalet hideaway, literally doing a 180 

and looking for the house where the spider and his friends stroll by.

I don't know right now if I'm supposed to be playing this scene, kissing her middle-aged butt and meeting the King's daughter Isobel.

---

Best pot? 

(sauce-pan, sauce-pot, f'n "ramen pot," OK?) 

Do my current pots'n' pans suck real bad?

Yes, but not enough to learn your clubby ^%$# lingo about cooking appliances.

I want short handles (OK??!) and um, a vented top, just like my hobo teflon-eaten pot has.

Only I want a snooty pot, one that someone will drag out of the dumpster when I'm dragged off to the Home.

D3, D5...whut?
A woman complains my prospective pan scratches, and she says it never happens on her All-clad.
Question: Why didn't she buy the &^%$ all-clad, were they a wedding gift she wouldn't be able to afford?
Bah. I'm taking her advice and at least looking.
(d3,d5, whut?)
I'm not seeking patriotic-pans...

The long handle is dangerous and stewpid

“Excusez-moi”  that's a "saucepan" and what I want is a smallish stockpot.

"all Clad" is AmArican, if that's important tue yew.

All others are affordable inferior.

Yeah, I'm gonna buy the 1/4-price competition, and live with scratches, bugs won't care.

"Dutch oven?? (IDK, fucket)

I don't know.

Metal Handles? Why?
Greasy brown filth covering whatever you buy, superglued to the once pretty finish.

Let's get real:

Black, nonstick, plastic (non-melting) handles.
Not tall, or I can't stir it. I need to flip it over to drain stuff.

And I don't care where it's made, iApple is made in China, everyone seems to ignore that.

If there are nine-hells of the internet, Amazon has to be in there somewhere.

A drill, a pot, people loved it, people hated it, people sent it back (guess which one you're gonna get)

"The 99-cent-store is having a sale (You bought WHAT??)" is NOT the reaction I'm looking for.
Maybe, (uh,) copper bottom with a nonstick-inside that you couldn't scratch if you tried, or are those only on Late-night TV?

"#1 Best seller" Cuz people buy the cheapest whatever.
Ah, hell, it looks very much like what I want, IDK.

https://prudentreviews.com/gotham-steel-review/
Oh. Hmm

I can't cook as good as this pot, but it fits the definition of "Snooty."
Ya know, I'm gonna *ignore* all your "best of" lists, you freebie parasites, you.

Burning metal handles? Sssssssuffer for their art (pretentious a-holes)

'K, uh, I guess ingesting Teflon sounds more practical, and me in my twilight years anyway.

Beesides, if you wanna be Brahmin-Republican DAR,

Non Pretentious proletariat great-unwashed brands appeal to me (they aren't dismissive of handles that don't burn Cook's fingers off (they don't actually cook anything, they just like the look)

The only question being, which one.

I found one I liked, the one advertising itself as a great wedding gift (for the poor and the great unwashed)

Now I know what I want (on time) for Xmas

There's a whole cult of cast-iron-people...I know enough not to buy one you'd have to "season."

Ah, *hell.* WHUT (da f*ck??)

I already know the one I want will be grease speckled...My only dead-brain spot is the size of the damned thing, 3.5qt vs 6 qt.
3.5 seems small, 6 quart, can you peer over the edge of a boiling pot?
IDK.

I gave up on Pot-roast, too many commode-trips in atonement for eating normal food, but it's the first thing on my list of foods to try.

Damn the commode, full speed ahead.

It's aMarican Plus it's affordable, it's more macho than stainless...
But it's very heavy, (IDK)

To go with the cast-iron, bye-bye 99c quilt-style.
The cast-iron one is growing on me, I don't know why.
It looks more like it's useful, not "pretty", and I suppose I can deal with the weight.
Someone (or my head) said, they're good for slow-cooking, perfect for beans or pot-roast (the only two things on my menu)
But...https://misen.com/blogs/news/cast-iron-vs-stainless-steel
I do not know (while typing this sentence) if the blogger makes stainless steel pans.

But they're actually interesting.

I....uh, choose ..."stainless"? I'll edit this.

(Or enameled Cast iron? hmm)



I erased two superfluous entries to concentrate on this one. So this next picture is a remnant, a leftover, of what I erased.

I've gotten lots better, I think (it's why this is here, so I can go look)

While you're at it, reinstall windows, or maybe buy another PC

BG3: My first fix

 OK this gets complicated quick, so I want to put down the kernel of what I'm trying to say.

The latest BG3 patch was called "Patch3_hotfix3.pak"
and with it installed, everyone is celibate (everyone who matters, anyway)

Renaming the file to something unusable by the game *fixes* the beach-romance, which hasn't actually happened yet but I've gotten the all-important "unclean" speech and the warning to wait until everyone is asleep to meet Shadowheart down the coast.
Hours ago I dumped the underwear (which the patch patched, only it broke the scene so it kind of ruined it anyway)

I might upload a screenshot here but it seems redundant.
I might also wonder, if this "fix" is so damned obvious, why no one else has brought it up, but I know why: the cool trendsetters have moved on to more recent games, this game being so last-month.

---

Unfortunately, my "fix" only worked *once* and after that, nothing.

My latest experiment is, erase all the hotfixes for patch-3.

(Patch3 itself is mandatory or else the game becomes impossibly hard, and ugly, to boot.)

Editing stuff no one reads is like having a serious conversation with yourself on a subway-platform, but there's prolly an ugly bespectacled guy listening and waiting to laugh and say something snarky.

So, even though this is mostly to myself, I want to emphasize that this is just one more experiment.

The experiment failed, and I still get the "we almost made it girl, didn't we?
We almost made it, this time!!"

But everyone says "be brave" and click on that line anyway, and *maybe* shadowheart relents and puts out.

IDK.

Not sure where to put this, but since it is a blog:
My phone's virtual keypad goes black and there's no way to wake it, in the middle of a call,
on the 50th question of a voicemail system.
Not sure if tiny offices are becoming more paranoid or just like to show off, but in the middle of the bombastic, the crucial "Press one to continue" can't be pressed because the screen takes a nap!

I'm gonna try some online solutions.
I've changed my ringtone from "Ethereal dream state" to a f'n noisy bell,
Something I should'a done last week, and I *think* I figured out how to avoid narcolepsy when getting lectured by answering systems.

<bombastic rant>
Whenever someone actually calls, the phone is across the room and/or I cannot find it in time to answer. Today my phone was playing soft music, which I assumed was part of my waking-dream (it wasn't.)

Maybe I should install a hook by the bed, hmm.

"Credit approval, deposit, qualifying service, and, in stores & on customer service calls, $35 assisted support, upgrade support or device connection charge due at sale. Equipment Installment Plan: 0% APR. If you cancel wireless service, remaining balance on device becomes due. Availability and amount of EIP financing subject to credit approval. Down payment & unfinanced portion required at purchase. Balance paid in monthly installments. Must remain on qualifying service in good standing for duration of EIP agreement. Late/non-payment fees may apply. Participating locations only. Examples shown reflect the down payment & monthly payments of our most creditworthy customers; amounts for others will vary.

In case I was dreaming of another phone (upgrade):

As near as I can figure, $0 Down means:

$0 +EIP (what you owe on your current phone)
AND Tax, and god help you if you call them up, it's $35.

So $150 burning the proverbial hole in your pocket, an upgrade is do-able, but not smart.

endoscopy on the sh*t list???

 https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=572370827&q=medicare+discourage+endoscopy%20-coverage

A doctor was half-heard (emphasize "half") asking her nurses whether an endoscopy was warranted, and the barely heard reply was, "??? looks down on them"

No, I must've half heard wrong.
Well anyway, I'll edit this. Apparently a person can find articles backing them up no matter what they google for, so I have my doubts.

----------

---------

I don't quite know why but after I wrote "Bombastic (under construction)"

I erased anything about drills and specifically the drill I bought on sale to install a soap-dispenser into my sink.
It's been exactly two years. 
I think I wrote that my decent drill was less expensive than the others, less snobby.

Two years later, after the one single job it performed, it has a special place in my tool-chest.

I retract stuff on a whim and regret the decision later.

A blog about blogging

 https://www.munich-business-school.de/insights/en/2021/the-power-of-writing-interactive-guest-lecture-from-prof-silke-heimes/

Amidst terrible news (gas is going up, your set-top-box has a biggie virus,)

And sites asking you to register to read that your information has probably been stolen by someone somewhere (chinese, russian, etc)

Uhm, it's nice to find trivia that has nothing to do with anything.
A journalist thinks writing is good for you.
(Prolly hermits think hermiting (hermitages?) are good for you,
And hackers think hacking stimulates your brain)

Oh. Useless trivia of the day: "Cantilever"

Wait, I have a picture (somewhere)

where you lived when you were growing up, many people you knew are still there or around there, or maybe they died, and / or got a write-up in the local newspaper.

Generic Famous-type person

Generic (etc)

If they're advertising something, they're on Facebook or LinkedIn.

You can't call or write (what the hell would you even say)
but it's nice to know they made the newspaper and have a decent picture on Facebook (so they're not homeless or destitute)

I'd go into this more but it's creepy (sort of), the way you'd pay someone to scour the internet for ancient relatives to verify your pedigree.

People who call or write claiming to be officials of the government might know your name and your address, which is prolly in some online phone-directory.
It's hard to know who to trust. Yes they know your phone-number, they overheard it at a CVS.

They know your birthdate and other identifiable information. 

THEN they ask you to apply for something and ask for even more information.
And assuming they're angelic lily-white bastions of honesty, 

they don't know jack about hackers who are eager to harvest whatever information you just disclosed, resistance is futile, you Will be assimilated.

Blogging is a nice pastime, but it's more dangerous than knitting (what with the needles and the cat)

---

A few months from now, the missing pictures here might confuse and mislead you.

But for now:

580 to 310 what??
(link)

They don't like or believe it, they think it's true but terrible, 

or they're contrarian a-holes who hate anything 

that smacks of Wokeness, snowflakiness.

Build more heaters, they rant. 
Sell more (heating) oil.

Let the weak die on Ice-Floes!

(Actually I have No Idea what they're thinking, but I imagined stuff in my head, hmm)

Playing the video at 1.75x, the guy seems to be saying that there are several prediction-models, that the predictions project out to January.

They've got lotsa time to modify their predictions....
"El Nino" is a pacific-ocean phenomenon (I thought) and yet most of the weather predictions concentrate on the east coast.

But forget all that, I was only wondering about 

the down-votes on any story-headline on Bing.

In other words, 

• The story is inaccurate
• The story is Poorly written
• The story is accurate and well-written, but depressing?

---

I have no idea what the exact spanish meaning of "Poblero" is, and google dismisses it at first as a misspelling.

But I've been told it translates out to "villager" 

but the hidden sense of the word is a downtrodden lower-class person.

(I think.)

There are no equivalents in english, unless you count the cast of frankenstein with their torches and pitchforks crying "Kill the Monster!"

The generic mob, the curio-salespeople, hmm

Villagers maybe, but "Pobleros?"

west bank

 ("West bank of what?") 

They didn't teach geography in my elementary schools, it seemed to be unimportant, although I've seen the odd textbook about it, from years before.

Maybe (I'm guessing here) boundaries and names get changed and they didn't want to get sued or look stupid, best to avoid the subject entirely.

The labels change depending upon your zoom level, hmm

The bank west of the Jordan River?

The river itself appears to coincide with several borders, but the actual river looks a little small. 

I'm expecting many rants in the next few days / weeks about the area, and I was wondering about it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=azerbaijan+armenia&oq=azerbaijan+armenia

Our fifth-grade teacher (under protest, I think) assigned students he didn't care for to wrap little colored papers around pencil erasers, and glue the papers to a map of the US (I *think* it was the US, I don't actually remember except he got disgusted about it)
And it was his class with the book about tule-reeds to make Teepees. (Wigwams?) 
I still don't know what a "Tule" is or if some indians are called the Tule indians.

They'll piss on Ukraine and send some bombs to Israel, and someone somewhere will get hostaged.

I forgot about Gas.
(weather, trucks, any war anywhere, your state, your city, politicians)

I really liked an article I just read, It's easy to read and makes a lot of sense

https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/09/opinions/israelis-demand-answers-hamas-attack-zacharia/index.html

---

BG3, because I'm on a budget: I played through til the romance-scene, but this time there wasn't any. (After "Hotfix #9") The hotfix totally screwed with the script.

Why?

Now that I'm starting over, the webs say that I can be a cleric or a fiend, to get flame-thrower-something ("flame strike.")

I'm not sure RomanceHeart would cozy-up to a fiend... 

and I don't want to wait five hours to find out.

I'll become a cleric, I feel the calling.

ALL characters suck in one way or another...but I know to pump up my wisdom, alertness and my dexterity.

I totally neglected "Charisma" and maybe that was my downfall.

Two "fake"-forced camps, one real honest-to-goodness camp, complete with a painting and a corpse.
No "unclean" line, no walk in the park, no swim in the cold lake, no disney crab hiding its eyes.

• Fake-camp#1 The Angel-type ("Aylin") explains to Shadowheart about her parents.
• Fake camp#2 The portal appears and a biggie battle ensues.
• Real camp: booty call (except after Hotfix #9)

Now all's I gotta do is know what I missed, assuming they didn't change the sequence of events.

"We had the beginnings of a romance...but we never really pursued it"

"Oh, well. Maybe in another life"

(WTF??!!)

Or download the algebra-class that is the mod, as posted at 

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/16kgp4s/fix_for_shadowheart_romance_scene_bug_on_pc/

Imagine maybe for a second that you have biggie chores around the house, that seemingly take forever, but as you become more experienced, the chores go faster, you complete them in less time. 
It isn't that you were going for a record, but it gives you a good feeling.
BG3 is a lot like that, doing chores faster and faster.

None of the commentaries mention this incredible lapse in the story, or they do but they mention much older versions that they have fixes for (kill shadowheart, resurrect her, etc)

I don't really know but I *suspect* that my soon-to-be-updated trainer is interfering with the scene, just like (as an example) a scene in "Starfield" that stops the game if you're using the trainer. 

"show us. Use your powers. Hello? Use your powers!"
And if you dutifully shut down the trainer at an exact moment and restart it afterwards, you're fine.
There's even a key dialogue, "Did everyone see that?" to show you're a good faithful player.

But in BG3 the damn game is so huge and bombastic, I would not know when to stop the trainer and restart it.

I can live without the love-scene, but it (the game) seems fruitless after that point, after the shadowheart-quests complete (after her parents are rescued.)

Brain schprain, who cares.

caste

Total Clickbait pic. It's on Youtube somewhere, google it.

 

Gloom-stalker-ranger isn't a "caste" nor is it a race.
So what is it?
*I* seriously don't know, but...
I just learned that to be first in combat, your "Initiative" must be higher than anyone else's, ignore the catcalls of lazier people telling you not to work so fast.
Unless it's a dead-end boring job and you're gonna get laid off anyway, then do what you want, but we're talking who gets to throw the first punch.

(Link and other stuff)

So lotsa coffee, some dexterity, wisdom.
Then beat the shit outta those guys.

Not knowing what the rest of the game will be like, will you be ugly, old-person ugly, Do you stand around at parties (no spells)?

It's a depressing fact that most of the internet's recommended characters flail at their enemies pointlessly (miss, miss, miss) instead of making them scream and explode.

---

Somewhere in this melange is/was a post about fine-point pens, and a deal I got at a supermarket.

Unfortunately it isn't indexed, or something, and I can't find it.
I remember writing it, and including a photo of the weird little tip which was surrounded by a plastic ball.

Is it here? 

I'm not actually disappointed with my new pens I got from amazon, 

"Pilot V5 RT" but I wonder about the plastic ball, is it only on some models?
Why is the pen writing so thick?

Maybe they laid in the sun baking for too long?

A better written sample is at 

https://farm5.static.flickr.com/4108/5068250333_8f517908eb_b.jpg,

And that little plastic ball I have on the tip of my pens, is either missing or it is transparent (not enough resolution to really see.)

It plainly says in the title of the pen that it is a "rolling ball" which surprises me no end, and maybe that egg /bagel-looking plastic thing on the tip is necessary, or maybe it's like Pentel and it is supposed to be removed?
I'm not breaking a pen to find out.

I bought "blue" which reminds me tons of fountain-pens in my youth, except they don't scratch (Because of the ball?)

My old black ones are missing the little ball on the point, and I'd swear they're finer, slightly (both say they are 0.5mm)

I'll judge these pens tomorrow when they've had a chance to congeal or whatever.

Is handwriting personal?
It shouldn't match anyone's database of rapists and their manifestos...

The cheapo editor ("paint") removed the background, making the scrawl nearly unreadable, but I'm happy with it. (nyah)

But this was *way* before word processors, editors.

I rarely need pens anymore, and they last forever (precious possessions: Son-of-Teaspoon (the original is lost), lighters and pens.

The Pens are in the original cardboard and duly (daily) crapped on by roaches.
The blue pen is my new favorite, I'll endure the thickness (with some occasional grumping)

The disembodied voices have spoken, "Should'a got 'Pentel' "

Yeah OK, next year.

Retractable Pentel 0.5mm "assorted Barrels" (??!!) are coming, assuming I ordered right, but, what's with the "Assorted Barrels"? (omg)

25k-people can't be wrong.... 

I don't really wanna edit this but I'll have to, soon.

Not "NV" but "RTX" hmm

I planned to scribble samples from each pen: The one(s) I have now and the ones that will get here eventually, hopefully on a cool autumnal day.

anyway, sample-the-First:

*WHY*, you ask? People can't agree on stuff, 

https://www.wusf.org/health-news-florida/2023-10-07/members-florida-family-sentenced-fake-covid-19-cure-online-church, 

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11488993/helpline-drinking-bleach-coronavirus-trump/

 whatever I write will be dissed. Did that come out right?

No? (furio)

I'm not selling pens but if I were, half would hate the color, the style, or the pointy.

You can't see what I do, looking at the overall "Look" of the two writings,

the pilot writes thicker.
That might be a plus for some people.

 I figure, is that you're asking "extra-fine" to write without scratching nor holding back ink, and it should be proud of it and show off.
So my *personal* preference  (they being nearly the same) is the Pentel.

In case you were wondering (I'm not,) they make an even finer pen, 

"Super-fine", 0.3mm 

creepy-town to Prosperity Drive

 Kids wanting candy on Halloween used 
to trick-or-treat their neighbors, 
Before drive-bys and hit-and-runs and random stabbings...
Actually I was just wondering where Amazon was today, and a train-of-thought started.
The one (with a shout-out to the movie "Purge") 

where little kids are trucked from Creepy-town to a more affluent section of town, to beg.
Prosperity avenue where *their* kids are at parties and wearing expensive latex getups.

At two times of the year we were transported from Hellhole to Nirvana-town.

Once was Halloween, and the other, Christmas, 

to drive slowly by the christmas-light competitions.

My *imaginary* train of thought is much creepier...
Prep-school/university-types are bussed to the poorest parts of town (follow the sirens and the helicopters) and left there to find their way home, with no cell phone.
Their wits and a couple bus-pamphlets is all they've got to live on.

---

So I'm reading a page from a bank, went off to fritter with something real-life,

Thinking trains of thought, when a creepy green-screen (all garbled, scrambled)

Appeared on my monitor.
Event-viewer is pissed I turned off the computer but its memory lapses when I look for what the cause was for the green screen.

Well I know it's probably video-card related because it affected my display......
Still creepy.
Bugs?

I'm sure if I could actually *read* the green screen it would have said, "Windows has encountered an error and needs to restart", but was it beheaded or did it stub its little toe??

O, yes, blame me, *I* must have done something.
Actually used the computer instead of treating it like some museum for Windows.

The very last thing it said (in event-viewer) was, it was unable to start some virtual thing.
It's true I had "SVM"-disabled until 5 minutes ago, because some guy (google it, you'll see) says you can disable it.

Grandma's burned-out house was the only address Amazon had, 

because she didn't want her family's packages delivered to the shelter they stayed at, 

where they could be lost or stolen.
The house looked fine from the front; 

it was only the kitchen and the rooms above that had been completely destroyed.
So she waited in the darkness for Amazon's promised prime-delivery, 

her and an old transistor radio to keep her awake.
The radio and the old dead oak in the front yard made enough noise to keep her company until the delivery, so she was content.

But it got dark, and very late, and the delivery-van never came.
Grandma died that night, sitting in her rocking chair.
People said it was a coincidence, that she would have died anyway wherever she was,
But sitting alone in the dark in that creepy house couldn't have helped.

Train

 In my point of the game a research company has invented a portal to a parallel universe.

The game's rules say that the temporarily connected universes do not affect each other, but the game's writers want to hang a guilt-trip on you (along with the mazes bugs and weird computers) so you'll feel guilty leaving one universe behind.

Total BS, the universes exist whether or not player is there to experience them.
No one winks out of existence at player's behest, the only question (maybe ) is, which universe Player ends up in.

(I think "Simpsons" did an episode like this, and maybe "Family Guy")

Writers must all read the same books.

Anyway there are many power-switches Player is supposed to toggle to turn off the connection between universes.
Until she turns off that last switch, she has her pick of two universes (I think) but remember the maze and the bugs. 
Was she supposed to (does the game want you to) turn off most of the switches in *each* universe, finally deciding at the end (at the final switch) which universe to stick around in?

In a movie, a horribly disfigured and comatose person can exist in a reality created especially for them by the AI in a computer, a-la "The Matrix" but by choice.
I think the movie was called "Vanilla Sky," but I'd need to look that up.

Anyway, I wonder if they've ever wanted to make a game from it.

PS: The Vanilla-sky movie didn't mention anything about stopping the aging process, especially for 150 years, although that might have been a line in the movie I glossed over.
Mel Gibson has a similar situation minus the dream, where his body catches up quickly to his real age (75?)

---

I still don't know what a "Gimbal" is, although those rings in starfield remind me of one.

Yeah but then you start talking "Orthogonal" and I lose interest fast.

Your sesquipedalian antics are not amusing
(or profitable, at least from all the pledge-drives wiki has) 

But "Perpendicular" being too hoi polloi, too great-unwashed, too democratic.

I dared to wonder what a "Dot product" was.

I thought, "(x1,y1)*(x2,y2)" but I was so very wrong:

Some guy made a video

Parallel, Perpendicular, opposite 1,0,-1, so the mounting pins of a gimbal should be (in a circle) 90-degrees from each other. Like, cross-shaped.
There's a f'n simple way to explain the obvious, and the clubby way.

(-b±√(b²-4ac))/(2a) is as far as I ever got, with p=ie and f=1/p as rumors I heard about later.

Gyroscope that'll work until it pops off your bed and splats into pieces (or gets stolen by jealous residents in The Home)

Real perty  (whut duz it dew?)

https://www.thoughtco.com/definition-of-valence-in-chemistry-604680 

or, why I hate chemistry.

Stating facts that need sixteen other facts to comprehend.

*I* always thought, valence meant, how elements react to each other when placed closely together.

For example (the one in my head, not real life,) screws in a plane's fuselage must be made of a certain material neutral to the fuselage, or they will "rust".

Wait, I'll go look.

Whut? Fucket, nevermind.

OK let's get simple: an electrical outlet or Light-switch you buy at Ace Hardware, says on the switch that you should only use Cu (copper) wiring.

This (I thought) was an example of valence, or a similar term. The metals get all chummy, eventually fall in love, and melt.

What valence exactly *is* IDK. I might be describing a different word (the one for metals interbreeding with other metals)

---

SHT is shit, so sayeth article writers from 2017.
But they're getting lots better at rubberizing the hulls of submarines, to dampen pings.
Los Angeles Class Subs (from movies) were almost replaced by
Sea-Wolf Class,
But Sea-wolves are prohibitively expensive (but they're so cool.)
The cheaper/smaller 
Virginia Class 
was invented.
Old dudes long for Sea-wolves again, but the timetable is waaaay out there, and they prolly won't for a while.
They don't go into what happens to a fancy-ass digital periscope when the battery goes out (Or the reactor goes offline,) they only point to how much better a perfectly-working digital periscope is.
In fact, the periscope looks so weird they're disguising it to look like an ordinary periscope.
And before you go locking me away, the above was a rehash of Wikipedia (and appears dated.)
Since, uhm, the sub is better off without a real periscope, because no leaky parts,
well, a guy wonders if they use wireless to connect the lens to the sensors and the display, and if the wireless signal could be hacked into, but that's from my head, not wiki. 
External  torpedoes, same question, 
everything working correctly, they've got ways to strap torpedoes to the hull.

But if the radioman isn't "Crimson Tide"-material, a guy wonders.

This next bit is irrelevant unless you're looking for a job.

General-Dynamics and Huntington-Ingalls.

I get that two companies but I counted three locations in their winding sentence.

And they're only (I cut off the quote) talking about *nuclear* subs, not diesel (eg) nor natural-gas(?) powered.

Connecticut, Rhode-Island, Virginia. 

But I read it wrong, doubtlessly.

The probability of swinging a cat and hitting a government employee has to be "Virginia." The other shipyard I'm not sure about.

yeahbutt...OK Thanks, nevermind

H.O.W.:https://evstudio.com/when-mezzanines-and-atriums-collide/

A mezzanine can exist under a loft.

A loft exists under a roof.

An Atrium *could* exist under a mezzanine and the loft.

Many mezzanines could surround the atrium, with (e.g.) offices above and below the mezzanines.

(But where does the dais go?)

I really should end this endless non-answer of an entry, if for no other reason than it's too long, and there's prolly a book about stuff you wonder about but never bring up at parties.

Nice ending