Southloop [he/him]

Psh! Chicken!

I believe Ikki is the original “kuso-ge,” so be forewarned.

The water at the time was around 40 Fahrenheit/9 Celsius. That gives you, if you survive the fall — which includes not inhaling water with the human gasp response when you hit the cold water or breaking you pelvis/legs/back on the at-that-height now concrete-consistency water (~20 feet/7 meters or above) — a rough seven minutes to get to shore and wrapped up nice, tight, and warm to prevent hypothermia.

They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.

The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.

To clarify, this is the AFQT which is a seperate subtest from the ASVAB and specifically for USAF service that you actually have to put a modicum of effort into, but for the good jobs — and by good I mean interesting, stimulating and potentially lucrative as a civvie — no. 30 won’t get you into special operations, specialized maintenance/aircrew, or the good “chair force” jobs like combat engineering, space, medical, scientific support, cyber, weather…etc. It’s also probably going to ding you for officer or hinder the climb to higher NCO, which is similarly equivalent to warrant officer in other services.

No, it’s going to be stuff like “light vehicle driver,” or “airport maintenance” where you ride around in the bed of a pickup and shoot a shotgun in the air to scare off birds. It used to not even qualify you to be a cop it’s so low.

Same in the US military. To fly anything is pretty stringently rigorous and high competition.

“Easiest” flight pipeline is probably the Army’s “High School-To-Flight School” which takes exceptional high schoolers and places them as warrant officer helicopter pilots. But in ten years of existence it’s only produced maybe 80 pilots.

Conversely, for Navy Aviation (say, fast jets for example) you have to graduate in the top 50% of your class from a top 200 university, preferably with a BS, within a certain seated height and uncorrected vision acuity, pass the officer qualification test, the aviator qualification test, officer school with a high proficiency, two years of flight school finishing in the top 20%, select fast fixed-wing jets, hopefully find an open seat, then qualify on catapult and cable retrieval. All for a total of about 1800 seats. After that it’s trying to qualify and be elected to Top Gun and hope it doesn’t ruin your career.

StarTAC! Then I had a Nokia 5100 when I went to college with a blue airbrushed lighting faceplate so it looked like the cover of Ride the Lightning. I might have made three total calls between the two of them and never texted, only partly because it was 10 cents a text.

I’m actually just a bit younger than you. We had it because my dad worked at Bell Labs and Scientific Atlanta way back when, so we could get the hook ups and build out whatever computing or network machinery we needed at the time. It was like sci-fi legos learning it as I grew up. It was great!

Half my duties at my first job as a maitre de at an Italian restaurant.

I can’t help but picture this being the size of a cinder block, like something tied to the gas station bathroom door’s key.

Your library of self-made notebooks were the pelts on the wall of your past game conquests.

Yes! The Harvard Family Health Guide or the American College of Physicians Home Medical Guide! And my dad always bought every new edition of the Green Beret Medical Handbook!

The typical Fox News addict of today also probably wouldn’t have been caught dead watching anything news related outside of local evening and maybe 20/20 depending on the subject matter. The CNN nerds were still watching though.

There was also a better spread of educational programming in popular circulation (talking NASA-owned TLC days and prior here).

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I started flying as a kid and remember getting mad at the GPS messing with my uptake on map reading in Boy Scouts and driving class. I also remember thinking to myself how grateful I was it’d never leave the cockpit and invade my daily life.

An IBM Selectric is the last one I ever used. Meanwhile, I’ve had internet since ‘88 and a family computer in the home since ‘85. I’m described as elder Millinial, but I prefer Digitally Native Gen X frankly.

Books, sketchpads, knitting or some other portable craft, table games like flick football and pocket chess, crystal radios. Plenty to do to pass time. There’s nothing on my phone that’s new.

I do remember people considered “in the know” were much more savvy with consumer protective information. Reviews were treated as reviews from relative or expert opinion rather than validation of taste. There were also options for children, teens (the magazine “Zillions” for example, my first taste of criticizing capitalism provided by Consumer Reports for kids), adults and the elderly.

Now, there’s a much less robust testing, renting, reviewing and demoing environment it feels.

Any ambulatory mecha would have massive motion sickness issues for the pilot whenever it walked. Suspending the operator in a fluid would possibly dampen the effects of bobbing around on the vestibular system and dampen shock from collisions or high-G turns. At least I imagine. I haven’t played Peace Walker but that’d be my reason for that to be in the design.

For me it’s the same as watching a ballet, but without the predetermined outcome of narrative theatre/dance. In the process of this, I need a protagonist I relate to. The easiest emotional connection I’m going to form is to my hometown teams given my mnemonic and experiential connection to it, especially having lived prior to the genera death of monocultural and regional identity in the US.

In the case of my alma mater and college sports, I tend to relate it as imagine your local sporting club association football team, but attach it to an entity that plays a gigantic part in educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay that follows. So yeah, I’ll buy the sweatshirt and hoot like a doofus for my alma maters’ bottom-wrung Big Ten and PAC 12 teams every January and March. Hell, I’ll wear the free suits they gave me every quarter while I’m at it.