Feels kinda gauche to comment under my own thread, but fuck it. I'm tired as hell and didn't get much sleep in three days, so let's roll. Despite being shit with recognising faces, I caught an 'outsider' cheating on a mid-term for one of my students. It gotta suck to (probably? hopefully?) get expelled from a school whose motto may as well be "Cs get degrees[0]," but it ain't exactly my problem. My ex-interns came back to work on that paper. They also had me invited/requested on a student project making a radiotelescope array with stuff like old sat-TV antennae. Not gonna lie; it's weird to wrangle scrap that'll ultimately be synchronised with a signal from our new atomic clock, but what the hell. It's super, and it's neat to construct something that's largely outside my scope. Like, I get the underlying principles, but my day-job puts me dangerously close to failed-phil dumbasses who ''''''prove'''''' how multiverses must exist because meta-predicate logics are constructable, so it's necessary to recalibrate and touch grass now and again. The whole thing reminds me of hackathons before recruiters and dickheads displaced real people. Also, labs/experiments are about a billion times more enjoyable when you know you won't have burn a weekend to write a 30+-page report afterwards. I've been asked to come along to a military recruiter as an all-purpose witness/assurance/nit-picker, and (for me) it was fun in an unintentional way. Almost feel bad for the guy 'cause between minute-long waffles to 'answer' yes-no questions and getting thrown off his game amusingly easy, I may have had my haircut longer than he's been in service. Still, my mission was accomplished. We also got some of the least informative literature since my last encounter with the Jehovah's Witnesses, but that was to be expected. Despite this experience giving my friend a pause, he remains interested, so I'm gonna do what we probably should have started with, i.e. contact soldiers I met through paintball. I know, there are many bullshitters there, but those get off on LARPing as special forces, not say they "mostly do admin" or "fight the entropy in the motor pool." [0] - I think Ut mediocris fuerunt, ita vicerint tracks.
Hey, I’d be happy to talk to your friend if need be. I’ve both fought entropy in the motor pool (extremely unsuccessfully) and done the non-LARP version of special forces. Always happy to talk about the good and bad of the experience.
Agh of course, I made the classic blunder of assuming someone talking about the military in English is American. Unfortunately my experience with the polish military is quite limited. Would still be happy to talk of course, all militaries end up being pretty damn similar when it comes down to it