Always suspected that everything beyond plier-wrench is not only man-made, but unstable.

Thank you for reaching out, I might get back to you on it. But you're from the USA, though, right? I'm not sure how much overlap is there with Polish forces.

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.

While looking for one of the sources to Ghost Wars, I had happened upon a book at the university library which, roughly 100 pages in and leafing through the rest, think you may enjoy: Poisoned Peace by Gregor Dallas.

I've got two dates and a Traveller game goin', so things are on the self-imposed socialization uptick.

It's been a pleasant surprise to see over 90% of students hand their homework on time, though there was a Dirac delta-like spike of submissions in the last 20 minutes before deadline. Some things don't change.

Broke up over the weekend. Between slowly realising I'm not the manic-neurotic one in this relationship and a partner whose libido had Iodine-131's half-life, it's kinda surprising we lasted almost six months. Still, I haven't felt this bummed by a break-up in a while.

My teaching-thing is going OK, but I'm beginning to see why there wasn't much competition for the post. So, every other weekend, I basically go to the school and do the same material eight times, four on each day. Not that I didn't expect it from the job description, but dang, super-duper kudos to primary/secondary teachers for enduring this daily.

Since my brain wasn't exactly up to anything serious this week, I ended up reading the first seven volumes Gotrek and Felix whenever not trying to kick my steaming pile of math forward at work. They're in that ambigious zone between not-bad-for-fantasy and straight-up guilty pleasure, but fun for what they are.

You're probably right, especially since I haven't been to facebook in years and tiktok ever, but there are places like tildes and other curated communities that allow users to moderate by flagging content. I've been a sporadic user there for about two years, and 1) removing any total karma score reduced clout-chasing, 2) having the option to flag something as joke, malice, exemplary, off-topic or 'noise' has really reduced the need for people to engage with nothing but angry ass-blasting, 3) abusive users and persistent trolls do get banned. Not ideal, kinda too big to get a sense of individual people as people, but pretty good. I also wouldn't mind that kind of culture back when I joined Hubski, 'cause jesus christ, this place bordered on unbearable until I blocked a whole buncha cunts.

I think people and conversations will return once there's an actual distance from the bullshit of the last couple years. From COVID straight to Ukraine, now another not-war brewing... dunno about all y'all, but my day-dreams all too often construct self-sufficient cloisters from first principles.