The astral plane tribal chieftain bowling alley SonicWorld lore dump is peak post-Zooniverse/Mardi Gras parade. Almost as fun as “Eels” IMHO.

I honestly thought I kept getting Tomb Raider confused with the character and events of Fear Effect. Now you’ve got me even more turned around.

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.

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.

Tell me about it. The oldest continually operating team in the league now has a big yellow sack of concrete on their shoulders.

I effectively had the same convo with a friend back in high school and pointed out the Gundam’s biggest canonical battlefield tech breakthrough was its armor, which let it potentially take anything to the face (until beam weapons see widespread use in the original). Then I compared that a real-life analog, the Abrams, which can hide behind hills and things despite being a taller tank than its counterparts. The Gundam— or anything else it’s fighting — can’t hide.

He still thought the army should use mechs after that…

Nah, I’d say that’d be fuel they’re better at dumping into the water than anything. The bombs go into dirt nine times out of ten during practice.

Wasn’t he one of the guys involved in the Bone Wars in the 1870s-ish? Dude’s name is almost synonymous with the word “dinosaur” in the US.

I think the Dollop did an episode on him.

Not yet, but several states are discussing implementing bans.

Eva wouldn’t exist without it. Anno ripped everything off from it and 70s super robo stuff. Also check out Nadia if you want a failed prequel to Eva.