Oof

Hamster Huey

Chill Oof, War

Damn. That’s a whole lot of TM-62s. It looks like there are about 160 of them there. It’s impossible at that rez to determine what variants there are, but let’s assume standard HE TM-62s. Each has 17 pounds of high explosives. Therefore, 17×160 = 2720 pounds of mega-kablooey.

And that would make anything within a thousand meters around there pretty gooey.

Paratrooper Stuff

Chill Oof, Video, Video (other)

One time on a hairy jump in the army in too-high winds, a buddy of mine slammed into the side of a field ambulance at 30mph.

Somehow he broke no bones but sprained nearly every major muscle in his body and ended up with a huge amount of bruising. As I was talking to him later, I observed it was some sort of weird anti-paradox: he crashed into the ambulance that was needed to help him since he’d plowed into an ambulance.

He was not quite as amused by my observation as I was.

He made a complete recovery. And if you’re curious, video of the jump is below. Read the poster’s comment too. That was a very shitty jump that never should’ve happened, especially since it was done just to show off.

I know most of y’all are not used to looking at military jumps, but the paratroopers should not be moving nearly-horizontally across the screen like that.

A very bad day.

Holy shit, just noticed these comments. That was my friend!

Scar Issue

Chill Oof

I don’t think I realized when it began how much Covid would deeply mentally scar people. A lot of people just went frickin’ nuts and never recovered. I knew one personally. Tons more on the internet.

The Covidians really will be ranting about Covid in nursing homes in 50 years and the poor attendants will have no damn idea what they are going on about.

50 Ways To Leave Your Computer

Chill Oof

I get at least three heartbreaking, incoherent emails a day now from random strangers who believe they’ve awakened an LLM god or LLM consciousness of a new dimension. The most salient quote from the screenshots below: “(An LLM) will never just say, ‘Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about??’”

[image or embed]

— Shannon Vallor (@shannonvallor.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 11:55 PM

Huh. This might make the depredations of social media look like a minor cigarette habit.

I mean, I could fall in love with a bot too. But it’d have to be out in the physical world and make me pizza. Then it could be love. But the above is just frickin’ insane.

Mega-kablooey

Chill Oof, War

Great goddamn. It’s not often that you see direct fire like that from such close range on an armored vehicle. At least it was an instant death for whoever was in that BTR-82.

That looks like a T-72 the Ukrainians have. Not sure of the variant. Can’t see enough.

Stock Phrase

Chill Oof

When the dotcom bubble burst.

I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3,000 years ago when pets.com went to zero.

And it was a wild goddamn time. I’d already exited the market completely. I watched many friends and acquaintances go bankrupt. Some who did not were paying off margin debt for nearly a decade after that. It felt like an end of things. And then came 9/11 and a truly new era began — one we were still in until Trump 2.0.

Now, something more malignant is on the horizon than we could’ve even imagined back then. History is returning with a terrible vengeance and none of us are ready.