I’ll admit to liking the look of some gaming PCs, with a custom loop with clear tubing, colored coolant, coordinated lights; it hits the same way a well done build in Satisfactory does.

I’m not really interested in gaming peripherals like a big chunky mouse with a bunch of angled plates on it trying to look like Gigatron’s jock strap. Some RGB can be kind of cool, I kinda wish I could do more useful stuff with it, like I always throught it would be cool to have RGB lighting that varied from blue to red with component temperature or something. I’m not the biggest fan of just unicorn vomit for the sake of unicorn vomit.

The cat I grew up with would start gnawing on a paw with this crosseyed look on her face and then she’d start to pull and her little paw would shake under the strain. I half expected her to come away and then just casually spit out a bean.

In the 1940s or 50s. My family has owned it since the 60s.

Would Stacy’s Mom be the Millennial equivalent?

I can never get over hairless cats’ noodly little tails.

I can’t get over the fact that’s what my cat would look like if she lost a fight with a bottle of Nair.

Yeah, I can see why you got the old nut and bolt, if that’s your take from Dan The Spool Of Wire Man. You didn’t get it anymore than his wife did. “I’ve had this spool of wire for 40 years, it used to be this big, now it’s about out.” He’s having some pretty heavy thoughts about his life, where he is in it, how much of it is left, what it’s all meant. And before he even gets a real chance to articulate all that, didn’t even get a chance to get to the feelings part, his wife interrupts him to give him shit about his hat. And just watch him shut down.

A woman that views that clip and perceives it as a “sweet sentimental moment” isn’t empathizing with men. Those men that pumped and dumped you, that you thought you felt a connection with? Yeah they didn’t, and I can see why. Gave you the old Phillip J. Fry: Just make up some feelings and tell her you have them.

As for all that crap about cups of coffee…In my home, if I want something to drink, I prepare it and drink it. If I want something to eat, I cook it and eat it. I’ve been single for a shade over 5 years now and not a single meal in my house has turned into a game of feelings jenga. And if I’m going to live the next 40 years of my life alone, sleeping alone, waking alone, eating alone, drinking alone, working alone, resting alone, dying alone, it will be a bargain price to pay to never again emotionally posture over who makes a fucking cup of coffee.

Electronics engineering is a bit beyond my scope; as an electronics hobbyist or field repairman you’re gonna get the closest I have in my kit at the time, I’ll probably get within an order of magnitude of the spec unless it’s somehow very damn critical or the schematic calls for one of the oddly common oddly specific values like 220 ohm.

Rule by elderly thieves. Klepto-geri-ocracy.

It’s definitely make ends meet.

Live not on evil’s deeds; live not on evil.

Seeking a better life for one’s children tends to be a powerful motivator for people. The promise of a better life has driven a lot of people to get on a boat and sail to the United States over the last few hundred years. As a natural born citizen, I benefit from them all, from the cleverest inventor to the humblest fruit picker. We got folks in power right now trying to abolish it, and look how it’s going for us.

You sound, to me, like a Republican.

Meanwhile, me in the wood shop wearing safety glasses, over ear hearing protection and a dust mask in 95 degree heat and 95% humidity be like:

You’re getting a 10 ohm resistor and liking it.

It almost certainly have been trained partially on r/anarchychess so it’ll probably try to play pop tart to king’s bishop 3.

HAHAHAHAAAAAAA fuck your foveas!

Time has been repealed. Everything took place 16 years ago earlier this afternoon.

I don’t believe you. I do not believe a woman is there for a man in his off days. I’ve never seen that. Women do not support men, supporting a man is misogyny. They go on social media claiming to be “strong and independent” always in that order, and demanding heights and salaries that they will begrudgingly fuck for. “You take me on enough expensive dates and I might stoop to fucking you.”

That’s what the modern online-only strangers-only dating scene looks like. You will be alone with or without these women.

Look up “spool of wire guy.”

Where are we getting the funds for Lemmy and its instances?

So…let’s actually set up a pretend scenario here. Pretend. We are pretend red teaming here; any resemblance to actual terrorist plots living or dead is purely coincidental.

Let’s pretend our terrorist cell is going to spit up, travel to 10 places around the United States, and we’re going to do a coordinated strike on 10 government buildings. Probably the smartest thing to do is just…do it at a planned time and not communicate after we split up. But for some convoluted Ocean’s Umpteen reason we need to communicate and coordinate. I see 3 possible scenarios here:

1. Leader just needs to say GO to the rest of the team, expecting no reply. So one, very brief, one-way communique.
2. Leader needs to send several detailed instructions over a long period of time, expecting no reply. Repeated, large, one-way communiques.
3. The team is going to gather some intelligence and report back, and based on all their observations the leader will say go. Full on two-way communication.

In all three cases, the internet is the better tool for this.

You are correct in that it is difficult or impossible to remotely detect radio receivers, no matter what the BBC tells you. There’s no machinery making a log of who accesses what over analog radio. But the realities of radio equipment and propagation are going to eat into that advantage somewhat.

If we’re talking truly coast-to-coast, you’re going to need HF. MF/longwave won’t reach far enough, you need skywave propagation, and you get that on HF…mostly at night mostly during favorable sunspot activity.

I bet you’re imagining most of the team using one of those handheld commodity shortwave receivers that does AM/FM and shortwave, about the size of a pencil case with one of those telescoping whip antennas. That might do for 1 and 2, people hear hams on those sometimes.

The bosses transmitter would need to be a reasonably serious bit of kit. At the very least something like an Icom 706 mobile HF rig plus power supply and at least a two element yagi for 20 or 40m. This is an antenna that’s 30 to 60 feet wide. Hams do routinely make do with less, but when you’re talking to someone with those crappy little antennas, probably inside a building, I’d want to focus my beam at least a bit. A wire in a tree ain’t gonna do.

Oh, and, let’s say Boss is in Washington DC. It’s possible he can make himself heard in Los Angeles but not Wichita, because the “optics” of the ionosphere doesn’t bounce his signal down to the ground in the middle of the continent.

One communique of “Baker this is Oven: Preheat complete, insert the bread. Repeat: Insert the bread.” might not be noticed. Or some ham somewhere will hear it and go “What the hell, who’s horsing around?” If you don’t transmit again, you’re probably not going to be direction found. But that big radio tower you’ve got is a weird thing to have.

If you need to make routine transmissions, well now you’re going to have to try some steganography crap. They did recently relax the baud restrictions on HF, but you’re still talking about 2.8kHz of analog bandwidth that MIGHT get through. It’s gonna look really weird if you’re repeatedly sending digital pictures to…no one in particular on a regular basis. Now, to blend in, you’ll need some genuine callsigns, because the FCC amateur radio license database is a matter of public record. You use a bogus callsign and you’ll be found out. If you’re transmitting a lot, people will find you, possibly out of curiosity.

Especially if you’re talking about everyone in the terrorist cell communicating, well now EVERYONE has to have an amateur radio license from the government, and fairly large, fairly conspicuous radio hardware. There have been spies caught with shortwave radio equipment, and said equipment was used as evidence against them. Entering the US with a smart phone and laptop is utterly normal, entering the US with a shortwave radio is weird.

OR

Get accounts on Reddit, and post cat memes. Compared to sitting around listening to static on an HF set, that looks way more normal these days. Yes, there probably is a log of what IP addresses sent and received what, but it’s really easy to make two-way secret communications look like perfectly legitimate traffic. The equipment required doesn’t draw as much attention. Keep the steganography subtle or a matter of “which picture I post” and not doctor them at all, well now it’s 100% indistinguishable from people having casual fun. Some guy posts a picture of an orange cat, it gets 30,000 views 975 likes and 75 comments, and ten IRS buildings explode. Do you think the authorities make the connection to the cat meme in the first place?

I could probably build a gaming PC that matches the Series S for $500 with an AMD APU, some Ryzen thing with integrated graphics, no discrete GPU. The Steam Deck makes it work in a handheld format, I can do it in a PC case. Or, go buy used. There’s gonna be a lot of perfectly game capable machines being sold off because they won’t run Win 11. Slap Linux + Steam on there and you’re gaming.