Great tits. Dickcissels. Boobies.

You have met bird enthusiasts, right? They’re all freaky.

Mind you that I am specifically excluding myself from this category, the guy with a penguin for his profile pic, for no particular reason whatsoever.

Thanks!

And, it’s to the tune of…

The goose, it is loose.

The RF is Canon’s current mount for their mirrorless models (the old and busted but most recent DSLR cameras use their EF mount instead), and the RF-S line is supposed to be specifically for their crop sensor APS-C models. I don’t know what the S is supposed to stand for. Small? Slim? Skinflint? Styrofoam?

These purportedly follow the smaller sensor = smaller, cheaper lenses pattern of thinking, and won’t actually illuminate all of a 35mm full frame camera’s sensor. Thus if you bung it on one of those models the camera body figures it out via the data pins on the lens and puts itself into 1.6x crop mode, effectively converting your big expensive full frame camera into an APS-C one with a lower pixel count anyway. It really rather defeats the purpose.

The only RF-S lens I’ve got is the 18-35mm kit lens that came with my R10 and it definitely lives up to the kit lens stereotypes. It is not terribly versatile, is slow, noisy, feels extremely cheap, can’t focus very close, and aside from all of the above it’s also highly optically questionable. Despite this Canon has the audacity to charge $350 for it if you have the perverse urge to buy one separately. It does at least have optical image stabilization built in which might be part of why it’s so damn expensive… Just like most of Canon’s lenses.

Mine is at least an APS-C, or Canon’s interpretation of the same, so when using one of their “real” RF lenses and not any of the toys from the RF-S series I get a free 1.6x magnification. That’s only marginally annoying for close-in work. You know, the other thing I do around here, which is why I have a separate 24mm macro lens to get all of large objects when they’re in my photo booth.

This also handily chops off some of the ugliness around what would have been the edges of the frame from a full frame sensor, which I guess is nice. So it could be better, but it also could be a lot worse.

You’re telling me you don’t keep polearms handy all the time?

What about swords? Not even a sword? I don’t know what to tell you.

They should, yes, but they don’t. In fact, they’ll ding you for having too many failed transactions and claim that it’s your responsibility to do something about it.

I know: Zeppelins.

This is one of the single most accurate and succinct analogies of a tech space I have ever read, save possibly for the one that Neal Stephenson wrote about operating systems being car dealerships.

The author not only uses ASCII bricks ( ▓ ) as bullets, and not only uses silly CSS tricks to mark down animated rainbow text rather than using the four megabyte or whatever jquery library which would inevitably tempt everyone else, but also goes as far as to literally name the aforementioned CSS class “funky.”

I think I like this cat already.

Okay, I definitely have to hand it to you. Your kiln is a lot bigger than mine. Bravo.

“No, your other left. That way. Over there. Damn it, Pookums!”

Done. I’ve been boycotting REI since… 2019, I think? When all this crap first came to light, or at least when I became aware of it. When their ex-Amazon management was trumpeting how their membership numbers were such a metric of success, I also managed to cancel my “lifetime” REI membership. This made their customer support people very confused. So confused that they actually gave my membership fee back, despite the fact that I’d paid for it like 15 years beforehand.

I had an REI credit card. I cancelled that, too.

I stood up for REI for a long time. I held my nose and bought my camping and climbing stuff from them for ages despite the fact that they were and are consistently the most expensive place on Earth to buy outdoors stuff. Because they were supposed to be a “co-op” they were “not corporate.”

Yeah, so, about that.

Fuck 'em. If you’re going to be dealing with corporate asshats anyway you may as well shop at the ones that have the decency to be cheaper.

Marylin Manson did a song about that once, in fact. He used… slightly different terminology.

In addition to fast hands you’d better have long arms and a very firm grip. If you grab a goose by the neck it will go absolutely berserk, and they’re much heavier and also stronger than people expect. There is also the inevitability that at some point you will have to let go. You are familiar with the proverb about riding a tiger?

Sturdy boots and a good punt are a better strategy. Don’t worry, goose chest muscles are quite strong and you probably won’t hurt it. With luck you can land it far enough away from you that you’ll have time to get your hands on a halberd or possibly a shotgun or something.

And it already is with other products, e.g. Tilex, which has a pickup tube moulded into the side wall of the bottle itself and runs from the very lowermost front corner up to the spray nozzle. Surely this is a commodity package that any manufacturer could buy, but they mostly don’t because I’m sure it costs two cents more per unit.

Even that don’t make no sense, boss. If that were the case not only should consoles and arcades be swapped, as you say, but also the VR line should be slipped in between handhelds and mobile. Dactyl Nightmare came out in 1991 and certainly wasn’t even the first VR experience, but it was the first commercialized one I can think of — and played myself, believe it or not. I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.

You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.

Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.

Cowboy Troy - I Play Chicken With the Train

I’m also not sure we can leave out the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones.

No. Lincoln and his supreme court (he appointed no less than five justices) wrecked that and set the dangerous precedent that no part of the US can unilaterally secede. The south attempted to secede for a bad reason, but this also preempts any part of the US doing it for a good reason in the future.

So as much as we might like to, say, get a huge saw and just chop Florida off and leave it to float away, the other states as well as congress must agree in order to do so.