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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I think what they’re saying is that there is a certain tolerance for silence from the Play-by-play and analyst in a football (soccer) broadcast in Europe. Part of it is style, but another part is simply the cadence of the game and the way crowd noise works. American fans tend not to (sonically speaking, and in aggregate) sort of hum and buzz in time with the tension of the play, and frankly most of our sports don’t have that same rhythm. Gridiron football and baseball in particular would be bad TV if they were announced the way soccer can be, doubly so with the weight of audience expectation. I do think an ice hockey broadcast can sort of sound like a soccer broadcast on meth, though, and thinking about the structure and cadence of play, that makes sense. In some sense, they’re the same sport with a different config file. :-)



  • I think you’ve got that a bit turned around. I don’t think Luke was ever referred to as a “Captain” so if indeed they’re roughly mapping to US ranks, he would be the O5 (or possible O4 as Lt. Cmdr.s are often referred to as Commander for convenience) and then, as you say, separated or inactive in ROTJ.

    If we assume Han had formal ranks and wasn’t just being called Captain to acknowledge he was captain of the Falcon, he would have been the O6 in ESB and received probably some sort of brevet or field promotion to O7+ because of the importance the Alliance assigned to the ground operation on Endor. It’s conceivable that he was in the “Army” track all along though and was the O3 in ESB, but I think either the honorific or Naval track is more likely.

    Lando, if the scriptwriters put much thought into it, was either rolling with a title earned at Tanaab or was on a USAF track, which builds off its heritage as the Army Air Corps and Army Air Forces.









  • I read this in some other article, but it seems like the margins are slim for their hardware because while (IMHO) the interface is still best in a very poor class, almost everybody else does it more or less adequately, so they can’t charge much of a premium. They’ve been making more money on their ad-supported streaming, both on-demand and their collection of all the free linear streams that you use to convince your rerun-loving gramma not make you climb into the attic to install an OTA antenna. The SAG and WGA strikes have done a number on how much advertisers are buying and at what prices. While I always wonder if there aren’t other places to cut first (coughexecutivecompensationcough) I don’t doubt that they’re in a way worse place than they were a year ago.








  • I’m more or less in your boat. My chin grows in a bit more, though still too scraggly to amount to anything, and otherwise I’m going on two decades of having a 15yo boy’s “beard”. While it’s annoying to have certain aesthetic options off the table, it’s kind of nice to have an easy routine that doesn’t even need to be daily.

    Shaving cream is mostly pointless, so I don’t bother getting any. Shave dry if the old electric is charged, change blades once a year. If it’s not, or I’m travelling, or I am feeling like I want to be pretty, then while the whiskers are still fairly soft after showering, use a Harry’s 4-blade disposable (maybe ten-fifteen shaves before changing the cartridge).

    I don’t use it much anymore, but I also have a safety razor, and I’d change those blades after five or six uses. I can count on one hands the number of times I’ve had any sort of razor burn I could feel after twenty minutes, and other than the first couple of times I used the safety, I’ve never had more than two nicks at a time in my life, including when I was a 15yo boy. In the end, the safety is still a lot less safe than a modern disposable, requires a more consistent angle, and is just a lot of ritual and futzing that never felt particularly satisfying for me. I’m there to scrape the scraggly garbage off my face once I start looking like a patchy hobo, not to pamper myself. If doing it “wrong” came with any sort of realistic consequences like razor burn, ingrown hairs, tons of cuts, or a 5 o’clock shadow at 2:30, then I’d probably be all-in on the hobby side, but for my face it just doesn’t matter. Anyway, I have fountain pens, woodworking, and mech keyboards to scratch my gleeful luddite itch.