Top Gun

Does Nabs think any of us give a single flying fuck about his opinion at this point? At all?

No one: Absolutely no one: Japan: "You know what really needs a sequel?"

No one watched old CN promos? "My ability to talk to fish is of no use to us here!"

I am filled with unironic glee. It's...it's so beautiful.

I mean there is some inherent value in saying, "Okay this is a thing that can actually be done," since researchers weren't 100% sure it was theoretically possible. That shifts it to more of an (absurdly complex) engineering problem than a scientific one. Oh, and while I'm being Buzz Killington, the raison d'etre for the National Ignition Facility is to provide data and experimentation for thermonuclear warheads, since it's kind of frowned upon to go blowing those up willy-nilly anymore. Granted, fission reactors had a similar original purpose, so y'know.

Ehh...this specific moment is not what I would qualify as a "massive leap forward," but instead a point along a gradual progression. Don't get me wrong, it's an important step along the way, but there wasn't some massive new technological leap forward that suddenly made this possible. It's more that the existing experimental setup has been refined to the point where it was able to achieve a net energy gain. Something else that's being glossed over in the general media coverage is that the net energy gain only applies to the ratio of output to supplied energy in the reaction itself. From what I've read, it took far more energy to charge the lasers used in the experiment than was actually produced by it, so this isn't exactly something that could generate net power. I don't mean to sound like a spoilsport here, but I think it's important to put announcements like this in perspective, which mass media coverage of science topics is generally horrible at doing. This is an important step, but even in the best-case scenario we are still literally decades away from a practical deployable commercial fusion reactor.

Viable nuclear fusion has been "40 years away" for at least the past 40 years and counting. I don't see how this announcement changes the arithmetic all that much.

I'm gonna wear out that "I'm shocked!" gif.

You can't honestly believe that the rest of us are as fucking stupid as you are.

Fish 'n' chips?

Just found this gem:

Ukraine has a great deal of aerospace expertise. No surprise that they could pull off something like this using existing hardware.

I've spent so long resigned to the fact that we probably wouldn't get any more Heroboys that it's kind of surreal knowing it'll be on in a few hours.

...how were we still counting votes.

The original series is a fantastic coming-of-age romance story that just so happens to feature kickass sky-surfing robots. Fortunately it was complete as-is and no one ever had the asinine idea to tarnish its legacy with increasingly-awful spinoffs and "sequels" and lord knows what else.

I don't think I've so much as heard of half of these shows. And to think there was a time in college when I basically had [as] on nonstop.

Somewhere Jingo just came a little.

But then we'll have zombie Rittenhouse running around.

Not that it'd ever happen, but if they could come up with some way to show a best-of marathon of Batman: TAS, I'd lose my shit.

*laughs in watching a single new OP episode per week for the past...oh, almost 15 years*

It's like when Republicans try to use "Born in the USA" as a patriotic song.

Did voting for her come with a free helmet?