Useless Conversation

[Reg]

Congrats on getting out of Texas, Morat. If you haven't already, you need to binge Heartstopper on Netflix a few times it's a guaranteed stress reducer.

[Sky]

Are avatards busted? Uploading a new one doesn't seem to be working.

[Trippy]

Uploads could be broken on the new server. Or you might be exceeding either the size or dimensions limits for an avatar. Is the source available on the public Internet?

[Sky]

398x520, 53KB

[Trippy]

Thanks I see the problem now. The auto-avatar resizer isn't working (software it needs isn't installed currently). As a workaround you need to make sure the width and height are no more than 140 pixels.

[Sky]

Noted, thanks!

[Teleku]

So I mentioned part of this story in Discord today, and thought I had posted it in the past, but don’t see anything when I search (if I did and I’m just retarded, apologies for writing it up again).  I decided it would be fun to post a write up about my time transiting Belarus’s airport, twice.

So back when I was serving at the Embassy in Moscow, I had a good friend serving at the Embassy in Kyiv, and decided to go visit him.  Because of Russia's (first) invasion of Ukraine, direct flights between the two countries had been cut off.  So the fastest and cheapest way to travel between them became flying through Minsk, in Belarus.  I got to the airport and got my tickets, and got my first surprise when the lady at the international departures gate basically said I was an idiot and to head to the domestic departures gate for my flight.  Belarus signed an association agreement with Russia back in the day, so the international border doesn’t start until I leave Belarus.  This is bad because I’m there as a US diplomat, whose comings and goings are heavily watched by Russian immigration/FSB, but also insanely restricted in Belarus.  Like, we literally cannot have more than 5 of us in the country at a time, and the counter surveillance is worse than anywhere.  But whatever, just going through the airport, should be fine!

I get to Minsk and head towards the signs pointing towards “international transfers”.  I walk through a door…and find myself out on the sidewalk in front of the airport, past all security, free to go wherever (without a visa or papers to be there).  The international terminal is down street, and I high tail it as fast as I can to get back in.  I get to the security line.  While going to put my backpack into the X-ray machine, the security lady points out I have a half drunk bottle of sprite in the side pocket I forgot about.  I apologize, grab it and go to throw it in the garbage can.  She grabs me, stops me, looks me very stern in the face, and says “Drink!”.  I pause.  Um…wha… “Drink!”.  I unscrew the cap and take a drink.  She waves her arms and says “Go.”  Sending me through the security line and into the airport with my half drunk bottle of sprite, now secure in the knowledge it was in no way dangerous. 

I eventually find where my gate is, but its behind a few special immigration control boxes, since now I’m “leaving Russia”.  I step in.  Have any of you played the video game “Papers, Please”?  It was EXACTLY that.  The same booth.  The same counter setup.  I had the lines on the wall behind me marking heights.  The guy behind the counter was wearing a uniform and huge hat with an array of ribbons and medals that made him look like The Grand Marshal of the Red Army.  I handed him my US Diplomatic passport.  His eyes go wide.  I spend 20 minutes standing there as he investigates my passport in every way possible (again, exactly like Papers, Please).  He had a little handbook he kept flipping through to compare stuff to.  He took pictures of it with his phone camera.  He held up the passport to compare my picture with my actual face 5 times.  He pulled out an actual mother fucking magnifying glass to examin marks and logos in my passport.  The entire time this is going on, I’m just standing there (thankfully nobody else was in line behind me), with the Papers, Please theme mentally running through my head.  Eventually he hands it back and lets me go.

I boarded the plane, which is a Belavia flight (Belaruses state owned flag carrier).  While people are boarding, the flight attendants start walking around, holding big ornate silver trays, piled high with what looks like ghetto jolly ranchers.  I take one, and best I can tell, its a fucking lemon jolly rancher they’ve re-wrapped with their own branded wrappers.  As soon as the last passenger steps through the door, they shut the door behind him and we almost immediately start getting pulled out to the tarmac.  The aisles are still jammed with people trying to get to their seats.  The plane pulls out, turns into the taxi ramp right next to the terminal, and shoots forward so fast I actually thought we were taking off right then for a few terrifying seconds.  The plane starts taxing down the tarmac faster than I’ve ever seen any jet taxi. People are bouncing around as they struggle to get to their seats.  Flight attendants are dropping lemon jolly ranchers everywhere as they can’t balance the big silver trays.  We had to taxi a long way as the route took a big long loop around the outskirts of the airport till you got to the start of the runway.  Looking out the window as the fence went by, I could tell we were doing highway speeds.  The plane is just booking it.  Finally, just in time for everybody to get strapped in, we get up to the front of the runway where we need to make a 90 degree turn onto it.  The pilot slows the plane down to the bare minimum he needs to do to make the turn and not flip the fucking plane.  Like, it seriously felt like he was power sliding the fucking plan onto the runway.  The SECOND the plane straightened out pointing down the runway, still moving, he punched the thrust and we blast off down it and then up.  I have no idea what’s going on.  I’m wondering if there was just a coup and I’m on the last plane out of the country or something.  But I guess that’s just another day for Belavia airline. 

I get to Kyiv, have a great time.  After a week of fun, its time to go back, via the same route.  My Belavia flight back out of Kyiv to Minsk was thankfully much more normal.  I land and seek out the transfer counter.  I come into a room where there is just one random desk in the corner with several airline employees crammed behind, and a giant mob of screaming Russians waving passports.  There is no line, just a room full of a big seething mob of people.  I have no idea what’s going on, but after waiting 15 minutes and seeing nobody actually moving, I decide fuck it, shove my way forward, and also wave my passport.  Lady behind the counter grabs it, flips through it, takes a picture of it with her phone, says in broken English that “the system is down” and waves me to go up the stairs.  Nobody had been leaving the room since I was there, so this felt odd, but ok.  I get to the top of the stairs and there is just a single door.  I walk through.  On the other side is a long narrow hallway that is about 100 yards.  It’s almost totally dark.  One flickering light is on in the middle, but the rest of the light is coming from ambient light through the windows (the sun had set by this time).  I slowly creep forward.  There is nobody else in this fucking hallway.  It’s filled with random maintenance supplies, ladders, equipment, etc.  And again, almost totally unlit.  Eventually I get to the end, the door thankfully opens, and I step into a fully normal and very busy airline terminal.  The door shuts behind me and I see it's a nondescript door coming out of a wall with an ad on it.  There isn’t even a door handle on it from this side, just made to blend into the wall.  I got to my gate for the flight to Russia.  I still have not passed through immigration since I left Ukraine.  I go get a beer.

I arrive in Moscow, and our flight boards busses on the tarmac that take us to domestic arrivals.  We walk into the exit terminal, and they have taken every metal bench and table in the room and thrown them up into a massive pile to create a makeshift barricade, with just one narrow hole through it.  In front of the hole several metal tables have been laid out with officials sitting behind them, creating a ghetto immigration line (I guess because ‘the system is down’).  I was one of the first ones off the bus.  And of course they see my US Diplomatic passport and freak the fuck out.  I stand there for almost 30 minutes while no less than 5 people get involved with the processing of my passport.  All 5 of them took pictures of it with their phones.  Long after every single other person on the plane has been processed and left, eventually they hand it back to me and let me leave.

Anyways, just one of my more amusing transit experiences, thought I should share.  Moral of the story is to never go to Belarus or Russia. 

[Samwise]

I’m one week into being a dad!  Shit’s pretty cool so far, and I’m hoping it’ll get even better when my wife's recovered a bit more and I’m not pulling double duty as a gofer.

In a lot of ways it would have been good to be doing this when I was younger and had more physical energy at my command and that many more years still ahead of me, but in a lot of other ways it’s great to have forty years of accumulated life skills making stuff that would traumatize and/or confound a twentysomething seem like No Big Fucking Deal.

Also, I’ve gotten in the habit of leaving my phone on DND unless I’m specifically expecting a call, since opportunistic napping is an integral part of my lifestyle now, and goddamn is that a life upgrade I should have made ten years ago.

[Khaldun]

Congrats. We had the same feeling that being younger, dumber and more energetic would have been better, but things turned out really well, so maybe being older, smarter and more sluggish was actually fine.

[WayAbvPar]

I’m one week into being a dad!  Shit’s pretty cool so far, and I’m hoping it’ll get even better when my wife's recovered a bit more and I’m not pulling double duty as a gofer.

In a lot of ways it would have been good to be doing this when I was younger and had more physical energy at my command and that many more years still ahead of me, but in a lot of other ways it’s great to have forty years of accumulated life skills making stuff that would traumatize and/or confound a twentysomething seem like No Big Fucking Deal.

Also, I’ve gotten in the habit of leaving my phone on DND unless I’m specifically expecting a call, since opportunistic napping is an integral part of my lifestyle now, and goddamn is that a life upgrade I should have made ten years ago.

Congrats, sir!

[Johny Cee]

Fucking motherfucking fuck fuckity fucking lawyers.


So:

I have a dipshit client who is getting divorced.  He is a dipshit boytoy outdoorsy type.  His wife is an MD who got tired of being married to the male love interest form a Hallmark Christmas movie.  Fine.  The MD has had a series of lawyers dragging the settlement through multiple years.  I got stuck with dummy because I did a favor for a family law attorney.  I was deposed for four hours one summer.  I have a 100 page transcript next to my desk that I never signed and returned because I'm so tired of this nonsense.  It is a solely a tax return engagement, and she makes many times what he does.

Was subpeoned a couple weeks ago to provide records for 2022 including workpapers and communications.  I dragged my feet on doing it because it is a pain in the ass.  Finally did it today, emailed a giant zip packaged including a notarized statement.  Fine.

Fucking lawyer just emailed me saying "thanks, but don't need it as we reached a settlement".  This whole dance will restart in 18 months when Mrs. Doctor gets pissed off at Fuckboy, so burns $50,000 to make him miserable for a while.

[Samwise]

That'll teach you to drag your feet harder next time.   

[Fraeg]

Noted, thanks!

Baron Karzack!!!

I had this super cool toy of him as a kid where all the limbs were attached to torso with magnets.

[Trippy]

For those of us in the San Francisco Bay Area:

BART to offer final rides on original equipment on April 20

OAKLAND, Calif. — Bay Area Rapid Transit, the 131-mile electrified rail network in the San Francisco Bay Area, is offering the public a last chance to ride the 1970s-era futuristic railcars that made up its original fleet.

On Saturday, April 20, at 1 p.m. at the MacArthur station in Oakland, BART will commemorate the cars with a ceremony and then run two 10-car trains using original cars for the last time. Anyone can ride for the usual fare.

“We understand that BART cars are iconic, especially the sloped-front A cars,” said BART spokesperson Jim Allison. “We just wanted to give them a proper sendoff so that people had a chance to say goodbye to the cars that have been serving the Bay Area for more than 50 years.”

I remember my Elementary school class (can't remember the grade) took a field trip to ride BART when it was new since it was such a big deal at the time.

[01101010]

Fond memories of taking BART from Berkeley to San Francisco to save the headache of parking and the Bay Bridge. Can't say I recall what the trains looked like when I took it though

[Samwise]

I imagine those two trains will be goddamn packed.

Despite the bad press they eventually got after decades of accumulated funk, I remember at a young age being impressed by how cozy the upholstered seats on BART were compared to the ones on Muni, and much later using those cozy seats to catch up on sleep while commuting to and from UC Berkeley. 

The new cars have half as many seats (because you can pack more people in standing than sitting) and they're hard plastic.  They don't make anything the way they used to!   

[Samwise]

Workers demolish columns, find a note embedded inside saying "these columns are ugly and I'm glad you're finally demolishing them."

The author of the note is already dead, but the renovation plans were already underway a year before he died, so he got to go to his grave knowing history had proved him right.  And probably giggling at the thought of the eventual discovery of his spiteful time capsule.

 

[rattran]

I heard a BBC interview with his son, who said his dad would be amused and excited that they are preserving the note in a display in the new hall.

[Samwise]

Useless link: How to monetize your blog.

[HaemishM]

Should be subtitled, The Internet's Slow Inexorable Descent into the Torment Nexus.

[Samwise]

This floated across my feed today: How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis

tl;dr it's about Lucy Calkins, who I'd never heard of, but she's considered to be the main person responsible for schools de-emphasizing phonics over the last couple of decades (which is a thing I was vaguely aware of from talking to friends with school-age children) which in turn is likely a significant contributor to falling literacy rates.  Truly wild how much lasting damage a well-intentioned bad idea can cause. 

Also wild that Why Johnny Can't Read was published in goddamn 1955 and we apparently have to relearn the same exact lessons every couple of generations.