California checking in. I’m working on it, there’s an effort to get it on the ballot.

Yeah, I’ve basically been online since 2003, YT comments has always been a lawless hellscape of scum and villainy.

How long do you think you can keep me in here, Cecil? I only have to get lucky once, you have to be lucky always.

IIRC, there was a study a few years ago that basically shrieked “IT’S THE NEONICOTINOIDS, IDIOT”, and the response seems to have been “well, yes, but we make money selling that, so find something else to blame, dumbass.”

I’m in central California and our insect populations have cratered HARD. Used to be that you couldn’t drive east-west across the San Joaquin valley without getting the front of your car called in bugs; it hasn’t been a problem at all for about two years now. I’ve seen probably a 95% decline in butterflies and bee-like insects; that is, I see about 1/20th of the butterflies I used to. This is deeply worrying. I had a dude come and offer to flush my lawn with pesticide to get all of the bugs out of it, and I took a moment to calmly talk to him about how he’s contributing to complete ecological collapse.

Not the person you responded to, TLJ is easily my favorite of the three sequel movies. The Force Awakens and Rise of the Skywalker (I think?) both felt like focus group fanfiction slop; TLJ was the only one with anything meaningful to say at the end of the day.

IIRC, academy bait also tends to have the high critic score low(er) user score complex.

He’s fucking right. Normal people don’t get their blood pressure up about “black people and women?! IN MY GAMES??”

Red clover is native to the west coast, it’s edible, makes a good incense apparently, and it looks rather handsome imo.

Clover and grass benefit each other in my experience, especially because clover fixes nitrogen. Wherever we have clover, the grass is visibly happier and tends to be hardier to adversity.

Let’s fucking go!

I just realized I’m a dumbass. The triplet isn’t below Iota Leonis at all.

Update: moved to Monday (tonight) because transparency sucked and I was tired.

Seeing: very little or slow twinkling

Transparency / Light pollution: Polaris visible, only one of the cup stars of Ursa minor visible to the naked eye. This is actually slightly better than normal for my area.

Equipment: 12" dob, 1520 mm focal length, 2" 2x Barlow, 2" 34 mm wide field eyepiece.

What I hit: M44: sketched it from my 10x50 RACI. I love finding M44 because cancer is dim as fuck, and I’ve got a cool trick where I just make a right angle with my left hand, pointer finger touching Pollux, thumb touching Procyon, M44 will be right in the 90 degree angle.

M65, M66 again. M66 was actually readily apparent to me, for some reason, where M65 took a bit of work to resolve. Did not manage to resolve NGC 3628. I also accidentally resolved another galaxy about three degrees south of and about two degrees below Iota Leonis. Found it purely by accident, couldn’t find it again, looked very slender, stretched almost across the view in 100x (34 mm wide field + 2x Barlow).

What I attempted: Bode’s galaxy. Spent probably an hour trying to starhop to it with different tricks (I think the thing that got me closest was drawing a line through UmA’s front elbows and shoulders and following that down to the level of Alioth. That got me onto a very neat little square of stars with a trail pointing towards the horizon, which I followed again and again to nothing. Very frustrating. I tried again to hit the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy, also no dice. Not sure if I just suck this bad at star-hopping or if the light pollution is really kicking my butt.

I spent so long on it that I ran out my clock and had to choose one last thing to do. Bootes was now plainly visible in the mid-altitude east, so I decided to try and hit M3 by making a right triangle with epsilon bootes as one angle, Arcturus as the right angle, and M3 as the last angle. Didn’t work. Tried a few other spaghetti plate strategies to find M3 and got nowhere. I mostly tried slowly slewing over at 100x mag, which I know is low for globs, but I figured it would at least stand out as a kind of weird bullshitty star that I could investigate, but nothing stood out.

You can’t win them all I guess =/

It’s all fun and games until someone gets the rest of the theatre to think of The Game. That’s why this isn’t a thing in person, the chances of shitpost-related violence is too high.

Actually, it’s a Norwegian G, so the correct pronunciation would be “Yiff”

Boeing (and McDonnell Douglas before them) actually made good planes when engineers ran the show. Then, the finance bros took over.

Legend!

I’ve heard it can be hard to see with the naked eye, and it seems like it would probably get murdered by city lights. Something like some low power, wide-lens binoculars might help collect enough light to make it visible. Also, I’ve heard that cell phone cameras and cameras in general are pretty good at picking up the Aurora over the naked eye, especially on longer exposures.

Yeah, I’ve noticed that about the left in general, that the perfect is always the enemy of the good. Meanwhile the right’s out there like “yeah, a lot of you are going to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.

I’m fairly certain I’ve encountered one in the last week. Not going to name names, but the conversation thread was fucking weird.

Don’t threaten me with a good time, buddy

IIRC, he also called for the corpocentrists to get primaried.