hydrospanner

I'm glad it's working out for you, but fuck if I'm about to pay some self appointment group to tell me what kind of fence or shed is unacceptable for me to own on my own property.

If I want to plop down a shopping container on my own front lawn, anyone who doesn't like it can kick rocks.

Even longer than that.

But gas means money, so fuck anyone and everything else that might get in the way.

I mean, shit, at least lionize some blinkered fanatic like Stonewall Jackson.

Jackson was a 19th century Christian jihadist.

On the other hand... instead of Lee or Jackson, James Longstreet is right there.

You're mostly right with the depth of field being the big difference but the image being darker is not a function of aperture (f-stop) directly, but rather overall exposure. At the same ISO setting, two identical shots in the same lighting would be the same brightness with truly equal exposure: the reduction in aperture (increasing to m the f-stop number to a higher value) would be compensated for with an equivalent decrease in shutter speed (in simple terms, constricting the hole lets in less light, so we leave the hole open longer to let in the same amount as before).

In the example, if the scene is darker it's because the exposure changed, not just because of the aperture.

Additionally, the number is shown as a fraction because it is a fraction. The "f" in the value (f/2.8) is a variable that stands for "focal length", that being the focal length of the lens being used. So, for example, a 50mm lens set to f/2 would have its aperture set to a 25mm diameter. (50/2)

The reason the numbers are strange numbers and non-linear in scale is because they correspond to aperture diameters that let in either double or half the amount of light from the stop next to them. So adjusting from f/2 to f/2.8 cuts the amount of light in half (I think this is basically doubling or halving the area of the circle of the aperture).

This is why a one stop change at lower values (bigger openings) has a much smaller numeric shift than a one stop change at higher values: adding or subtracting diameter of a larger circle adds or subtracts much more area than the same diameter change to a smaller circle. That's why one stop goes only from f/2 to f/2.8 on the wide open end, but on the closed down end, one stop goes from f/11 to f/16.

Finding new and different applications for the Musk RTO technology!

I can't think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you

We're talking about rivers like the one in Cleveland that they caught on fire?

Twice?!

IDK what's in that but I'll leave my cup for you haha

The Rock, Sean Connery

I love this!

I also thought Matrix, but Neo would be Gonzo and Morpheus would be still played by Laurence Fishburne.

Oh man, I feel like the energy between the Muppets and Viggo Mortenson would make me pick him instead.

Animal could play Gimli, Sam the Eagle is Gandalf.

My favorite summary and comparison of two movies was something along the lines of:

"In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine plays it absolutely straight, as if there were no Muppets at all, and as if he were completely surrounded by nothing but classically trained professional actors...

...in Muppet Treasure Island, on the other hand, Tim Curry plays it as if he himself were a Muppet."

My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.

A company I used to work for touted their profit sharing program as a major incentive when I was hired. Basically, any profits over X% in any giver quarter, a portion of the profits beyond X were shared proportionally with the employees. Simple and effective.

Well my first quarter there apparently I was not included because I hadn't worked there the full quarter. Okay, whatever. The next quarter I did indeed get a modest bonus, nothing crazy, but nice.

After that, the market surged and we were working on what would definitely be one of our best quarters in years. Well the ownership saw that and at our quarterly recap meeting, they announced "upgrades" to the bonus formula: going forward, they'd share an even larger percentage of profits over X%...but now instead of X being a fixed percentage, it was a variable moving target that they would set at the beginning of each quarter based on projections.

Projections that, by the way, they didn't share with the class until halfway through each quarter.

Conveniently, from there on out, their projections were always so accurate that the bonuses basically completely went away.

The second-to-last straw for me was one quarter when the market was really bad, yet our people worked hard and somehow in a down market, our company surged against the tides and had an amazing quarter. We were all proud of our work and looking forward to that bonus.

Well in the fucking meeting where they gave out the bonus, they announced that it was such a unique situation that they revised their projections a second time, once at the midpoint of the quarter...and again just two weeks ago. For me, that meant that a bonus roughly estimated to be about $1,500 ended up being a check for $33.

I was so tempted to just throw the check in the trash on my way out of that meeting.

Thus I refreshed my resume and started looking. Found a great role in government work and began the months-long pre-employment process. In the quarter that happened next, morale was utterly shot and our company had a down quarter. We still did well, mind you, and better than our competition and the market in general, but we only had slight growth (in a quarter where many competitors had contraction). Of course we missed the pie-in-the-sky projection and got no bonus that quarter.

Then, as it worked out, I was set to give my 2 week notice, and my boss scheduled my annual review for that exact day.

Went in, was told I was doing a great job, helping the company, blah blah blah...but that in the next year moving forward, they wanted me to take half the workload of another worker they'd recently terminated and didn't plan to replace. Additionally, the new ERP system, that I'd been asking to be trained on for months...well they weren't going to train me on it, but instead, I'd be expected to learn the old system, to help pick up the workload of other employees as they learned the new system. So my workload was set to more than double, while not getting the training I'd requested (not even like paid courses, just let me sit in on the meetings and have access to the material)...and of course in this market, the best they could do for me was a 1.3% annual raise. Boss said he was sorry and wished he could give me more of a raise but even he was only getting a 6% raise.

Then he asked if I had any feedback for him before we wrapped up and it felt incredible to say, "Yeah, well...I'm not going to be doing any of that extra work you just told me about, because two weeks from now I'm not going to be here anymore. Consider this my 2 week notice."