The Aliens in Aliens are loosely based on Naked Mole Rat cultures and behaviours complete with hive mind that talks via chirps and trills, giant queen with extended baby area, specialized roles (this is more from the expanded universe), not liking other clans of Aliens, resistant to pain/acid etc. There are just so many parallels.

I say Aliens as the Alien in Alien was slightly different depending on if you consider the deleted scenes canon or not.

Most amateurs have signifcantly more time they can cut by training better and harder than spending thousands or tens of thousands on better components.

Its a very small list of amateurs who train to the same level as a pro who has a good chance of winning any of the big competitions.

Stick that under 30s pro on a cheap bike geared the same as a midlife crisis amater 45 year old gear head on an ultra expensive bike and guess who wins?

If you want to buy wins enter an amateur car racing event, those are mostly reflective of money spent given a base level of talent and training (which costs far more money per hour than training for cycling).

Eurasian Blue Tit, one of my favorite common species in the UK

Bonus Bluey

Its hands down my most useful tool, especially as I can both invite people to my events and I can share my calendar with people I choose. Everything goes into the calendar, from appointments to birthdays to holidays to when things need to be renewed. Only time I forget something now is if it hasn’t gone into the calendar.

I especially like being able to send the address of where I am meant to be going straight to my maps program, as I will usually try and work out where I want to park when going somewhere. Saves so much hassle when you actually get to the event.

I did a large scale data rationalization and migration project for a company that is heavily regulated. They can be asked to prove they have this or that document from seven years ago, for no other reason than they should have it. Not having it means big fines and negative press.

Hundreds of Tbs of data got appropriately labelled and migrated, even more got left behind on the old system till it could be decommissioned safely after a period of parallel running.

As part of the decommissioning the data was backed up twice, and I wanted the backup properly tested with some random file restores. Not a full restore, just a few random restores just a proof of life test that the backups worked. I was told that wasn’t a reasonable request and it wasn’t needed as the architect in charge of backups trusted his backup team and he “designed pragmatic solutions”.

I still mean to call in to the regulator in a year or two to trigger a restore request, lets see if a pragmatic solution design is actually the same as performing some basic testing.

I was diagnosed as dyslexic as a young child, I spent a lot of my childhood reading, and it definitely helped my ability to read. So much so I was ahead of my reading age by the time I hit secondary school.

However it did next to nothing for my auditory processing or my ability to phonetically spell out words. I did have significant coaching around this during school age but nothing ever really stuck with it.

I still cannot reliably phonetically spell out words today, many decades later. Pretty much every word I can spell I have had to brute force learn the hard way, letter by letter with a lot of repetition.

I have had the same problem with handwriting, its completely illegible unless I take my time and draw my letters the same way that people draw pictures, fine for forms but way too slow for notes. Thankfully I can type everything like that now.

2018 they were suspected of having an extra battery and all sorts of rumours as nobody could work out how they suddenly leapfrogged everybody elses PU. 2019 was the year they were suspected of cheating the PU fuel flow and the year after they agreed that private punishment with the FIA, in what must have been a completely unrelated measure the FIA also increased the monitoring of fuel flow for 2020.

For at least 2018 and 2019 they had the best PU on the grid by some margin (I would argue that RB had the best aero package during this time period at most circuits), even more so than the previous class leading Merc PU. For 2020 they had the hangover of the punishment from the FIA so were nowhere near the sharp end till the ground effect years.

There is an argument to be made that they fucked up 2019 and threw away the title with what was a huge advantage at the start of the season or that they agreed with the FIA to throw the 2019 title in exchange for not being kicked out completely that year and the public shaming this would have caused. We will not know till someone from Ferrari speaks about this, if they ever do.

For 2018, Seb buckled under the pressure from Lewis. The comeback from Lewis from Germany onwards was insane, he just ground down Seb and pulled out a ridiculous number of wins.

I mostly read fantasy and scifi. I tend to read a few of one genre, then switch to the other genre. Example, read Wheel of Time series last year, so this year I have read back to back scifi for the first two months and will switch to fantasy when I finish my current book. Now and again I will want to read some contemporary fiction or classics, so I just pick those up only when I feel like it and usually as a palette cleanser.

Now to what books I will read for a genre, thats something I struggle with. last few years I have been re reading my favorite authors entire back catalogs after not reading their earlier books for a couple of decades in some cases. This makes it quite a lengthy process when I am re reading the likes of Pratchett or Tolkien.

Authors that are still publishing I wait a while then catch back up on their latest books. I like to read a few of the same books by the same person as you get used to the setting/style and you process them quicker.

Completely new authors I tend to go on reviews, books take too long to decide if I like them or not and it would take an eternity if I was to try and do completely independent self discovery of authors. If I know I am finishing a series of books I have already chosen, I research reviews, pick a few I like the sound of, then try them. Authors I like I will then follow for new stuff and/or read their back catalog, authors I don’t I just forget exist.

I did cooking at school, all the way to GCSE, very nearly went to culinary school instead of doing A Levels and Uni. I decided against it as chefs are more likely to work evenings and weekends than your average IT nerd. I do not regret it, IT can be toxic but nowhere near as toxic as a lot of commercial kitchens.

As I got older I realised that I enjoy cooking, and I am a good cook, but I am not a chef and being a chef is a completely different level due to the volume of food and dishes you have to make. Cooking for yourself you make for a handful of people most of the time, usually a single meals worth of dishes, and you will still eat it even if its bad most of the time. A chef might do over a 100 covers from a menu of dishes and they have to be at least good, while working as a team to do so.

At least for GCSE there was a lot of repetition over dishes to get good at them and their basic techniques, and an encouragement to experiment with them. I must have spent six weeks making victoria sandwich cakes for example.

Post school, cooking books and youtube to expand the range of cuisine that I can cook.

The vast majority of tourists in Japan are Japanese domestic tourists, like over 90% of total tourists.

Queue spiderman pointing meme.

No its Lyonel Baratheon, he throws the best parties.

Ford serves two markets, the Americas, and everybody else, with an approx. 2/3rd vs. 1/3rd split respectively.

Sure they sell some small amount of F150s and similar oversized cars/trucks outside of the Americas, but its measured in 1000s.

European market is mostly much smaller cars. Ford has had the best selling car in the UK on and off with its Puma, a small SUV that is a mild hybrid.

Outside of the Americas they are starting to move forward with EVs, and will even have their own Renault produced R5 clone with the new Fiesta, but its too little too late as its not due to 28.

Often they don’t actually use the cards themselves, paying is the job of an assistant so its more likely to be some sort of company credit card.

Heres Rishi Sunak completely failing to get how contactless works, literately the simplest process to pay for something, you don’t need a PIN or put the card into the machine, you just tap the card reader. Its like hes never paid for anything in his life before.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/rishi-sunak-contactless-fail-video-b2043035.html

Am I the only one who thinks the new bookshelf view is ugly AF? Calibre has always been more functional that attractive but this is taking it to new levels

I still cannot get my head around what they expected when they employed him? Did they like not commission even a one pager on his style before they hired him?

Its the same with Forest and Dyce, Dyce is a reasonable signing if your expectation is to keep a team up, but they seem to have hired him to take Forest into the European places. Again, did they even look into Dyce at all? What about his previous record suggested he could do exciting, successful, attacking football.

It all seems mental if you are spending £10s of millions on a manager (Frank cost £6.7m to get his and his teams release from Bees alone) to not at least do some basic research, even if that means paying someone to do it for you.

Macro photography is always an option for indoor

You can add gambling adverts to this, it would be disingenious to suggest kids do not watch football

Assuming you want to use the laptop for this hobby, I would suggest getting a cheap, secondhand camera, old DSLRs are like £50 with a lens and perfectly fine starting point, but you can spend as much as you want on a setup. Only recommendation I would make, is get something thats still supported today for the lens mount type, that way you know you have a constant upgrade path.

Get the camera with the right lens included for what you want to start taking, additional lenses will increase the budget significantly even at the bottom end as they can often work well with better (and more expensive) camera bodies if you decide to upgrade later on.

Then you can use Darktable & GIMP to play with the photos to your hearts content or “spend” on Light Table & Photoshop. You can do anything from basic image correction up to full blown re-imaginings of your photos. Plenty of online tutorials to walk you through the processes.

Yeah for the average user, a Mac with Apple silicon is a great choice, you do not even have to buy new as a second hand M1 or M2 can have its battery replaced by Apple for about £160 and have a warranty on the work. The M1 for the average user is still more than powerful enough if you avoid the base RAM and storage. If you get really desperate there are also the genius bars, lol.

Sure you can pick up a secondhand Thinkpad for the same amount of money, replace the battery for less, stick whatever flavor of Linux on it you like, but the average user doing that by themselves and ending up with the same easy to use experience is unlikely. I would rather do the latter as I would pick a model I can upgrade RAM/Storage myself, but then I simply do not see the average user wanting to do that.