A Battletech joke for my fellow Mechwarrios. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Haven't reposted this in awhile and we got Battletech Scouring Sands in time for Turkey Day, cheers.
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
i don't do bad sauce passes

JBB: An Artblog!
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopiaď˝ćľˇăŽĺşă§č¨ćśăç´Ąă
Game of Thrones Daily
styofa doing anything

$LAYYYTER

â

çĽćĽ / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
noise dept.
almost home
Three Goblin Art
trying on a metaphor
todays bird
dirt enthusiast
đŞź
cherry valley forever

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@chriskotthoff
A Battletech joke for my fellow Mechwarrios. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Haven't reposted this in awhile and we got Battletech Scouring Sands in time for Turkey Day, cheers.

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Sometimes weâre unsatisfied with a thing we made because when it only existed in our head, we saw all the things it could have been and when itâs done we know all the things that it isnât, but we canât see the way it expands into a million new things when someone else unpacks it in their head.
Actually had this happen to me recently.
Made a card for a co-working who found a new job, simple.
Hated what I was doing, I actually came close to throwing it away multiple times but I needed to give them something.
Every one loved the card, honestly caught me off guard.
Artist will always be their own worst critics, sometimes we need a reminder that it doesn't need to be perfect to be good.
Battletech The Animated Series, the Good with the Bad
Battletech: The Animated Series premiered in 1994 and was my introduction to the larger Battletech Universe. It wasnât the best series, Exosquad premiered the year prior with better art direction and a tighter story that over shadowed the Battletech cartoon in many of ways. It also hasn't aged nearly as well. If anyone who tells you that the BT animated series was worth revisiting today, I would say that person was wearing nostalgia glasses as thick as Oppenheimerâs blast goggles. Many Battletech fans of today are only aware of the shows existence as source material for a fair share of memes, the shows more cheesy moments providing plenty of comedic gold for the community.
That said, that cartoon had to gotten a few things right if it got a much younger me invested enough to want to know more about Battletech in general. Enough so, I became a fan for life after MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat dropped a year later. So as clunky and dated as the show was, it got the vibes right and explained the Battletech simply and effectually enough that the 11 year old me, ADHD and all, had no trouble diving into a franchise with ten plus years of world building and machines. This is a task many current fans have trouble with, especially now with 41 more years of world building. This explore this;
First the opening
âThis is the Inner Sphereâthousands of planets colonized by humankind.â
Pulls up star map, establishes the vastness of human stellar expanse and the boarders of the great powers at a glance
âOnce it was united under the Star League, but for the last three hundred years it has been consumed by savage wars...â
We just covered the Star League and the Successions Wars in one sentence vs sitting someone down for a two part Tex Talks Battletech viewing party (defiantly recommended but you need to start short and simple for someone who is new)
â...until a new enemy appearedâmysterious invaders known as the Clans. Powerful and ruthless, they struck like lightning, attacking every sector at once.â
⌠Now we introduce the Clans. We will get to the Clans history and origins later but it establishes who they are right away and in one sentence; a powerful army from beyond the Inner Sphere that catches everyone off guard.
This is just part of intro to a kids cartoon and it delivers BTU from the Star League to the Clan invasion for new viewers in under a minute. Yes, itâs ultra simplified but thatâs what you need to do for someone brand new to your setting. The show needed an elevator pitch for kids with a low attention span (Iâll raise my hand now) and it nailed.
All the extra details, you pick that up along the way as I have. First the show, then the game and books, now I can go on for hours about Battletech without one of my friends telling me to shut up (politely of course, thatâs why their my friends after all)
If you ever need to introduce Battletech to someone brand new to the setting, this is how you do it. You give them the broad strokes first, then they come back for the rest of the big picture.
There are other parts of the show I may revisit but I think this is the most important take away. No, the show in it self is not a good introduction to Battletech but maybe it can help give you an idea of how to introduce someone yourself.
Besides, the best part about games: It's your story
Welcome to the Inner Sphere... don't mess with my home planet
>Avi >Callsign: Dilettante >IPS-N Drake Lancer mech commission for @ZombiiSquared!
I really loves this take on the Drake, the other Lancer designs are equally impressive
The complete collection.
Great Noir Episode art combined with great hard-boiled Private Eye Monologue - and both of those TV Tropes articles even use Tracer Bullet as header illustrations.
According to The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki, this is the last of Tracer Bullet's three appearances, so here are his first two.
The very first is a single day's strip, part of a larger arc involving a Really Bad Haircut, hence the hat.
The second strip is a week-long story about a Maths problem.
Remembering my own mathematical ineptitude, with 'O' Level results to prove it, one sympathises.
Shee you 'round, shweetheart.
Calvin and Hobbs is a master work.

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This
This
A maquette of the invisible id monster from Forbidden Planet (1956).
The animated monster as it appeared in the film, lit up by energy from a forcefield fence and ray guns.
Doom soundtrack intensifies
In their defence, a lot of it is sand.
I'm starting to think that maybe Europe just isn't that big
no but because australia is close to the bottom of the map and the flat map is distorted to fit a square map shape, australia on the flat map is significantly smaller compared to places closer to the equator.
Thank you for being the one single person in the notes who understands map projections. Australia is big, but still significantly smaller than the US.
Australia is not significantly smaller than the mainland US, no. These are the real sizes, not a Mercator projection. I think you're misunderstanding what yanzinator said. The US does have significantly larger island territories than Australia, though.
The continuous US (so, not counting the islands and Alaska) and Australia are roughly the same size:
US: 2,959,064.44 square miles (7,663,941.7 km2)
Australia: 2,969,907 sq mi (7,692,024 km2)
And the person above has the impact of the Mercator projection completely backwards: North America and Europe appear much larger than they actually are due to their latitudes. Most notably Greenland looks like it is bigger than Africa! (It isnât.)
In the picture below, the pale blue is Mercator and the dark blue is actual size:
And here is Africa vs Greenland:
There is a website where you can drag and drop countries on top of each other to see the actual size comparison taking into account projection
Drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. Is Greenland really as big as all of Africa? You may be surprised at
It's pretty cool and also Japan is a lot bigger than I thought it was
I keep thinking this had become common knowledge but apparently not, this is a good reminder.
It all started with a mouse
For the public domain, time stopped in 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Act froze copyright expirations for 20 years. In 2019, time started again, with a massive crop of works from 1923 returning to the public domain, free for all to use and adapt:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/
No one is better at conveying the power of the public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, who run the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. For years leading up to 2019, the pair published an annual roundup of what we would have gotten from the public domain in a universe where the 1998 Act never passed. Since 2019, they've switched to celebrating what we're actually getting each year. Last year's was a banger:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada
But while there's been moderate excitement at the publicdomainification of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," AA Milne's "Now We Are Six," and Sherlock Holmes, the main event that everyone's anticipated arrives on January 1, 2024, when Mickey Mouse enters the public domain.
The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in 1928's Steamboat Willie. Disney was critical to the lobbying efforts that extended copyright in 1976 and again in 1998, so much so that the 1998 Act is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Disney and its allies were so effective at securing these regulatory gifts that many people doubted that this day would ever come. Surely Disney would secure another retrospective copyright term extension before Jan 1, 2024. I had long arguments with comrades about this â people like Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart (RIP) were fatalistically certain the public domain would never come back.
But they were wrong. The public outrage over copyright term extensions came too late to stave off the slow-motion arson of the 1976 and 1998 Acts, but it was sufficient to keep a third extension away from the USA. Canada wasn't so lucky: Justin Trudeau let Trump bully him into taking 20 years' worth of works out of Canada's public domain in the revised NAFTA agreement, making swathes of works by living Canadian authors illegal at the stroke of a pen, in a gift to the distant descendants of long-dead foreign authors.
Now, with Mickey's liberation bare days away, there's a mounting sense of excitement and unease. Will Mickey actually be free? The answer is a resounding YES! (albeit with a few caveats). In a prelude to this year's public domain roundup, Jennifer Jenkins has published a full and delightful guide to The Mouse and IP from Jan 1 on:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.
Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?
The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!
This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.
Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:
Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or
Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.
The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.
The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).
Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.
So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.
Re-blogging as too many people take memes at face value.

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Strange Days (1995) dir. Kathryn Bigelow
This is the future they promised us...
In Plagiarism and You(Tube), Hbomb says "If you consider something so obscure you can get away with stealing it, you do not respect it." Save that line for the next time someone tries to tell you that Roy Lichtenstein brought respect to comics as art.
It's since been pointed out that while Lichtenstein did copy one of Russ Heath's drawings of an airplane getting hit, the painting depicted above was actually copied off Irv Norvick, because Lichtenstein did this so many times to so many comic artists.
In Lichtenstein's defense, he was doing this in a time when comic artists frequently weren't even credited in the issues themselves. In his condemnation, he never even tried to check, nor has he made any move to pay or credit any of the comic artists who recognized their own work later on. Rather than elevating the "low art" of comics, he was widening the gap of financial success and respect even further.
The Hbomberguy of this story is art historian David Barsalou, who has now spent decades tracking down the original art and the names of the original artists used in Lichtenstein's most famous output. Here's the full flickr gallery for the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project. Frequently copied were Tony Abruzzo, Ted Galindo, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti, and dozens more Golden Age artists who aren't very well known in comics circles, let alone art history books. Many of them died in poverty. That's something that the Hero Initiative, mentioned in Russ Heath's comic above, aims to prevent.
Also, Lichtenstein didn't even paint Ben-Day dots. That's a specific thing.
Another throughline here: Plagarized work is lazy work, and lazy work shows through in the final product.
In a massive stroke of irony, the commercial artists he copied from display much higher classical technical skill than his enormous-scale paintings. There's a delicacy to the brushstrokes, a level of expressiveness, and a clear understanding of form and shadow in those tiny newsprint originals.
The changes Lichtenstein made often omitted or simplified backgrounds and text, used garish primary colors, andâlater in his workâundressed the women in the panels. Central to his "iconoclasm" was depicting comic art as even more simplistic and culturally shallow than it already was.
Copyright law offers no help to the original creatives, freelancers on exploitative short-term contracts. Russ Heath explains, âI couldnât do anything because all the characters that I did draw for comic books were, at that time, owned by the comic book company. So, if they want to sue, they could sue and have a legitimate reason to sue. But they wouldnât make enough to bother having a suit.â Most of the writers ripped off by Somerton, too, were on contracts which meant they do not have the rights to their own work.
Art historians are correct that Roy Lichtenstein's work raises interesting questions about mass reproduction, parody, and the border between "commercial" and "high" art. The answers to those questions, however, are not flattering to the art world at all.
Remember if youâre out at a store and someone says âThis is a robberyâ you can say âno itâs notâ and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .
You can not just say this without dropping the whole story
Ok so,
My dads coworker is at the front and this man comes Up and hands him a document.
The coworker took a Look at the document and while he couldn't read the things written by Hand, because he wasn't wearing his glases, he did notice the Logo of a different Bank so he's like:
"Oh, sorry sir you can't do that here! You have to go to the other Bank for this :)"
The man, visibly confused leaves, but dosen't take the document with him.
The coworker, now just as confused as the Guy actually Takes Out his glases and reads the hand written part:
This is a robbery
Can you imagine trying to rob a god damn bank and the teller just cheerfully tells you to go rob the competition instead
I worked as a bank teller for several years and a few things you should know, bank robberies happen far more frequently than you might think and they come in waves. When a bank gets robbed a notification with photos goes to all banks in the area to be on the lookout. And there are two kinds of robbery, the pass the note and the takeover (what you see in movies).
So our branch had had a big takeover robbery as well as a note one. We also had a teller that had transferred to our branch after having been through a robbery. She was sweet as apple pie, hair up to the ceiling, southern lady who had just been through multiple robberies.
A guy comes in and hands her a folded note. Her immediate thought was âthis guy needs to learn you donât hand bank tellers notes. I am just not going to read that.â So how the conversation goes:
Her: how can I help you today?
Him: Iâm here to get money
Her: great *hands him a withdrawal slip*
Him: all the information is on the paper
Her: to process the transaction I need you to put it on my piece of paper
SO HE FILLS OUT A WITHDRAWAL SLIP. Meanwhile another coworker is looking at her latest robbery notification email thinking the guy at the window looks a lot like him but the teller is calm and seems to be following standard transaction.
Back at the window the teller notices his name on the withdrawal slip doesnât match the name on the account so she asks for his ID. He once again tells her all the relevant info is on the folded note but also gives her his ID and says it is his dadâs account. She tells him he will need a check from his dad to get cash. He grabs the note and leaves.
ONE HOUR LATER
Two new robbery notifications hit our emails, both branches within a mile. It is our guy. Teller goes over to the manager and sheepishly informs them he was here and the time. Security department is notified as are local police and the FBI. The FBI comes over believing that these poor tellers had been robbed for the 3rd time in a month and take her statement. She is completely embarrassed telling them how everything went down and he kept signaling to the note and telling her to read it but she was just done.
To which this FBI agent of 40 years who has been to the scene of many bank robberies (several at this branch in recent weeks) says: Ok. Let me see if I got this right, he came in fully intending to rob you. He gave you the note and you justâŚrefused to read it? So he left and went to the bank literally across the street, handed them the exact same note, and they just handed him five grand? Do I have that correct?â
Her: I am so embarrassed
FBI: this is best thing I have ever heard. He even handed you his ID! Holy-
Her: I feel so dumb!
FBI: donât! This is the best thing I have ever heard. This is going to be in training courses. (He sat there giddy for at least 5 more minutes)
I have a similar story from my friend Fred, who is a great human and I like him lots.
He was working at a 7-11 that got robbed a lot, working nights. And he was bored and read though his entire contract and learned if you're shot at work you get $200,000. Also, he hated his boss and the job.
So when a guy came in to rob him at gunpoint he got excited and was able to hatch the plan he had been pondering while dealing with a Shitty Boring Job.
"Dude. Shoot me in the leg. Right here- it'll go through and not hit anything vital and I'll be able to quit this fucking job. I'll give you fifty fucking grand to shoot me in the leg then you can take everything in the register."
This ended with him chasing the weeping attempted burglar out of his store screaming "SHOOT ME YOU FUCKING COWARD I WANT THE MONEY".
@rmilkies
One of my uncles was a branch manager at a local bank when I was a kid. His branch had the dubious honor of being one of- if not the- most robbed bank in the area. There was a bullet hole in the wall behind his desk where he'd been shot at once.
One day, this guy came in and announced he was there to rob the place. This man was smoking a cigar with one hand and had a gun in the other.
My uncle pointed at the "No Smoking" sign and told him in no uncertain terms, "Put that cigar out, or finish it outside first."
This guy, bless his heart, went back outside to finish his cigar.
My uncle locked the door behind him and waited for the cops to show up.
This is what I like to call the Bugs Bunny Deescalation Strategy
Lancer comm wip depicting some boarding actions
Really like the art. The sleek, curvy (yet still tanky thanks to the proportions) and colorful chassis cutting through the boxier, industrial olive drab mech with sparks and shrapnel everywhere. Love all the detail and use of color, one of the more original looks for a chain sword as well.Â

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Lets Talk About Battletech
Felt like gushing about the one sci-fi series that I have always nerded out over, so lets talk about big stompy robot and one of the last bastions of the real-robot mecha sub-genre in this cyberpunk world we now live in. Â
My introduction to Battletech was the Animated series that aired for one season in 1994. It was far from the best cartoon, mostly serving as a meme generator for the current fandom. Exo-Squad was on their second season by that time and had superior animation and story telling but there was something about Battletech that kept me and my friends talking about it. That something was the Battletech universes itself. As flawed as the cartoon was, it did a great job summing up the Inner Sphere in itâs 60 second intro. The show leaves out a lot but if itâs mission was a simple introduction, sampler to the much broader Battletech Universe, mission accomplished.
After the cartoon ended, my buddies found the Battletech novel series at the local book store, that lead us to find the Battletech 3rd edition table top game and in 1995, Activsion published MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. After that, I was unapologetic Battletech nerd.
What was it that made me fall in love with the game? Allot of little things. The âMechs that took center stage in Battletech had wight, they looked and felt like combat machines. Each Battlemech looks purpose built for war, walking weapon platforms that would crush foes under foot given the chance. The stories themselves are not award winning but most are relatable. Each conflict has petty beginning and costly consequences. Few things are black and white, war itself was the enemy but was also celebrated. Each character had their own self serving motivations rather than some altruistic idea, be it seeking honor and glory or avenging their home planet lost to conflict. It wasnât ultra-bleak like 40K but it was acknowledging there is little black and white in war, just allot of gray. You are piloting a towering killing machine and winning sometimes means just getting back alive after you run out of ammo, your armor has been shredded and the other mechs are hunting you down.
As with any community built around a war game, you do run into occasional jerks you need to block but I found most of my interaction with fellow Battletech fans to be good ones. Some of my most cherish from my childhood was playing the table top with my school yard friends or talking about that stupid cartoon. Made new friends simple sharing Battletech fan art and still enjoy talking about Battlemechs with my current social group when I can. Â
Coming full circle; If that stupid, stupid cartoon can teach us anything, donât be petty. Itâs far easier to make enemies than allies and in this world of gray, do the right thing when you can⌠that and Nicolai Malthus was an ass... sorry Jade Falcon fans but you know why heâs the meme.Â
My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.
Our world.