Today I learned +

[Ruin Explorer]

I always saw it as virtual doll fashion play.

Dolly dress-up is more about transmog than character/avatar creation in most cases, I'd say.

Like, the endgame of a lot of games, whether it's Dark Souls/Elden Ring, various MMORPGs or whatever, is fashion. And that's absolutely got significant elements of dolly dress-up. But that's at like at least 45 degrees off from character/avatar creation in most, because the character/avatar creation typically doesn't include their outfit.

Where it does include the outfit, then yeah.

 

[trappedslider]

This plane is actually a Lockheed M-21, a significantly less famous cousin in the Blackbird family.

An easy way to tell the difference is that mysterious third engine-looking contraption on its back. It's not an engine -- it's a drone! Only two M-21s were made, and they were designed by Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works to carry the D-21 drone. The idea was to launch the drone, which was equipped with a camera, off the back of the plane to fly over Soviet territory during the Cold War. The M-21 would turn around before it crossed the border, while the D-21 would keep going. That would technically fulfil the United States' promises not to pilot aircraft over the USSR, since the drone had no pilot, while still giving American intelligence photo surveillance of the region.

The program is considered a failure. This M-21 is the only remaining example, as the other plane crashed during testing, killing one of the crew members. A handful of D-21s were flown by Boeing B-52s, but ultimately the drone was shelved in favor of other technology.

 

[Bohandas]

This plane is actually a Lockheed M-21, a significantly less famous cousin in the Blackbird family.

An easy way to tell the difference is that mysterious third engine-looking contraption on its back. It's not an engine -- it's a drone! Only two M-21s were made, and they were designed by Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works to carry the D-21 drone. The idea was to launch the drone, which was equipped with a camera, off the back of the plane to fly over Soviet territory during the Cold War. The M-21 would turn around before it crossed the border, while the D-21 would keep going. That would technically fulfil the United States' promises not to pilot aircraft over the USSR, since the drone had no pilot, while still giving American intelligence photo surveillance of the region.

The program is considered a failure. This M-21 is the only remaining example, as the other plane crashed during testing, killing one of the crew members. A handful of D-21s were flown by Boeing B-52s, but ultimately the drone was shelved in favor of other technology.

Fun fact. Speaking of Cold War era spy drones, a couple decades ago the army decalssified some documents revealing that the thing that crashed at Roswell was an experimental unmanned spy device they had been testing at a nearby military base

 

[Ryujin]

This plane is actually a Lockheed M-21, a significantly less famous cousin in the Blackbird family.

An easy way to tell the difference is that mysterious third engine-looking contraption on its back. It's not an engine -- it's a drone! Only two M-21s were made, and they were designed by Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works to carry the D-21 drone. The idea was to launch the drone, which was equipped with a camera, off the back of the plane to fly over Soviet territory during the Cold War. The M-21 would turn around before it crossed the border, while the D-21 would keep going. That would technically fulfil the United States' promises not to pilot aircraft over the USSR, since the drone had no pilot, while still giving American intelligence photo surveillance of the region.

The program is considered a failure. This M-21 is the only remaining example, as the other plane crashed during testing, killing one of the crew members. A handful of D-21s were flown by Boeing B-52s, but ultimately the drone was shelved in favor of other technology.

The D21 reminds me of a MiG 21, from that angle.

 

[Mad_Jack]

the army decalssified some documents

Where the hell were they storing these documents that they needed to be decalcified? lol

 

[Ulfgeir]

Where the hell were they storing these documents that they needed to be decalcified? lol

Maybe they are taking the expression "written in stone" a bit to literal..

 

[Dioltach]

Maybe they are taking the expression "written in stone" a bit to literal..

Or they were just wiping the slate clean.

 

[MoonSong]

Today I learned, more like today I remembered. In 2002, Make-a-wish chose a kid named Tyler who had a severe liver cancer which had already ruptured and had a bad prognosis. Tyler's wish was to design his own Yu-Gi-Oh card. Manga author Kazuki Takshashi himself drew the art.

Only one copy was made. This is already more or less well-known trivia, but Tyler's eventual fate is never ever mentioned. This is what I learned: he managed to beat the odds. He is in his thirties now and had the card auctioned to help pay for his first home. Yugituber Cimoo helped to make the transaction possible.

Other make-a-wish wishes involved feeding the homeless (which had to get reduced to feeding the homeless in one city, one time), getting tons of get well cards (they ended up filling a big warehouse), and hunt a particular bear. (And after make-a-wish stopped ranting hunting related wishes, a new charity, Hunt of a Lifetime, was born to fill the void. Just how many gravely ill kids with hunting experience are there?)

Fun fact. Speaking of Cold War era spy drones, a couple decades ago the army decalssified some documents revealing that the thing that crashed at Roswell was an experimental unmanned spy device they had been testing at a nearby military base

In general, I'm very skeptical of ufo as alien vessels and close encounters. It feels weird to me to accept them at face value because they require 'basically magic' levels of technology to be viable in the face of relativity and how insanely huge space is.

 

[TheSword]

Today I learned that you can’t use a reaction to cast a spell on your turn and cast another if both use a spell slot. For instance if you move and provoke an attack of opportunity, using shield to deflect that attack, you can’t then cast a leveled spell.

 

[jian]

This is not a today thing, but something I learned about a week ago.

I’d vaguely heard of the Great Kanto Earthquake in manga etc before, but only read up on it last week. In case you don’t know, the GKE was a massive earthquake which destroyed most of Tokyo and killed 100k people back in 1923. It was generationally traumatic and is partly accounted an influence in making Imperial Japan more nationalist and fascist at that point.

Which is bad enough, and quite a lot of trauma for any nation to process, but I hadn’t known about what happened afterwards, which was when mobs murdered 10k people over the next 6 months. The victims were generally outsiders such as ethnic Koreans (some of whom had been brought over as slave labourers), trade unionists, and suffragettes. The mobs were under the mistaken impression in some cases that the victims had poisoned wells or even caused the earthquake. This time is generally known as the Great Kanto Massacre.

The GKM also had a profound effect on Japanese culture and society along with the GKE - not only can terrible events outside your control destroy your world, your neighbours can then become barbaric monsters at the drop of a hat afterwards. This explains why there’s such emphasis on accurate information after natural disasters in Japan, and probably contributed to the formation of a collectivist culture where nobody rocks the boat if at all possible.

An exercise to the reader might be to compare this to the effect of the Wall Street crash in 1929 on America and how that shaped the individualist culture of that country.