Also, when they're recording the audio, they're usually not just reading through the whole script in one go
They're probably doing multiple takes of most of the lines, changing little things until they get the take that feels right
So you'd end up with a bunch of choppy little cuts instead of a nice long continuous shot of the VA doing their thing in a recording booth like OP is probably imagining
That same week
I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal
We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn't killed everyone while we were gone.
It probably depends on the music festival you're going to but there was one I used to go to every year
It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.
And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I'm not saying that that's a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it's more than a lot of people normally do.
I think @southsamurai@sh.itjust.works pretty much hit the nail on the head, but just to sort of reiterate
Wearing "women's" clothes (I always liked the Suzy/Eddie Izzard quote "They're not women's clothes, they're my clothes. I bought them") doesn't necessarily make you gay or trans or anything, it just means you're wearing women's clothes.
If you're comfortable identifying as a man, and you're attracted to women, all that means is you're a straight male cross-dresser or "transvestite" (I believe some people find the term transvestite offensive, others have no problem at all with it. I'm not a cross-dresser myself so I won't weigh in on that debate) or perhaps a femboy. It could be that you just like wearing women's clothing and there's not much more to it than that. It could be some sort of kink/fetish thing, it could just be that you find it comfortable or feel cute, or maybe you just think it's fun and silly.
And you could probably go down some pretty deep rabbit holes trying to unpack why you like it. There's probably as many reasons for it as there are people who enjoy cross-dressing. But unless it's really causing you severe emotional distress not knowing, you can always just take a page from Popeye the Sailor and say "I yam what I yam an' that's all that I yam"
Or it could be that you have some sort of gender dysphoria, and this is your way of working it out and coming to terms with that. In which case you might figure out at some point that you identify as a woman or some flavor of non-binary.
But at the end of the day, clothes are just clothes, and the person wearing them is just a person. I don't think it's worth getting too hung-up about putting labels on things, go ahead and try some different labels out for yourself, maybe you'll find something that sticks, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line
From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There's a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there's always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.
From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we're relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it "Phase II") which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.
What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates
An "uncertainty radius" or "confidence factor" which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within
A "confidence percentage" which is how confident the system is in that location (I've literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)
So what it ends up looking like is something like "90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W" (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it's definitely not where I work)
I've seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I've seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.
My agency's policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we're unable to verify that location any further
And if they're in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they'll probably see you when they get out there. If you're in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that's really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.
That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we're lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you're in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.
So we always try to verify the location, and we can't, as my callers like to put it "just GPS your phone"
New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you've filled that out.
Once you hang up with us, that's usually pretty much it, we're not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.
We also don't get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.
If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.
We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.
Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we're able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that's not always super useful, people move and don't update their address, are on someone else's plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it's up to date) property records, etc.
So if we get a call that's just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we're using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.
We're probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.
If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we're sending the right resources.
If they stop talking to us while we're on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it's the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.
If it's just an open line, we'll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don't we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don't pick up we just kind of move on and it's in the hands of the police to do something about it.
I've always been a cheap sunglasses guy, I buy whatever brand they're selling at whatever store I happen to be at when I need sunglasses. I usually go through a couple pairs of them a year, they get lost or broken, or the lenses get all scratched up.
Arguably I could be more careful with them, but $20 a couple times a year for something I use almost every single day seems more than worth it to me.
One time I came across a good deal on a pair of Oakley's, and I figured I'd treat myself. IIRC they were a return at an REI garage sale, they looked brand new and the tag said they were just returned because the original customer did like them or they fit poorly or something.
It was a relatively cheap model of Oakleys to begin with, and with the discount I think they came out to like $60, which still made them the most expensive pair of sunglasses I've ever owned.
I liked them, I don't think they were in any particular way better than my usual cheap sunglasses.
And about 3 days later I found out that if you drop them and someone accidentally steps on them before you pick them up, they absolutely break the same way a cheap pair of sunglasses would.
So no more fancy sunglasses for me.
If I have to pick only one, I'm going to go with modern crumple zones
But man, I do wish we had some kind of magical smart metal that could be as rigid as an old car for low speed collisions, but still crumple for more serious impacts.
Because when you drive an old shitbox like I do, pretty much any damage is enough to total it, and having to get a new car really sucks when the accident was minor enough that no one was going to get hurt anyway.
Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn't actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it's difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go
But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go
I remember shortly after the switch launched, my friends had gotten one, and when I was over their house one day I asked if they had licked one of the cartridges yet.
One of them said no, of course not. It didn't seem like he was going to grant a request to taste one, so I didn't press the issue.
A few minutes later he walked out of the room for something, and his wife, who is definitely much more of my partner-in-crime when it comes to dumb ideas, got a little bit of a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.
I of course said yes, and tasted their Breath of the Wild cartridge.
I asked if she had tried it when her husband wasn't looking, and of course she had.
I'm pretty sure there are two kinds of people in this world, those who, on being told about the bitter coating on the cartridges have to test it out themselves to satisfy their curiosity.
And those who think the whole idea is gross and it never crosses their mind to test it for themselves.
And I think the two types tend to end up marrying each other, those two did, and my own wife has not yet licked any of our switch cartridges despite having ample opportunity to do so.
As much as I'm happy to blame boomers
The youngest boomers are in their 60s now, not too many of them are out working as any kind of field agent. Most of those assholes out there now are Gen X, Millennials, or even Gen Z.
There have been some changes under this administration, and I don't know what the current "rules" are (as if they care about following rules anyway) but I know at one point there was actually a mandatory retirement age for federal LEOs, and I'm pretty sure it was at about 55 or 60, so under those old rules you couldn't be an ice agent as a boomer. Some probably hung around in admin positions and such, and since the rule changes I'm sure a couple have come out of retirement, but I'm pretty confident that that's a vast minority.
The issues with not questioning authority, gullibility, tech-illiteracy, etc. remain though.
I have a 6 year old malinois (possibly a mix, she didn't come with paperwork)
When we got her, she was crate trained, never gave us any issues going into the crate, happily went into it and let us close the door and leave. My wife and I work different schedules, so normally she was only in there for maybe about 4 hours, if it was much longer than that we always made arrangements for her to stay with my parents or at least to have someone stop by to walk her.
However, she's too smart for her own good, and at some point she figured out that she could escape the crate, and there was no putting that cat back in the bag. No matter how we tried to secure the crate she figured out a way to squeeze out. We got worried that she'd hurt herself trying to get out so we started leaving her loose.
And at first everything was fine, she maybe got into the trash a couple times but overall we had a few good years of her being loose by herself in the house without any major issues. After a few months of having free reign of the house she never really went into the crate anymore and found other "den" areas around the house, so we packed up the crate.
Lately though, she's been getting bolder, stealing things off the counter (she pulled the whole bread box down the other day,) she got into a bottle of vitamins (that was a fun vet bill) etc.
She's not being destructive otherwise, not chewing up the furniture or anything, she doesn't even always eat or try to open any food and such that she steals (I came home to a fully sealed bag of tortillas on the bed the other day, she absolutely could have torn that open if she really wanted to)
And she does get a lot of walks and playtime, nothing has really changed in our routine that I can think of that would account for this change. It feels a lot like she just let the intrusive thoughts win one day to steal something from the counter and it's just snowballed from there.
Right now we're doing what we can to secure anything that seems like it might be tempting to her or that we're especially worried about her getting into before we leave, and we're providing her with some longer-lasting puzzle toys and treats to distract her when we leave.
So far that seems to be working, I feel like as long as we can keep her busy for the first 20 minutes or so after we leave, we're probably ok.
But we're also considering the possibility that we may need to start crating her again in a more escape-proof crate.
So in case it comes to that I'm looking for advice from anyone who's had to do something similar.
Few years back I decided to go back to the original concept and do turnips for my Jack O'Lanterns, and what can I say, I love the little guys.
They also fit on my windowsill a lot better back when I was in a small apartment without a proper front step/porch to put them.
Sunny is a 6 year old Malinois, as her human companion I'm pretty sure I'm obligated to start off with that so you don't call her a German shepherd.
We had a chance to go camping with some friends on their property over the weekend and she did great.
The first night temperatures dropped below freezing. I'm a firm believer that there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear, and we managed to stay warm and cozy together in our tent overnight.
She got to spend almost the whole weekend off-leash, a rare treat for this suburban pup.
Her herding and guarding instincts got a bit of a workout, when some new (to her) friends arrived, she gave them a good barking-at until I caught up and greeted them, at which point Sunny saw that they were ok and immediately rolled over for belly-rubs.
The whole weekend Sunny would position herself around camp to make sure that she could see all of us, and if anyone wandered too far away from the group, she would go with them to make sure they were safe.
My friends' property is large, remote, and provides some safe natural backstops to set up a shooting range. Sunny has never been the least bit bothered by fireworks or thunder, and I'm happy to report that she showed no signs of fear at the gunshots (from a hearing-safe distance) but was a little annoyed at it disturbing her midday nap, so we cut our shooting short. I'll be getting her some hearing protection if we ever try that again.
On the ride home, my check engine light started flashing and my car went into limp mode on the highway so I pulled over and called for a tow, I've never been happier to have that premium AAA towing package. Sunny was not a fan of the tow driver strapping our car onto the truck, but again warmed right up to him. Unfortunately she was not allowed to ride in the cab with us and had to ride in the car by herself until we could catch up with our friends off the highway to transfer her into their car. She didn't seem too bothered by that and I think she appreciated the higher vantage point. She got to ride the rest of the way home with her new friends and behaved very nicely in their car while I continued with the tow truck.
After an exciting weekend of hiking, meeting new friends, and new experiences, she spent most of the next day in our bed catching up on some missed naps, and I got to pay for new spark plugs and ignition coils.
My wife worked at a higher end kitchen store for a long time, and got to test out a whole lot of different brands of kitchen gadgets and such, and made really good use of her employee discount
In the end, her recommendation is to basically go with Breville for everything but stand mixers (go with KitchenAid) and blenders (go Vitamix)
So we have a Breville hand mixer. This was actually one of the last things she picked up before leaving that job, and it was at my request, she kind of didn't see the point of it since we already had the stand mixer, and an immersion blender, and honestly just about everything else you could want, but now that we've had it I've made a convert of her. It gets regular use and abuse and it's still going strong probably almost a decade later
It's got a light that shines into the bowl, which doesn't seem like it should be a big deal but it's actually really nice to have, it's got plenty of power but is also probably the quietest mixer I've ever used, it comes with the usual beaters, whisks, and dough hooks, and its got a little storage container in clips onto so that the attachments are always there with it and you don't have to go looking through your drawers for them when you need them.
The silicone on my beaters is starting to look a little worse for wear, but I don't think that's unreasonable given how long we've had it, and I'm pretty sure I can order new ones from Breville still if I wanted to.