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This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.

The torrent has ended. We lost Crewman Willikers in the wash. He had tied himself to the helm, and tried to keep course. We lost the wheel too; but the carpenter had a spare; and was able to patch it up. On the other hand he's not so sure of the patch to the hull, and wants us to find port. The sails will need patching, but for the most part the ship is sound.

The navigator says we're more than 200 off course; but the damn man wont provide any units. Could be parsecs for all I know. or Milliliters. or Pascals. bastard.

where's the damn grog?

Day 7 has disappeared in a fog. Not sure if fog is real, or due to too much Grog.

Day 8 - the rain has penetrated through our skins and soaked every last crewmember. some have even taken additional time in the bilge to get away from the relentless downpour. the winds have slacked off, but without the stars to navigate by it is hopeless to maintain a heading.

Don't use a skillet for your bacon, use your oven! In my case 225 degrees Celsius for about 10 minutes results in perfectly crisp bacon simmering in its own fat.

I use a sheet pan in the middle of the oven, two layers of baking paper under the bacon, and leave room for some half-baked small baguettes that I add when the remaining time is right.

Take it all out, slice the baguettes, put on bacon, put on cheese (maybe some cheddar slices) = simple and quick filling hot bacon & cheese sandwich.

Next time I do this I'll try wrapping the paper around the bacon to minimize any grease splatter. I might have to add a bit more baking time to get it as crisp since it's loosely covered.

Ovens are also great for making super-crisp sausages but I've only tried it with the thick kind that are about 3cm or 1 and 1/2 inches across: bake them until they rupture! Exploded sausages taste a lot better but be careful as they're really hot.

As many might know SoylentNews resides on http://li694-22.members.linode.com/¹ and because of this some people were talking and joking about using li694-22 as a new name. It's a cool name, I was tempted myself! Perhaps an even "weirder" inside joke than http//:/..org :)

No need to be tempted any more; a Mr. Watt (not me!) of Washington bought it and pointed it at SoylentNews¹ :)

¹ naturally your cookies are in different jars

Edit: just to practice safe surfing don't log in through redirection or move your cookies manually or anything like that. Not that I would think anything bad would happen in this case but one would never know until it was too late (maybe Mr. Watt suddenly develops an appetite for collecting low UID accounts).

Since I've moderated and can't be bothered to log out I'll write some thoughts here for my own interest. By no means is this meant to be any kind of complete answer or anything of the sort, just some idle thoughts/speculation.

0.a. It is an entirely unknown failure mode that is sudden and immediately cripples everything. Very unlikely.
0.b. It is an entirely unknown phenomenon that is sudden and immediately cripples everything. Extremely unlikely but not zero.
0.c. A confluence of simultaneous and lasting shoddy operation and systems malfunction in two culturally different countries (Malaysia and Viet Nam). This one is hard to judge; I wouldn't think so on behalf of Viet Nam but they hadn't yet taken airspace control/responsibility for the plane and might not have paid much if any attention to it. Malaysia is fully able to fuck anything up beyond rational belief (*cough* bigoted apartheid-style legislation on the use of a word *cough*) but even so Viet Nam should still have the radar records and be fully able to find anything if there in fact was a more normal disaster.

I guess the simplest ad hoc would be 0.b. with some kind of unusual simultaneous failure of radar range for whatever reason: the signal would then simply disappear giving no clues about anything. If this was caused by some freak meteorological event local to the aircraft it might explain the total lack of everything except debris which might be found later. It might not have to last all that long if the electronics in the plane are knocked out before any remaining related blips on now-functioning radars disappear among the noise. Still extremely unlikely. Inverted clear sky sprite plasma bolts (no such thing is known to exist) or time-space warp bubbles (sorry no link to the paper handy and no such thing is known to exist) or alians!!1 (etc.) or whatever, but who knows.

1. Whether or not some terrorist organization claims responsibility doesn't mean much. Some YKW (You Know Who) organizations claim just about everything or are created solely to claim credit for anything new (like happened for the attacks in Oslo before those claims were discredited) and all it takes for the opposite to happen are a few things:
1.a.1. Whoever did it has discovered and understood the meaning of tactics, and the incident while public in nature is also long term in nature (there are several possibilities here, I'm not comfortable with spelling it out). Somewhat likely.
1.a.2. Whoever responsible simply (and without any deeper thought) doesn't want to draw attention to something that is still ongoing. Fairly likely.

and

1.b.1. For whatever reason(s) the incident fails to trigger knee-jerk claims. Doing something to a flight from a YKW nation to China should naturally avoid most if not all such attention because China is kind of outside the horizon of most YKW despite the recent YKW attacks both in Beijing and western China. Not too unlikely.
1.b.2. Someone figured it was stupid and counterproductive to make bullshit claims and has the clout to stop those who still don't get it. Very unlikely but not impossible.

For a 1.a.2. that passes 1.b.1 it seems very likely that some YKW "Chinese" did this to simply kill as many Chinese as possible. Such YKW "Chinese" aren't known to be big on making public statements of responsibility, in fact they seldom say anything at all (probably it makes them very easy to catch and kill) so that fits.

Oil slicks don't mean much on their own but are often the first thing spotted. If nothing else is spotted (lots of debris floats for a fairly long time) then 0.b. increases.

Sometimes there isn't an answer.

Betteridge be damned: which is better?.

I think I'll keep the CC Squad as protection and use the BRG as a grenade! I also have a spare Barrel of Uber Robots but I'm not sure what their stats are.

* SNQ is short for "Soylent News Question"

So lovely to be back!!! Yes that's how it feels isn't it?

Had two UIDs on that other site, one relatively ancient forgotten one and one mostly unused as I joined the AC horde :)

But now... now home has been rebuilt! Awesome. Way back then I don't think I truly appreciated what was available --and I'm probably not the only one this applies to-- but now that we have lost it we have gained more so this time I'll try to make better use of it.

Not that I'll be prolific or anything like that but I'll scamper about once in a while *crams stuff into 255 char bio*.

Day 5, the sky has broken open and begun to rain upon the vessel. So far we have sent the cabin boy down to pump the bilge.

Crew managed to trade Spam for rum before we left port;

First mate was shanked for whistling showtunes on deck.