All aboard the Alabama shit train!

Fact: The only thing that smells worse than your poop is tons of other people's poop. If you don't believe me, take a road trip to the town of Parrish, Alabama. They'll back me up on this one: According to the Associated Press, the citizens of Parrish were forced to endure the stench pouring off a train full of  sewer sludge from New York and New Jersey for close to two months.

It's not unusual for trains full of human waste to pass through the town of 982 people: there's a landfill complex that treats and disposes of the excrement another 20 miles further down the track. Having the train stop in town to share its intoxicating perfume for two months? That's both unreasonable and unusual. It seems that another county in Alabama blocked the train's passage, making it impossible for it to reach its final destination. So, there it sat in Parrish: like a man in the bathroom after a large, questionable meal, full of poop, making everything terrible for everyone. NPR states that the train was stopped near a local park. The odor coming off of it was so bad that little league games had to be cancelled.

After two months of having to put up with the stench ruining the lives of everyone in the town, in mid-April, the Mayor of Parrish was finally able to tell her constituents that it was finally moving on. The town's administration will be looking into passing a series of by-laws to keep similar incidents from happening again.

This is a terrible/fun story, but there's a big issue behind it: Alabama is a state without a lot of money. A combination of the state's loose-goose zoning laws and cheap land, make it an attractive place to set up businesses that require massive amounts of acreage to operate: like a landfill, for example. With it being illegal to dump raw sewage into the ocean, shipping it out to be disposed of is pretty appealing to regions that have the money to afford it.

It's just another example of affluent taking advantage of the poor. Be it a country, city or a person, where there's a lot of money involved, someone's going to get screwed.

Image via Wikipedia Commons

Hope Larson's "All Summer Long," lively YA graphic novel about tween friendships, rock and roll, and being yourself

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Chiefs of U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps & Air Force say that transgender soldiers aren't a problem

Hey, remember few weeks back when The Trump Administration, with its dickery engines revved up to 126%, declared that transgendered personnel would no longer be in welcome in the United States military? One of their bullshit excuses for why this should be the case was that, apparently, transgendered individuals were bad for unit cohesion and terrible for morale. Well, the heads of all four branches of the American military have all gone out of their way, on the record, to say that this simply is not the case.

From the Military Times:

Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, D-N.Y., as she had with the top military leaders of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps when they appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee for their budget hearings, used the opportunity to question Goldfein as to whether he was aware of any “issues of unit cohesion, disciplinary problems or issues of morale resulting from open transgender service.”

“In the last two weeks Gen. [Mark] Milley, Gen. [Robert] Neller, and Adm. [John] Richardson have told me that they have seen zero reports of issues of cohesion, discipline, morale as a result of open transgender service in their respective service branches,” Gillibrand said, referring to the chiefs of staff of the Army, Marine Corps and Navy, respectively.

Bravo Zulu.

The Military Times goes on to say that on Tuesday, the Air Force's top officer, Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein, told Congress that he hadn't heard any reports of issues in the ranks surrounding transgendered personnel and, of those he spoke with, he noted a “commitment to serve by each of them.” This is a hell of a thing: four career officers at the pinnacle of their careers all going to bat for the men and women that serve under them. Any of the four officers could have played politics, and thrown their transgendered troops under Trump and Secretary of Defense Mattis's shitty, bigoted short bus.

I guess at the end of the day soldiering, as they say, isn't about fighting for your country--it's about taking care of the soldier next to you.

Image via United States European Command, Spc. Bethany L. Little, 40th Public Affairs Detachment

A video game that simulates building custom PCs

"PC Building Simulator" is ... kind of what the name suggests, yes? A sim in which one builds PCs.

I admit I'm intrigued. Sort of? As this review at Motherboard notes, the game has a "career" mode where you play the role of someone who inherits your uncle's PC-repair business, and is given increasingly complicated tasks ...

As you can see, my idiot uncle sold this poor guy a PC but forgot to apply thermal paste to the CPU. For this job, I had to open the PC, unplug the CPU fan, apply thermal paste, and then put the CPU fan back in. To make sure that the computer is working properly, I also had to install and run 3DMark, a real-life piece of software that tests a computer's performance by running 3D graphics demos.

One of the cooler things about PC Building Simulator is that it uses a lot of real brands. Some parts are fake, I'm assuming, because the developers couldn't get the necessary licensing deals. For example, PC Building Simulator seems to take place in some kind of utopian alternate dimension where everyone uses an operating system called Omega, which I'm assuming is a Linux distro that magically runs all PC games. But there are also a lot of real parts. I installed real EVGA GPUs and even worked on the Master Cooler brand PC case I have at home.

This is all fine, but I realized that PC Building Simulator really wasn't fucking around when it actually demanded I sit through the entire 3DMark test before I could finish the job. Poor DR Waterman only got an average 8 frames per second, but the PC was working now so it's not my problem. Besides, since this job is the repair shop's fuckup, I'm not even going to get paid for my time here. Thanks a lot, uncle Tim.

The only question I have is: Can you play a simulated version of "PC Building Simulator" on one of the PCs you build inside the game?