Out in the Open: 'I was blocked by the President of the United States on Twitter'

If Trump was a private citizen, this wouldn't matter. But he isn't a private citizen. He's currently the POTUS.

Some folks have called foul, citing the First Amendment. Thing is, the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law", and Congress is the Legislature, not the Executive. Does the First Amendment apply?

Just bitching, don't mind me.

• When converting from Yuku Tapatalk has inconsistently mangled large story posts in fora like "The Legendary".  Extra paragraph breaks, semirandom HTML entity substitutions, universal removal of apostrophes, things like that.  This isn't an artifact of the scrape, as I've had to go several times to the original posts and retrieve their pre-mangled contents.  What's especially puzzling are the posts that didn't get screwed up -- I can't figure out any pattern or logic behind what got garbled and what didn't, and why any given post was subject to a particular set of garbling.
  

• I just noticed that we have several threads in the Introductions forum that were created by established members who still have accounts, and yet their first posts -- and only the first posts -- are attributed to "Guest".  I've manually fixed a couple here already, but I'll have to check them all out tonight after work.  Again, this is not an artifact of the scrape or my transfer code -- you can go right to Crapatalk and see the misattributions.  What worries me is how many other threads in other fora might also suffer from this. (ETA: A quick SQL query revealed about 825 posts attributed to "Guest"; I should see how many threads share that attribution. I expect, though, that a good chunk of the Guest posts were originally from Logan Darklighter, who as I noted in another thread appears to have nuked his account some time in the past few months.)
  

The date of the epilogue at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was last Friday.  (I actually discovered/realized this a few days ago, but I kept forgetting to mention it.)

So li'l Albus Severus will be finishing his first week of Hogwarts today.

... as I finished up importing the threads from the Legendary forum, that long-time forum member Logan Darklighter appears to have not only left the forums, but deleted his board membership at some point before the scrape, such that all his posts are now attributed to "Guest".

This bothers me greatly, as I considered him a a friend of long standing, even though we disagreed on political issues, and it was political issues surrounding the election of Trump that apparently convinced him to quietly abandon the forums.  I had noticed his silence, and said nothing as I felt that at some point he would return of his own volition, but I regret that I was wrong.  I should have reached out to him.

I can mark a particular forum as read, but I can't seem to mark the site as a whole as read. When I try to do that, I get this error:

"Authorization code mismatch. Are you accessing this function correctly? Please go back and try again."

Heads up! Chance to see northern lights on Wednesday night

TL;DR: There's a coronal mass ejection on the way, expected to hit "late on Sept. 6 and into Sept. 7". The ejection is strong enough that aurora might be visible in southern Canada and northern USA. "For the best chance to see the lights, head out to a dark location and look north. You can try photographing them with a DSLR on a tripod by taking a 15- to 20-second exposure with the focus set on infinity or a distant object."

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center has a 30-minute aurora forecast.--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Hi, this is a serious post, there is no fiction or joking in it.  BTW I am 39 and I have been researching this for over 2 decades...

I have discovered what could be termed "handwavium", which is to say I have as a back yard type, discovered something revolutionary that could lead to the technology required to meet and exceed Fenspace etc..., which is strange because that's almost never how big important discoveries are made except for most of them of course.  Ok, that was a joke.

So here is the problem, I have not got the money or skills to get this technology to the level where it can take us to the stars, or other planets, at least not yet.

And I am a bit unsure about asking for help from people who might have more interest in suppressing/stealing this technology, or others who might be too closed minded to look, or feel it threatens their current beliefs.

So anyway the strange part is that handwavium is very appropriate as a term as the "substance" that I have found how to generate/effect for want of a better word (much in the sense that electrical generators generate the substance electricity) is currently only detected by, primarily hands.

So WTF am i talking about?

Ok, so I started researching claims of Antigravity and Free Energy, and I concluded that there really was something to it, so then I went about trying to understand it, at first looking for a "loop hole" or pulling one's self up by your own boot straps, a logical way to cheat physics.  Alas, not only do such attempts only seem to trick the mind, but when I looked for correlations in the claims that I overall accepted as being true I did not see indications of such methods, rather I saw something different that I didn't want to find, that there was a substance in the background of space, a sub quantum field, an aether, or a technologically derived version of "chi" or "orgone".

Ok, so I know how this sounds, the skeptic in the back of my head hears all this too, but please continue reading...

So after all together too damn long, embarrassingly long, I made a strange coil that I could feel emanate this curious flow of "something",  call it aether, chi, orgone or "handwavium", i was able to verify that it was not anything conventional, for one it would continue for about 10 minutes after I stopped applying power to this unusual coil.

So since then, I have managed to get some strange results and significantly improve the degree of this "stuff" which I can generate/effect/disturb.

I have found that over 90% of people can feel this energy.

So here is the question, if someone makes a discovery, can reasonably prove it (in the sense that while the technology to detect this "stuff" might not have been readily identified/invented or be ubiquitous, human sense can detect it to a degree that, done well, leaves no doubt as to the reality of this "stuff"), and it has the promise of being vastly revolutionary...

Will anyone care?

As it says in the fenspace wiki (I have not read the books) Scientists studied it. Governments feared it. The rest of the world didn’t care all that much.

In short Governments and the public at large aren't going to be interested in a helpful manner.

And respected scientists are too busy being respected than to embrace heretical ideas that breach the current laws of physics, also the Government and current financial interests influence them...

So who, except for the lone inventor gives a stuff?

Do you, my fellow sci-fi nerds?  Or are your subscriptions to skeptic magazine on lifetime subscription?

I can prove my modest yet extraordinary claims, but even if proven, who cares to actually put in the effort needed to bring this seed of a new realm of technology into reality?

...I bothered to bring 15 years' worth of support and questions for a completely different forum system over here.

Oh well, I guess "historical purposes" is as good a reason as any.

Member of Aquaman film crew stabbed outside St. John's bar after wrap party

I didn't even know they were shooting any footage for Aquaman in Newfoundland...--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012