Last night I had a dream I woke up to find that my house had been turned into a Smart House with every wall being a digital screen including the roof so I could see it even laying on bed and the Siri voice said “Don’t worry. You are perfectly safe in your Apple Smart Home™️” knowing I have a BIG phobia of intruders especially at night and it continued with “Let’s explore the neighborhood from the comfort of your home” so it opened google maps and accidentally zoomed past a shitty jpeg of the girl from The Ring standing outside my house and it said “ignore that”. woke up laughing

surely this is a good idea that doesn’t have the capacity to end real fuckin badly

Bridges aren’t supposed to have weight restrictions on them. That is, they don’t come with weight restrictions on them when they’re new. So a bridge with a weight restriction on it is a sign that something has gone wrong and the bridge does not meet current standards.

The maximum weight that a vehicle is allowed to carry on the Interstate System per federal law is 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight (with a max of 20,000 pounds per axle). That’s 40 tons. That limit applies to every inch of pavement, not just the bridges. Since this is a known cap, a new Interstate bridge will be designed to accommodate an 80,000 lb GVW load on it. You could say the bridge’s weight limit is 80,000 lb/40 tons but that doesn’t really have much meaning, because a load higher than that would be illegal to transport on public roads anyway, and the road leading up to the bridge has the same weight restriction. (In practice, the bridge doubtlessly will be designed to have a little bit of let to it just in case some idiot tries to squeak by a few hundred extra pounds.)

Now, note that that law applies to the Interstate System only, because the federal government only has a governing interest in the Interstate System (and other roads that together make up something called the National Highway System) because they partially fund it. Most long-distance roads are owned and funded by the states. The states could theoretically set lower standard weight limits and/or design bridges with lower weight limits…but in practice they don’t.

One, because all of that 80,000 lb GVW traffic on the Interstate system has to go somewhere when it exits the system.

Two, because a group called the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO, who are best known for picking the road numbers) maintains a catalog of standard components for making bridges that meet Interstate System requirements. Engineers are expensive on a per-hour basis, so if you can direct your engineer to use standard components and make a standard bridge, that’s a lot cheaper than having them design a bridge from scratch to go over the creek in Nowheresville. As a result, most new bridges meet Interstate standards and have an 80,000 lb GVW rating even if they aren’t on the Interstate system. (This is also why all new bridges kind of look the same, but we’re not worried about how boring the bridges are for the sake of this post.)

So a bridge only has an explicit weight limit if it has been damaged in some way (through failure to properly maintain it usually) or because it predates the application of Interstate System standards and the standard AASHTO bridges.

Older bridges often have other problems in addition to the weight limits: many older designs are what we call “fracture critical”, which means that if one component of the bridge fails the whole thing collapses. Modern bridge designs have redundancy designed into them so that if one beam fails the other beams will carry the load until the damaged beam can be replaced. Older bridges also often don’t meet other standards, like height (16 ft clearance) and width (12 ft per lane plus 14 ft for shoulders) requirements.

Biden isn’t advocating eliminating weight limits and letting it be a laissez-faire free-for-all where trucks can just go wherever they want. He’s advocating for replacing bridges that carry weight limits with new ones that don’t have them.

wow i got absolutely schooled thank you for all this this is really informative. i have learned so much

This is a great explanation of what the fuck Biden was talking about in his tweet. because I will freely admit that I also went “…….wtf?????” when I read it. So thank you.

Today I learned about civil engineering.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

so, when i was a kid at vbs (vacation bible school), at the very end of camp, everyone would gather around this big-ass framed picture of jesus for a group picture. and when i say "big-ass" i mean this thing was fuckin massive. and last night i got to thinking that all my mutuals and i should recreate that group picture, but instead of a big-ass jesus picture, it's just this low quality picture of bloody vinny.

here's an illustration i made for reference

a study i did because i realized idk how to draw environments at all LMAO

STOP SCROLLING THIS IS A PAINTING

https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/

If you have a 3d printer, this site has a ton of print files of different sculptures/artifacts. Not the one statue of Selene I've been looking for, but lots of others.

Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly

We Stan this San Diego Man

this

C o m e d yy

Some recent gems:

And of course there’s

#where is race war tony hawk tweet thats my fav (via @laughingfish​)

I gotchu, bro:

i’m wheezgJmf stoP

Honestly every time this thread just makes me laugh. And new additions…excellent.

So do I just like....follow...anyone? Like real people? Like the actual people and not the subject matter? That isn't like following someone to their doorstep? Why does this seem so personal???

Think of it as, you are a stray cat, and every evening I put out my garbage and you come and eat it

This garbage is now mine.

god this tickles me

(OP's tiktok here)

WAIT THIS IS FUNNY

[video description:

a person is hunched over, perhaps examining something, on the shore of a rocky beach. the person recording walks up to them holding out a palm-sized clamshell, says "yo dude, check out my pokemon" and opens the clamshell to the camera, revealing a small crab standing inside.

end description.]

Tag your age if you wanna bc I was just thinking about how I have used floppy disks before (I'm 25 and used them in elementary computer lab) but my 22 y.o. brother hasn't which is so weird to me like 3 years isn't a long time at all to me

the notes are so right. You don't bother to check every egg until the day one is cracked.

One time I ran into Alice Cooper at my local grocery store and he was checking the eggs so you really do need to check every egg.

we *did* really need this rain

You’re not a real gamer unless you’ve wasted countless hours of your life purposefully walking in the wrong direction to make sure you’re not missing any content

I’ll stop doing when they stop putting chests full of mid-tier armor in the opposite direction of the clearly marked endgoal

That feeling of “oh crap I triggered the plot I wasn’t done fucking around yet”

“Dammit, I thought this was the wrong way and now the plot’s progressing.”

B L O C K E D

Back in the ps2 days I would have gotten a booklet with game instructions and lore, a booklet on how to not have a seizure while playing the system, and a coupon for a gaming magazine that doesn’t exist anymore.  

it makes me sad as hell. I use to pour over that little booklet 5 or 6 times before even starting the game. I’d look at all the little concept art and lore. I’d try to imagine what the game would be like in my head based on what the game prompted me with. I’d imagine being in the world myself and what the heck the dash button meant.

There have been a lot of reblogs insulting me about this, but nah. I stand by it. It’s not a giant sadness, but a tiny tinge of feeling like something is missing in the same way that I miss cd booklets with lyrics sheets, art, and listed credits or dvds with features. Somehow I as an adult move on with my life. Fuck, I even make my own art y’all.

For me it’s about presentation of it an an experience. Going to see a movie in a theater vs. watching it on netflix. I like the presentation. I also have a fondness for pop culture ephemera on a layer beyond that. Booklets often had lore and art that helped you get into the mindset of those creating it. It was interesting to see what they thought to be important lore, or trying to cram in stuff they couldn’t fit into the game itself. Also, less universally, it was cool to read credits. See who worked on what. The little dedications and special thanks. Credits exist in games still, but it was like a theater program for your game. it was neat and a reminder that it was people that made the things I like, not corporations or some big auteur.

Not to be Old On Main but one of my favourite books when I was a kid was the Diablo 1 instruction manual.

This thing wasn't a lil' tiny booklet, it was almost a novella sized brick of paper, and I read that thing over and over again.

And it had all the usual stuff in a game manual, like technical support, troubleshooting, installation instructions and so on, but then next to those instructions you'd also get stuff like... a little poem, or a little lore tidbit from the game just hanging out in the dark margins, spicing up the place.

It also contained instructions for things which, nowadays, you probably wouldn't even get an in-game tutorial for in a lot of games, like "It also contained instructions for things which, nowadays, you probably wouldn't even get an in-game tutorial for in a lot of games, like "you can't walk through walls" or "clicking on a character interacts with them." This was a time when gaming wasn't ubiquitous, where a lot of people saw computers mainly as data entry work tools, and a time when in-game tutorials simply were not a part of game design yet.

You want to know how to operate the software? Consult the manual.

But the REAL prize that got me reading the thing over and over again was the concept art and the lore, the story, this literal VOLUME of background and information about the game world that, much like the tutorial, would never be explained or be accessible in-game.

Oh, bad anatomy Chris Metzen warrior illustration, you informed so much of my younger self's idea of what cool fantasy aesthetics look like...

Besides those biographies of the warrior, rogue and sorcerer, there were extended details about the items and weapons, diagrams and drawings of the magic system and the bestiary and, most fascinating of all to young me, literature and art from the deep stories of the setting.

Playing Diablo itself, you would only ever really get the cliff's notes and hints about the full breadth of the lore and story created for the game, and so the developers took great time and care to cram it into - as I remember it - almost a 100 page booklet full of all the creative ideas they couldn't fit into the game proper.

The instruction manual felt like a true companion piece to the game, an equally important part of the experience if you wanted to fully understand the game you were playing. Getting to read the instruction booklet for a game you you had bought after only ever playing it at a friend's house, back then, felt like being let in on something. I guess the closest equivalent would be... it felt back then kind of like how discovering a really fascinating fan-theory, or a really great video essay about a game, feels today. Like a step deeper into something that's otherwise closed off to you.

Now, I don't want to wax TOO nostalgic, though. A lot of game manuals weren't this elaborate and interesting (Blizzard always took special care with theirs), and for all that I loved the Diablo instruction manual, it's not like any of the writing in it would make for literary classics. It hits about the level of the worldbuilding notes for a really cool homebrew D&D campaign, deeply stewed in 90s fantasy cheese and underground comix aesthetics, complete with... that particular cultural moment's approach to female characters.

(this is an approach to character design Blizzard has never grown out of, even to this bloody day)

And for all that I love the instruction manuals of old, yeah, I'm not gonna pretend like it's not more convenient and holistic to have an in-game codex and in-game tutorials, I'm not gonna act like the registration cards and ads and half-baked and incomplete attempts at troubleshooting and tech support aren't relics of a time when better options weren't available.

There is not a lost golden age of manuals when games were more magical and the experiences were more real, no prelapserian utopia from whence the modern world has fallen.

But game manuals were, once upon a time, a thing that creative folks at game companies poured a lot of time into, a lot of care and attention, and buying a big box brand new video game for a game with a really good manual felt that much more special and revelatory for it.

I do miss the physical media of games, the game boxes and manuals and jewel cases for CDs or floppies. A steam library is way more convenient and often better, but there is just a different feeling to holding something physical in your hands.

Zeus: Master of Olympus was, at its heart, a city building sim. Sure you had monsters and conquest, but you built your city. The book that came with it was probably a 4x6 book and half an inch thick. All the how tos and the tips of the gameplay but also art and I think it even had some basic mythology included to explain the monsters and the gods.