fun fact: there is a US law that prevents NASA from working with the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) in any capacity whatsoever

NASA and CNSA are literally prohibited from working together by law

China has a space station, Mars rovers, has landed several things on the Moon, and has a successful human spaceflight program

Now, where have I heard of 2 extremely capable spacefaring nations working against each other before?

No the real most useless mob is the player, unless they're carrying something they don't even drop anything when killed, and they keep respawning when you kill them, and they chop down the trees as well (BTW they STILL have not fixed the bug where they leave the top half of the tree unmined), and if they find diamonds they become CRAZY strong and kill all the other mobs, idk what Mojang was thinking, the AI is really well coded I mean I gotta respect the effort there, the advanced combat these mobs are capable of is way beyond that of the other mobs but it seems unbalanced and a bit out of place.

fun fact: there is an area on the Moon called the Sea of Moscow that was discovered by (who would’ve guessed) Russia in the 1960s

however, the rules for naming places on the Moon said that you couldn’t name them after anything political, and the city of Moscow fell under that category

but the soviet union was determined
so they argued that the city of Moscow was “a state of mind” and so not political

and it WORKED

your daily reminder that the United States Space Force has a classified “fleet” of space planes very similar to the Space Shuttle but with no crew and they only do military stuff

they’re called X-37s and every once and a while one will launch, stay in orbit for a few months, and come back down
what they do up there is classified
we have no idea what is on board


(it’s probably just spy satellites and stuff but i like to tell people this because as much as people like to joke about the Space Force, it’s a serious organization that actually does stuff)

PMC! Soooo, I have good news and "bad" news!

Good news, the Creator Analytics update is ready but the bad news is the timing isn't right to launch. I have some IRL things happening that require my undivided attention. All good things though, so no worries there. It's just best to wait until things are settled so that I can return the same attention to the update and you.

Creator Analytics WILL release next month! It took longer than initially expected for a number of unexpected reasons but scope of work also grew in many directions for the best. There's always more to do after the launch but there's more than enough to be useful and fun now and into the foreseeable future and historical past interests. Always nice when things motivate you to go, go, go. Didn't help switching chart libraries last week but know it was the right decision for the short and long run.

You'll see soon and I'm looking forward to having the proper time to respond to bugs and feature requests.

so i’m sure you guys know boeing at this point
the airplane company that keeps having doors fall off their planes and other wacky events

well a lot of people don’t know that Boeing is also a space company and has launched things into space

and now they’re working on the first crewed flight test of Boeing Starliner, which is a new vehicle meant to take people to the International Space Station

let’s go over a brief history of Boeing Starliner because it is the worst crewed spacecraft since Apollo 13

the first flight test of Starliner occurred in 2019, it didn’t have people on it and was just trying to get to the ISS
It was almost ready to approach the ISS and then MISSED

the second test, also with nobody on it, went fine a few years later
keep in mind that Boeing wanted people on Starliner in 2018. It’s now 2024 and a crewed flight test is just now about to happen

istg if Boeing kills a bunch of astronauts I think that’ll just be the end of the company
the first company to kill someone in space
let’s hope that doesn’t happen

New mod! :D

https://www.planetminecraft.com/mod/toybox/

When you finish a project you've been working on for weeks and then you're like "uhh ok what do I do now"

hey look outside your car is on fire! ha ha april foul

I was 10 days sick; i don't know if it was corona or influenza...I don't left my bed and don't had see a doctor. I feel better and i think Tea was the best i did to cure myself...Okay, i'm back for a while...

time to perform ritualistic sacrifices to Artemis, Selene, Chang’e, Chandra, and whatever other moon gods i can think of for the successful landing of the VIPER rover sometime this year
dear god this thing needs to succeed
we aren’t sending humans back to the moon without it

Hi PMC, hope you're having a great weekend!

After a roller coaster ride of locating, merging, migrating and auditing massive amounts of data (nearly a billion records), I'm back on crossing off front-end features until remaining tasks are down to launch preparation. The bulk of the work is done, last 10% requires pushing through and eventually leaving some ideas for post launch.

Just going to drop several work in progress screenshots from various analytics sub-pages and let them do the talking:

no time to explain

the tin can (starship, the most powerful rocket ever built that will eventually send humans back to the Moon and to Mars) hopped (launched successfully, reached orbit for the first time, we are so back, humans will be back on the moon before the end of the deacde)