From my youth: 1970 Buick GSX Stage 1

From my 20’s: I started autocrossing at age 19 with a 1985 Corolla GT-S. Which for those that know Toyotas, know that the Corolla GT-S was the North American version of the AE86. Which is ONE of the greatest platforms Toyota has made. It ended up being my favorite car that I’ve ever owned. Adjustable struts/shocks, sway bars that would look at home on a semi truck and Hoosier tires. Plus some minor mods on the engine, which was also used in the MR2 of that era (4A-GE). It was a ferocious little car and I won a lot of autocross events with it. I was even keeping up with some of the MR2’s, which at that time (late 80’s) were the greatest autocrossing cars on the track.

Now that I’m in my 50’s, having participated in multiple forms of auto sports, then left that for skydiving… My opinion about cars is this:

A “fast” car is just less slow that its competitors.

Given that I’ve been north of 225mph with NOTHING around me except for a parachute. Cars are booooooring.

That I’ve met personally?

Don’t know, but here’s a list that I consider the coolest people I’ve personally met and I’ll give a brief synopsis on how I met them:

Neil Armstrong: Went to get a haircut in Loveland, OH where I was living at the time. Walked into an old school barber shop that was on Loveland-Medaira RD, just down from Krogers. There were three men in the shop, the barber, who was cutting the hair of a man in the chair, and one more who was reading a newspaper, so I couldn’t see his face. The barber finished up and looked at the gentleman reading the newspapers and said; “Neil you’re up next.” The man put the newspaper down and I found myself face to face with the first man to walk on the moon. Yeah… It was a trip to say the least. He lived in the town next to Loveland and he was there looking for a new barber, as his previous one was a bit of a creep.

Paul Tibbets: My Demonstration Skydiving team was performing in an airshow at Lunken Airport on the east side of Cincinnati. Col Tibbets was there as part of a Hiroshima presentation. After my team wrapped up after the show I toured the displays. I had my team shirt on and walked up to the table where he was sitting. He asked a few questions and said my team and I were really brave doing demo jumps… Yeah… the guy that dropped the first nuclear bomb called my team and I… Brave… Rather a surreal moment for me. He was really interesting to talk to.

Chuck Yeager: Gen Yeager drove the pace car for the 1986 Indy 500. My high school marching band also was marching in the parades and around the track. Yes, I’m really old, I was 16 that year. Some friends and I were walking around the campus where we were staying and actually just ran into him… Literally. I knew who he was, but none of my friends did not, so I didn’t say anything. He gruffly dismissed us and walked off. Yes, we did apologize for running into him.

James Doohan: He gave a presentation at Indiana University Southeast in the early 80’s and my Dad took me to see it. He never announced that he was staying afterward and for some reason my Dad and I hung around after most everyone left. There was only about 8 people that were in the auditorium and we got time to talk directly to him. He was the type of person that you just… Loved. He was an actual good person who was also very intelligent. I actually cried when he died in 2005.

Anyway, that’s my submission of people that I think of as “cool” that I had direct interactions with. Other’s than that I would consider cool:

John Young: Robert Crippen, in an interview, stated that his heart rate while Columbia was sitting on the pad, for its first launch was over 140. John’s was 70. Yeah, John Young was sitting on top of thousands of pounds of brand new untested rocket and wasn’t bothered in the least… FUCK ME. If that ain’t cool, I don’t know what is. I never got to meet him, unfortunately.

If you find yourself throwing away a lot of stale moldy bread…

Freeze it.

When you need it, take it out the night before to thaw in a sealed bag. Or if you want toast, just throw the frozen slices straight into your toaster.

This also works for most cakes and other baked goods.

How about…

Inside the damn airplane. It was a Beech 18 with Pratt and Whitney Wasp Jr engines used for skydiving operations. The pilot was also the drop zone owner (DZO). The DZO normally kept 3 loads worth of fuel in the plane and I got on the 4th load.

We take off and are on climb out and about 200 feet off the ground it gets… quiet. Did you catch the previous paragraph where I mention the plane had two Pratt and Whitney Wasp Jr engines? I mention that, because those engines are loud… Like really really loud. We crashed in a corn field off the end of the runway. It was like being in a car accident, except a whole lot more noise and grinding metal and quite a bit scarier. With that said, no one was hurt and there was no fire, because there was no fuel in the plane.

All but one person in the crash got out and jumped into the other Beech 18 and did our jumps.

Yeah, skydivers are a bit of a different breed, no doubt about that.

As far as closest to an airliner accident. I saw the remains of United 232 in Sioux City IA about 4 hours after the crash. My parents and I were on the way to see my oldest brother and his family that lived in Sioux Falls, SD at the time. We passed by the airport on I-29 which is less than half a mile away. It was far enough to see the debris and rescue crews working, but not close enough to see the victims… Thank god.

Seeing that accident, plus a strong love of aviation ignited an interest I have had ever since to learn as much as I could about aircraft incidents. I probably should have pursued a career in aircraft accident investigation, not sure why I never did.

That’s awesome!

I live about an hour away from Lake Geneva, WI, which is Gygax’s hometown and the birthplace of D&D. I worked with someone that worked at TSR during the 2e days and he has a lot of stories. (The only thing he has to say about Gary Gygax is; “The guy owes me money.”) Last April I attended a conference in Lake Geneva at the location of the very first Game Con. The Wisconsin Historical Society sponsored it. It was a great time and will be going back again this year.

My books look in great shape… From that angle. LOL… They have thousands upon thousands of hours of playing behind them over the last 40 years. Every page has smudges on them from where they’ve been turned again and again.

Here are the older edition books I have. My 1e DMG and PH have been lost to time. That copy of the Monster Manual is one of the originals. The Deities and Demigods though is NOT one of the issues with HP Lovecraft’s monsters in it. I have seen one of those editions, one of my local games stores has one for sale for over $300, but that’s not what I have. Not shown are all the 5e stuff I have. In my youth it was a challenge to save up enough to buy material when it came out. As an adult, especially since I got the wife playing, yeah… I’ve indulged quite a bit.

54M here. Rolled my first D&D character in 1978. Played GURPS, Twighlight 2000, Traveller, you name it I probably have at least dabbled in playing it.

Today I play D&D 2024 and 5e, Call of Cthulhu, Castles and Crusades and a few others. Some on Roll20, or Foundry VTT (which is awesome BTW.) My primary gaming group is all fathers and mothers spread out across the country.

As far as actual Computer games, I used to be into Flight Sims, but dropping $500 plus on JUST a graphics card is just not something that is going to happen. It’s not the wife acceptance factor, it the sheer balls the graphics card manufacturers have charging that much for their crap. I still dust off MS FS 2004 and run it on my Dell Precision laptop, but my machine won’t run the latest version. I would like to see if it would run Battlestar Galactica Deadlock though.

Otherwise, I have had a home server for many years. It runs Proxmox and I have containers running Plex, Homeseer, SMB (acts as my NAS), and it provides backup services for every other computer in the house.

For reference, I am an IT Professional, with about 30 years in the business.

I have several direct antecedents that lived over 100. The last was my paternal grandmother, who died in 2004 at the age of 103. She was born in 1901 and outlived 3 of her 6 children (one child was stillborn). Her last child, my Dad, died just this past February at the age of 88. He was the youngest.

I live in Wisconsin and have a co-worker that lives in the general Tallahassee area. She sent me some photos of her making snow angels. She has a LOT more snow on the ground than we do.

It’s rather disturbing.

Former skydiver.

Performed a lot of Demonstration jumps into everything from airports, race tracks, professional sports stadiums, high school sports stadiums, golf courses, and a few other places that required skill and knowledge to land in safely.

Also, spent a lot of time teaching canopy skills to up and coming jumpers.

I KNEW IT!

I’M A LESBIAN!!!

I’ve known my whole life and it’s a relief to FINALLY to be able to come out officially.

THANK YOU PRESIDENT RUMP!

Both my competition and Demo teams decided to call it quits, for various reasons. One was we were all burnt out and it caused some of the deep seated interpersonal issues in the teams to explode. That actually all happened in 2004 and I jumped another two years. However, by that time I had met and started dating Mrs Canopyflyer, who is not a jumper. No, she did not force me to quit. Being with her just made me realize that there were other things I wanted to do in life. I’m also neurodivergent, so when I burn out, I tend to burn out completely and have to leave what ever activity that caused me to be in that state. So I sold my gear, turned that money into a wedding, honeymoon, and down payment on a house. We’ve been together 20 years and have two kids.

Today, I’m old and have a bad back so there is no going back, but I have no regrets.

They can go as high as they have fuel and oxygen for. The highest skydives ever were all done from balloons, although they were helium and not hot air balloons.

I’m in the USA, so a BASE rig would be illegal to use from a Balloon. Any jumper exiting from an aircraft must carry two parachutes, one of which is packed by an FAA Certified Senior or Master Rigger. The other chute must be packed by a Senior, or Master Rigger, someone under the direct guidance of a Rigger, or the person who would be jumping the chute. BASE rigs typically do not carry a reserve as there typically isn’t enough time to deal with malfunctions.

To specifically answer your question, yes I used a sport skydiving rig. The lowest was from 2500 feet, so essentially I pulled my pilot chute right as I exited the basket (at least that’s the story I tell). I’ve jumped from as high as 5k on other balloon jumps. Early in my career I jumped a Sunpath Javelin J2. Later I had a Sunpath Odyssey. The only BASE jump I’ve ever made was off the bridge in West Virginia and even that was using a sport rig where the main parachute was modified with a mesh slider and a BASE pilot chute.

My favorite was being the only jumper going up. There were 4 or 5 other passengers plus the pilot. She took off from the DZ and the DZO told her if she used his airport, yes he owned it, then she had to take at least one jumper up. No one else was ready to go, as it was really early in the morning, so I got to go. The eyes on those passengers when I jumped… Oh man you would have thought they were seeing someone killing themselves. I was probably safer than they were.

I’ve been retired from skydiving since 2006.

54m here for reference.

Best long term romantic relationship: We will be celebrating 20 years married this year. Two kids and we’re well on our way to spending our dotage together.

Best Friend: We’ve been friends for 5 years. Have literally played hundreds of hours of D&D and other role playing games, along with a group of fellow fathers and mothers that all like family. We got to play D&D in Lake Geneva, WI at the very birthplace of Game Cons this past year. That was pretty great.

Familial (specifically, blood relations): Terrible. My parents are dead and I would be estranged from them now if they were still alive. Estranged from both my older brothers. I have no plans to reconcile with them. They made their choices and it did not involve their younger brother. I have a FB connection to ONE of my many many first cousins.

I have around 6 take offs in a Hot Air Balloon.

Never landed. Jumped, deliberately, out of each one.

You mean before it blows up in ours?

Yeah, me too, but I’m not holding my breath.

Asparagus, Broccoli, and broccolini… although to be fair, I didn’t discover broccolini until about 20 years ago, when I was in my mid-30’s.

Also, I found out it wasn’t the veggie that I disliked, but the way it was prepared. My family boiled (ok Blanched) all vegetables when I was growing up. That’s about the worst way possible to cook most veggies, especially the three I mention above.

Here is what I do to prepare them:

Asparagus: Heat oven to 350F. Trim woody ends and place them in a single layer in an oven proof dish. Salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with olive oil. Finally top with Parmesan Reggiano. Roast in the oven for 25 minutes or when cheese is browned.

Broccoli (florets only) and broccolini (trim woody end, but leave as much of the stem as possible: Heat oven to 350F. Place veggie in a single layer in an oven proof dish. Salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle with olive oil. You can top these two with Parmesan, but I usually do not. Roast until slightly charred about 25 minutes.

I will never blanch a veggie ever again, except for green beans. There are times when you’re serving a spicy dish, or something with a sauce and just need something plain to go along with it. Case in point, for my General Tso’s Chicken, I serve it with blanched green beans. Otherwise, I sautee them with salt pepper and red pepper flacks and a bit of high temp oil.

Commoner Adventurer: All stats are 10. You start the campaign at level 0, no class. Throughout the campaign, the characters attain a class based on their actions.

Wrong class for the race: Halfling Barbarians, Half-Orc Wizard, etc. This can be a lot of fun, as instead of having an optimized character that can deal a lot of damage, you have to think through things and come up with strategies. I personally have always liked playing characters that are small that have to use their wits to survive in combat. Oh, I like playing a tank once in a while. Currently, I’m in two different sessions. In one, I’m playing a Dragonborn Cleric that has served as the melee support for the party’s paladin. The other session I’m playing a halfling rogue Soul Knife that rides the barbarian into battle. I have a lot more fun with the Rogue.

Doing a Horny Gorilla skydive with 5 friends.

Representative photo of a Horny Gorilla not a photo of me or my friends:

We get into the formation, actually get stable and the next thing we all see is a one jumpers deployment bag, with their main parachute in it, come out from his back. Goes above the formation, then the deployment bag comes down into the middle of the formation… goes back up… comes back down. Lines are streaming all around and it’s turning into a really dangerous situation. Getting tied up in the lines, while in free fall has a great chance of being fatal.

But it was just a surreal moment for all of us, seeing this deployment bag dancing around in the middle of the Horny Gorilla.

The person next to the jumper with the deployment bag out, reaches down and pulls the affected jumper’s Pilot Chute, which is what actually deploys the main, and tosses it into the air stream. The affected jumper went flying out of the formation as his main parachute deployed. The rest of us break and track hard.

The guy actually landed his main parachute! He did not end up cutting away and pulling his reserve. The way that deployment bag just danced in an out of the middle of the formation was just unreal and we all just stared at it for what seemed an eternity.

25 years on and we all still talk about it.