Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

So I almost killed a guy today...

Earlier on this evening, a friend said he was dropping his car off in the next town over at a performance shop to get some work done on his car and asked if I could give him a ride back home... Sure! Why not! What could go wrong with that?

I was already at the shop when he finally arrived. We drop off his keys, hop in my car, and head back down the same road we had just come up to head back home. On the way home, my friends scanner goes off saying that there is a 2 car accident on the very road we were on near our home town.

Oh goody... this road is about 30 miles long, and there are no alternative routes. Rather then driving back to the town we just came from, then driving to the next town over from that, and then driving home, we decided to stick it out and perhaps they would have it cleared out by the time we got there... half an hour with responders already at the scene according to the scanner... a reasonable assumption. Also the speed limit is 55mph on that road, so to give them that little extra time, I slowed down to around 50 or 52 and just cruise.

About 20 minutes in and we get to a long straight stretch of the road with 2 or 3 little shops on each side. Up ahead (about 1 to 2 miles down the road) a van pulls into one of the shops with its high beams facing into the opposing traffic... just me. I can’t see a flipping thing because of this (now about a half mile away from the van) so I started so slow down to make sure I don’t run off the road or something.

51... 50... 49... 48... 47... I am now about 100 feet from the van and I can’t see a bloody thing at all as it’s high beams are just piercing my windshield. Dispite this, I can still see further down the road around the bend that there are a bunch of flashing lights... Seeing that I couldn’t see anything and now know the accident is just up ahead, so I will have to stop soon anyways, I let off the gas entirely.

46... 45.... I am now just 20 feet from the van and I finally pass out of the line of site of its headlights. All of a sudden, 20 feet infront of me, there is a guy standing IN MY LANE in a black shirt and pants WAIVING AT ME TO STOP.

Not having a lot of time I can only assume I reacted instinctively. I scanned the other lane for immediate traffic, and in seeing none, I hit the brakes hard and cut the wheel a bit to go around the guy... WHO THEN PROCEEDS TO THROW HIMSELF IN MY WAY AGAIN TO GET ME TO STOP!!! Seeing this, now probably less than 15 feet away, I pressed the brakes to the limit of their grip, cut the wheel even harder to get the rear end to break loose and then intentionally locked up the brakes to get the car to pivot and use the front end as an anchor. I swung the car about 90 degrees sideways coming to a stop with my passenger door handle only about a foot away from this guy.

Here, this guy was a first responder to the scene and was coming down the road a bit further to stop traffic... by standing in the middle of the road, with his high beams on, no 4 ways, parked off the side of the road, wearing black, at night, with no reflective vest.

And he was mad at me for almost hitting him... my friend a little later said he never even saw the guy until we were completely stopped.

I saved that guys life... or almost killed him... take your pick. I am just really glad I drive a sports car with high performance brakes, fantastic handling, and brand new sticky high performance tires... or else there is no doubt about it... he would be dead. There is no way I could have stopped that fast in any normal sort of car... no way no how...

Sports car for life.

 

Deleted

 

I don't totally know what happened or what was going through that guys head either. When I came to a screeching halt he was swearing up and down that he was gonna kill me. I politely told him (in a really panicked state as I had almost just killed this guy) that he HAD to turn off his headlights as that was why I couldn't see him. He then swore at me some more (I guess somewhat called for seeing as he did almost just die) and told me, "You didn't give me a chance you ^%$&*(@#$#*(@)@#&*$#&)*$(#$)". I mean... if I was going 60mph, he pulled into that parking lot while I was 2 miles away. That is 2 minutes to shut off your lights, put on your 4 ways, put on a vest if he even had one, and casually walk into the opposing lane just to make himself more visible to me... Or just pull across the road, that would have done the trick too... It was just dark enough that you should legally use your headlights, but not dark enough that you couldn't see anything, so I would have easily been able to see a van pulled across the road... Heck, I would have easily seen the guy standing in the road from 2 miles away if his high beams would have been off. There were about 10 different ways he could have gotten me to stop... he just happened to line up all of the worst possible ways you could ever imagine.

 

Few times I have ended up into argument with cops about usage of headlights, have even done demonstration to them which has very shortly ended up the argument. It is really amazing how little some people think about such things, but when stick is put to their hand and shown which end to hold, they might grasp some idea of proper usage, it is just some individuals have had less good education.

But atv_123 you did well, really well, people might give c about someone having cars and driving as a hobby at times, but there are these cases where being active driver really pays off, kudos!

 

Today's Burger King trip could have gone better...

Walked out the store with my food, ready to cycle home, went to unlock my bike annnddd the lock had failed. Failed shut to be exact. So I had to strip lights and stuff off my bike, let the staff know I would be back later to remove the bike shackled to their store, and walk home. About 40 mins later I arrived back at BK and let the staff know I was gonna try and cut it free. So their patrons got to watch "a bike being stolen" with cable cutters, shortly before seeing the (clearly very safety conscious) "thief" fully populate the bikes lights, put a helmet and gloves on and cycle off xD

I guess the one saving grace is that I used a really lightweight cable lock since I knew I would have full line of sight while in the shop, hence it was really easy to cut through with some brake line cutters. Had my U-lock failed a trip to B&Q to get an angle grinder may have been required.

 

Got this pushed under my door today. Given that this company is pushing their fliers under the doors of exclusively student populated apartments, I can only assume that they are a 100% totally legit business purely in the market of providing N02 to budding chefs... And that they are totally not trying to capitalise on its other potential purposes... :/


I swear, some of the thinly veiled crap that get targeted exclusively towards students...

 

Had a takeaway at the top of the hill the other day. Thanks to the bike it was still hot when I got there.


Been getting a fair chunk of work done on the R60 recently. The wheel geometry across all models has been updated, and the tyres have been overhauled to match the tyres of the current default in game wheels. I have also fixed a few issues on the 4wd versions so that the transmission functions with less judder.

Had a bit of fun pushing it hard on the "Rally Forest" map (which is awesome). Overall I was using way too much throttle and making loads of mistakes, but still fun none the less. At least it looks flamboyant


Really need to get this thing finished and released soon. Its been far far too long.

 

I got bored, so I decided to do a bit of photoshopping, and this is what I got:

This took about 10-20 minutes to make, but atleast I got something out of it.

 

We visited our old abandoned summer cottage. The house has been abandoned for years, but it wasn't as bad as I imagined. It didn't even smell that bad. I found a CAR magazine dating back to November 1995 inside. It is still pretty good, not even moldy (there's not much mold in that house, except for my father's old hat in the wardrobe, ew), just the cover is faded from the sun and one page is torn. I took it outside and read it. Very entertaining for someone obsessed with 20 year old ordinary cars. I even found a short review of my car in the GBU section. It was under "We Hate" and described as gloomy and overcast. Unfortunately, I can't take it home since it spent so many years in a rat, mice and mold-infested house (I didn't even touch it, I used two branches to pick it up and carry and two smaller sticks to turn pages), but I will come back and take some pictures of the most interesting articles before it is destroyed together with the house and everything inside.

 

I've made up my mind; I'm going to try to build a laser environmental scanner using plans I've found online. There's a nice curvy mountain road vaguely in my area which is scheduled to have its best part bypassed (and probably blocked) by a nice, straight, boring new road because the hardhats are tired of cleaning up rockfalls, and I'm not sure when this is supposed to happen, but it could be as soon as next year. I feel I have a duty to digitally memorialize this road so that years from now, after Team StraightenBypassBlockDestroy has had their day with it, it can still be driven on in games like Assetto Corsa and BeamNG.Drive.

Of course, once I have the thing built, it'd be a pity not to use it on a bunch of other roads. I mean, someone has to counter all the Assetto Corsa JDM spam.

Laser scanned cars, of course, would have to wait until 1. seeing my checking account balance exceed $300 no longer qualifies as a significant emotional event and 2. I can find some sort of way to calculate an engine's exact theoretical torque curve from available data, so the engine data in game can be just as accurate as the body & chassis structure.

 

Its just past midnight and still over 31c. Today has averaged 33c. I feel pretty grim right now.


However, Yesterday I learned that plants can walk...

 

I guess they were referring that the road can get a bit plant-infested, but that sign is pretty funny tho.

Anyways, I opened up Photoshop and made 2 renders (sedan and coupe) of a 1990 Burnside Special concept car. It got a bit of attention (even one user decided to make a production form of the vehicle in Automation and ported it to BeamNG.drive), so I'm pretty happy with the results and is anticipating to try out that mod I was referring to once it's released in the Automation section.

 

Its technical language, but not in the common vocabulary, to the point where I doubt a lot of people will have any idea what they are supposed to be looking for.
https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Construction_plant

 

Interesting... but I don't get the use of the word "Crossing" when they really aren't crossing the road. But I guess that's normal for the British, but our signs are pretty different in the US when it comes to road work signs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_signs_in_the_United_States#W21_Series:_Road_Work

 

That isn't a road, its a bridleway for bikes/pedestrians/horses, its about 40 miles long with water on both sides. From what I gather that section of work is where they are building a bridge for the new city bypass road to go over. So they have put some small temporary bridges for construction vehicles to use during the building of the larger bypass bridge. So for the time being, construction vehicles may drive over the bridleway when crossing the river.

The region where I live currently is very flat and low lying, so there is a VAST network of rivers/canals etc to prevent flooding. With active monitoring and the abilities to divert/route water to different areas of the county via the waterways, then they also have the ability to flood certain farmers fields to prevent flooding in populated areas. Hence why we have paths down the middle of rivers etc. The image below is about 10sq km alone.

 

Hmmm... never really been to a bridleway. Then again, I don't bike at all, so that's probably why I'm not familiar with the term bridleway.

 

I got my learners permit today

 

Check the install directory of BeamNG. You should see a folder called something roughly along the lines of "cache backup" (I forget the exact name). It should contain all the cache files that have been "deleted".