It's literally cheaper to go to Europe to watch a race, which is exactly what I'm planning to do next year

Kinda, I'm a part of nomadic virtual but only fly flights for them occasionally. It's a aircraft ferry va so the routes and aircraft are unique and you get flights personally dispatched for you to make it realistic. You even get a reason (eg. Repositioning flight for a freighter conversion, etc.) and MEL items in the dispatch.

A decade or so ago I flew virtual united and it was fun but found after a year or so I wanted to explore more parts of the world and more airlines so I left to have more freedom.

Top left, but get some long planters. I did this on a windowsill and it's just a curtain of pothos. It took over a year to really fill in but now it's like a waterfall of green and looks really cool.

Has there been anything said about Mac release?

The locked cases are such a pain in the ass. My local target has all hair care and soap products locked up. Not just expensive ones, literally everything. I needed a bottle of body soap and had to wait for an employee to come and unlock it, wait for me to smell then to figure out which one I wanted, and then lock it back up when I was done. All got a $12 bottle of soap...

Yeah it is kinda annoying, rain makes the race so interesting. It feels reactionary almost, like the teams won't use the extremes (or even inters it would seem) and they end up red flagging because the conditions are unsafe. Idk maybe at a certain point it's too wet for extremes? But even then nobody ran them so how would they know? I guess it's probably more to do with spray from the aero when I think about it. If it's wet enough for extremes then there's probably so much spray that nobody can see and they need to red flag for that.

mostly stock. scenery is Taimodels ENGM, aircraft is the Felis 747-200.

Woooosh

Yeah I was a bit worried after seeing the trailer. Really hope it is just a bit and not whole episodes about covid shit. It honestly feels late to even be doing anything covid related anymore.

1% content (posts), 9% comments, and 90% lurkers is how it's broken out

Copied from a comment I made on Reddit a while back (first time opening Reddit in a month!)

I've been simming 15 years and got my PPL last year so have gone through this recently. Simming absolutely helped me in my PPL, I had a good understanding for how the aircraft handled and felt things came quickly in most regards. As far as stick and rudder skills, I obviously had to learn the muscle memory, which came fairly quickly but took practice. Sight picture was actually a bigger thing to learn, along with localized weather, things like thermals on a hot day or mini rotors when landing in a heavily wooded area, etc. Those are things which don't exist in the sim so had to be learned from scratch. The actual aircraft handling made sense in my head so it just required the stick and rudder learning. Crosswind landings actually came really easily having already learned and practiced the coordination in sim for years.

A few things I noticed in my training

let your CFI teach you. Don't assume you know anything, let them teach you everything as if it's new. Some stuff you'll say to yourself "yeah I already knew that", but with a lot more stuff than I expected I actually learned I was doing it wrong or learned a better way to do it. I found this helped me overcome bad habits more easily because they were identified from the get go and then never practiced the bad habits in the real plane.

dont bother using the sim to practice any stick and rudder stuff, but do still use it. I found it helpful to practice my SRM skills, visual navigation, and just familiarizing myself with the area and landmarks. It can be helpful to do stuff in the sim to practice the things you learn for the written, like VOR stuff, magnetic compass turning/accel tendencies, etc.

look out the window! learn your sight picture and keep your head out of the cockpit

reset your bar. Don't assume you can do anything irl that you do in the sim. You need to prove everything to yourself IRL before you can be confident doing it.

use VATSIM, even for VFR. Just having lots of voice comms and being comfortable talking and flying, and just with how radio comms flow is very useful and made learning the radios super easy. I learned to fly under the seattle bravo shelf and was always talking to someone and it was really not too bad given how much I've used VATSIM.

The more I've heard from friends still using it the less desire I have to go back. At first I was gonna boycott until the end of the month but it sounds like it's not even that good now that a lot of active posters left. Haven't felt much urge to go back, although I do need to find new communities for some of the more niche subs I was on. My houseplant and travel hacks discussion has been very lacking since I left Reddit...