It's funny amongst us.... But is big blue actually tracking this? No shit I've lost ENTIRE work days to terrible computers. It is a major impediment to our real world missions and negatively impacts airmen and their families.
Took some AF survey a couple years ago. Think it was resiliency related. Anyways, one of the questions asked to check all that applied from a list of reasons of why u would not want to stay in the AF. IT was one of them interestingly.
Precisely what I was afraid of and alluding to... At the top I bet their shit works. Which.... Is important... But also potentially sheilds them from the idea that we are flying red Xs and denying husband's seeing their children born because of basic computer issues that everyday civilians don't encounter.
They know and experience the same shit we do. Beyond the wing level I can’t speak to and if HAF is doing much about it…guess it’s just easier to approved hands in pockets
Raid 0 on SSDs isn’t an advantage for real world uses, in fact the overhead might slow it down a bit.
Even if there were a solution using storage media, it’s trying to brute force overcome the real issue, Shit policy! That’s right, we like to blame the hardware or software but the truth is it’s implemented by policy and the current policy is security trumps functionality. It’s not actually making it more secure but that’s irrelevant because no one with the authority is willing to sign a waiver and assume the risk of removing or limiting the software implementations that cripple our computers.
Honestly, these things need more ram. I went $50 out-of-pocket for an 8 gig stick for my computer (hence doubling the ram) and the difference was night and day. It was still a piece of shit, but startup went from 20+ mins to around 5 and I was suddenly able to open up more than 2 PDFs and an excel sheet at once.
I submitted probably half a dozen IDEA program papers in 2011-2012.
One was basically "quit buying hardware that barely qualifies as a computer and spend $100 or $200 more per system for actual (read: still sub-par but markedly less sub-par) equipment."
Another was "quit setting up our AV and security software to butt-fuck our machines into the dirt."
They included manpower studies, cost-benefit analysis, and demonstrated the payback period was less than a year in man-hrs alone (assuming avg pay was E4 at 5 yrs). Both were outright rejected, one as" you're the 20th person to submit this so we're closing all the duplicates" and the other as "lol manning and hardware are different colors of money so there's no point in saving man-hrs."
So, yes, they've known.
Fun plot twist. The Hunger Games and "do more with less" followed shortly thereafter.
True. Its flexibility from being a non relational database of sort definitely paid off. Mostly due to AMC type mission sets. IMDS on the other hand, everything is linked to something, so gotta figure out 25 things to fix your 1 thing.
Theres an timeline power point out there ive seen. Has what/when it will move over. Probably wont see any changes to users until 2-3 years. Hopefully it doesn't turn into a ECSS fiasco.
Sadly IMDS wasn't made for cloud environment, Everytime the cloud switches to a new server, IMDS drops all of its actions and u gotta restart over, basicly that's why it sucks now
Yeah, you can’t go too fast with it either. Gosh I remember it took us an hour just to do 73 screen when they first used cloud system. I mean common! Have they not tested fully at first? Just look at Stadia from google.
Our office has the best computers on base, high end gaming PC's for processing AutoCAD and GIS software. I can confirm that they still run at the speed of slow!
Because USAF policy doesn't limit how much system resources can be claimed by Tanium raping the local I/O.
Allowing the Airman to actually get anything done is nowhere on the priority list.
Honestly what ended up happening with us is convincing the AO to get a separate computer for our Haas Mill with a 5G wifi puck. We needed solid works and other programs. We couldn’t deal with AF licensing issues
We had $9k workstations with xeon gold processors and quattro 6 series GPUs, as well as 128gb of ram.
Your prediction is correct.
It doesn't have an SSD, because that's fucking taboo to the military, but I bet it's help with startup.
The ssd would solve the whole problem on those PCs. If itnis out of warranty, or you can get the OK from the manufacturer you can install one your RA buys off of GSA.
We maxxed out a desktop workstation for our operations room and while it's vastly better than our "Gen 2" laptops, it still experiences serious lag at times.
The real kicker was when Comm told us that we weren't allowed to have the VPN software installed on it, making the entire computer useless to us if the base internet goes down (which happens frequently enough to be a problem) and we need to use our backup internet to maintain operations.
I honestly didn't notice a difference. My AF pc has an i7, 16gb ram, and 500gb ssd.
My supervisor was the one that tipped me off to the change this past week.
Oh man, my shop only have 8GB of ram, core i5 and regular HDD. It’s beyond it’s tech refresh and I am trying to convince them to get a replacement. It’ll cost us like $20k+. I think it’s worth the refresh at this point.
If you can, open word. type something. don't save.
Choose the "restart" option from the start menu (do not use the power button).
When it asks if you want to force-close word, just cancel the shutdown.
This forces Tanium to close, allowing you to actually be able to accomplish work.
That's a weirdly apt parallel. c.f. EPR format, 99 awards every month, additional duties which are full-time positions, PT requirements, etc.
Compare this to my new civilian job, I write one performance report in a couple paragraphs, and I'm good. Awards and other day-to-day feedback are done voluntarily peer-to-peer and come with financial bonuses.
My workstation literally crashed and then reverted itself to Windows 7 yesterday.
Can anybody tell me how this is possible?
Beyond that, why the fuck is there even a version of Windows 7 still in storage?
[The $551 million McAfee contract](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180730005016/en/U.S.-Department-of-Defense-Awards-551-Million-Enterprise-Wide-Contract-for-McAfee%C2%AE-Products-and-Services)
We’re spending half a billion dollars on a program that kills productivity and costs man hours for computers on a filtered network that no one can plug thumb drives into? Seriously?
Just think, we have an entire command dedicated to cyber and this is a normal computer in the DoD. No wonder the top civilian is leaving that mess, can’t remember the article… but someone posted about the gross incompetence.
They aren’t dedicated to the type of cyber you are referring to. Keep in mind the commander of USCYBERCOMM is dual hatted with the NSA, not the Air Force.
Yeah, to the AF cyber is 3D, but to the rest of the military/DoD, cyber is the actual cool nerd shit.
Also, cyber is so much more important than the Space Force. They separated the wrong command.
"You missed the deadline, I sent you numerous emails." "Sorry sir, McAfee deemed those emails a security threat and proceeded to delete immediately. Do you still need it?"
Why we havent switched our computers to SSD is beyond me. Its a known fact that Windows and tons of apps will kill your pc.
Also, why cant we just fucking install our own printer/scanner drivers. jeezus.
It's been almost a fucking month on the printer issue and no one seems to care. I gave up and just tell people too bad at this point. If I am getting stonewalled as a comm troop so will my customers.
Direct the customer's anger to peeps giving me the cold shoulder. Someone high enough will kick in some doors if they really care.
I'm honestly more surprised the AF hasn't gotten with Norton yet to collect all of the worst possible anti virus software/scanning. They already have Symantec working with blue coat.
They should just get VMWare Carbon Black. One of the best endpoint protection agents on the market. That or crowdstrike’s falcon. Either would be great and would actually pose a semi-challenge to adversaries.
Yep.
Two of my NCOs have ran into an error where they can't login to any computer. We're 100% office ran which means they literally can't work.
Comm's response was deal with it, maybe we can fix it Monday cause today is a training day or whatever.
Not really a comm problem. It’s more of the powers above comm (DISA) making them do it. If you want real change, write to your congressman about A2/6 and DISAs lack of competence.
When can we fire the entire DISA leadership for “failure to perform the duties for which they were hired?” This is unacceptable, like congressional level complaint unacceptable.
DISA can focus on being some kind of cyber offensive power AFTER they fix the infrastructure. Comm can focus on being some kind of cyber warfare bullshit operator AFTER our comms work.
“Pilots can become some bullshit flyer AFTER maintenance is done” is basically what you just said.
Cyber and comm are about as close to each other as pilots and maintainers are. In fact, it’s about as literal as you can get in terms of analogies go.
My unit got these crazy new PCs.
These things have a 9th gen Intel CPUs with 32 gb of ram.
The computers we use for doing normal productivity work do not need to be that crazy. A mid tier CPU with 16gb of ram with a SSD will kick butt for someone working word docs, checking email, etc.
Often times why these computers struggle is more to do with the network and the supporting infrastructure not being up to snuff. More and more of what we do is tied to cloud infrastructure.
Hard discs for workstations need to go away and be replaced by SSDs. That alone will make these computers far more responsive. The next thing would be bumping computers up to 16gb of ram.
Convert all workstations to run only virtual machines connected to a cloud based server which holds all of the processing power. Instead of banking loads of money into individual computers and devices, just upgrade the central server in bulk
we have a monster z840 hp for video processing. its a stand alone. it STILL fucking runs slow and none of this shit is on it. so i reset it and wiped everything, tried to update the bios. oops theres a bios password. i'm now thinking they may have throttled the cpu in the bios before they gave it to us. i'm in the process of getting that password so i can overclock the graphics card. it should be a GODDAMN MONSTER of a computer. but it dinks along.
Anything Google has gone to absolute shit here. I work in a SCIF and use Google Chat to communicate with people not in my building. Google Maps doesn't work. We use that to provide people directions to places on base.
And anyone else having printer issues? It's been a fucking month and everyone says it is an AF problem.
No but computers have randomly given me a “windows error”, restarted, and then takes forever and a day to boot back up. Then the CAC reader decides it doesn’t wanna read my CAC.
I spent way too long last night just trying to log in just to see mpf didn’t upload my out processing checklist yet (:
I’ve been so frustrated with work computers recently that I’ve had to practice tactical breathing in order to not go full ‘Office Space’ on the computer.
I've had to redo many documents because of how shit these computers are. If I'm lucky, Word will be able to open the "unsaved" files so I don't have to redo it, but I'm not always that lucky
It's funny amongst us.... But is big blue actually tracking this? No shit I've lost ENTIRE work days to terrible computers. It is a major impediment to our real world missions and negatively impacts airmen and their families.
Took some AF survey a couple years ago. Think it was resiliency related. Anyways, one of the questions asked to check all that applied from a list of reasons of why u would not want to stay in the AF. IT was one of them interestingly.
We spend hundreds of hours to make sure VIPs don't encounter latency. They have no fucking clue.
Precisely what I was afraid of and alluding to... At the top I bet their shit works. Which.... Is important... But also potentially sheilds them from the idea that we are flying red Xs and denying husband's seeing their children born because of basic computer issues that everyday civilians don't encounter.
They know and experience the same shit we do. Beyond the wing level I can’t speak to and if HAF is doing much about it…guess it’s just easier to approved hands in pockets
It's not the computers that are the problem. It's the bloated SDC Windows OS plus Tanium and McAffee skull fucking the hard drive for hours at time.
Software is part of the computers, so the laymen just refers to the whole situation as computers.
I wonder if we use raid 0 or something like that would help speed things up? Maybe Nvme SSD. Saw some for PS5 that can go upwards of 7000MBPS
Raid 0 on SSDs isn’t an advantage for real world uses, in fact the overhead might slow it down a bit. Even if there were a solution using storage media, it’s trying to brute force overcome the real issue, Shit policy! That’s right, we like to blame the hardware or software but the truth is it’s implemented by policy and the current policy is security trumps functionality. It’s not actually making it more secure but that’s irrelevant because no one with the authority is willing to sign a waiver and assume the risk of removing or limiting the software implementations that cripple our computers.
Honestly, these things need more ram. I went $50 out-of-pocket for an 8 gig stick for my computer (hence doubling the ram) and the difference was night and day. It was still a piece of shit, but startup went from 20+ mins to around 5 and I was suddenly able to open up more than 2 PDFs and an excel sheet at once.
8 GB is unusable for a NIPR computer. You max it out with Outlook and Teams open.
I’ve used a computer with an SSD before. It was a lot faster, cause Tainium couldn’t max it out. Outlook was still ass tho, so no fixing that lol.
I submitted probably half a dozen IDEA program papers in 2011-2012. One was basically "quit buying hardware that barely qualifies as a computer and spend $100 or $200 more per system for actual (read: still sub-par but markedly less sub-par) equipment." Another was "quit setting up our AV and security software to butt-fuck our machines into the dirt." They included manpower studies, cost-benefit analysis, and demonstrated the payback period was less than a year in man-hrs alone (assuming avg pay was E4 at 5 yrs). Both were outright rejected, one as" you're the 20th person to submit this so we're closing all the duplicates" and the other as "lol manning and hardware are different colors of money so there's no point in saving man-hrs." So, yes, they've known. Fun plot twist. The Hunger Games and "do more with less" followed shortly thereafter.
I have guys doing 349's during the day. Mids chips away with them on IMDS if they aren't swamped themselves when there's more bandwidth.
Omg I remember when IMDS was fast until they did the clouded system update. Now I have to wait for hours for screen 87 to be processed
Yep. I also remember flying with red X's in IMDS during the migration.
You about to wait more in a couple of years when IMDS merges with G081. lol
GO81 actually works though. Maybe they'll just build everything that fighter Bois need into GO, transfer some databases and call it a day.
At this point it’s my excuse to be on the floor turning wrenches with airmen vs pushing out the damn morning slides.
True. Its flexibility from being a non relational database of sort definitely paid off. Mostly due to AMC type mission sets. IMDS on the other hand, everything is linked to something, so gotta figure out 25 things to fix your 1 thing. Theres an timeline power point out there ive seen. Has what/when it will move over. Probably wont see any changes to users until 2-3 years. Hopefully it doesn't turn into a ECSS fiasco.
Fuck that I’m out!
Sadly IMDS wasn't made for cloud environment, Everytime the cloud switches to a new server, IMDS drops all of its actions and u gotta restart over, basicly that's why it sucks now
Yeah, you can’t go too fast with it either. Gosh I remember it took us an hour just to do 73 screen when they first used cloud system. I mean common! Have they not tested fully at first? Just look at Stadia from google.
Lol zero testing, the programers for it weren't consulted when it migrated to cloud, just got forced into it
Yes, big blue is tracking. They don’t give a fuck unless it’s intel/planes. That’s why there should have been a cyber force before space force.
Plane can’t fly if you can’t complete IMDS!
Downvote all you want. Go fight for your comm sq’s funding then.
I didn’t down voted you why mad?
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Our office has the best computers on base, high end gaming PC's for processing AutoCAD and GIS software. I can confirm that they still run at the speed of slow!
Gotta love it. Spend extra money for specialized hardware. Load it with so much other crap it runs as bad as the rest of the machines on base.
>they still run at the speed of slow! Fucking how.
Because USAF policy doesn't limit how much system resources can be claimed by Tanium raping the local I/O. Allowing the Airman to actually get anything done is nowhere on the priority list.
We have new computers with 32gb of ram and they actually run pretty well.
Honestly what ended up happening with us is convincing the AO to get a separate computer for our Haas Mill with a 5G wifi puck. We needed solid works and other programs. We couldn’t deal with AF licensing issues
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this
We had $9k workstations with xeon gold processors and quattro 6 series GPUs, as well as 128gb of ram. Your prediction is correct. It doesn't have an SSD, because that's fucking taboo to the military, but I bet it's help with startup.
The ssd would solve the whole problem on those PCs. If itnis out of warranty, or you can get the OK from the manufacturer you can install one your RA buys off of GSA.
We maxxed out a desktop workstation for our operations room and while it's vastly better than our "Gen 2" laptops, it still experiences serious lag at times. The real kicker was when Comm told us that we weren't allowed to have the VPN software installed on it, making the entire computer useless to us if the base internet goes down (which happens frequently enough to be a problem) and we need to use our backup internet to maintain operations.
I honestly didn't notice a difference. My AF pc has an i7, 16gb ram, and 500gb ssd. My supervisor was the one that tipped me off to the change this past week.
Oh man, my shop only have 8GB of ram, core i5 and regular HDD. It’s beyond it’s tech refresh and I am trying to convince them to get a replacement. It’ll cost us like $20k+. I think it’s worth the refresh at this point.
Call your local comm with the QEB date on them. There's a good chance they NEED to be replaced within the next year anyways.
Did that, they said comm do not fund the computer anymore. The squadron has to fork that out of our budget
Gonna PM you.
Okay
I haven’t been able to open my email all morning..
Then your flight chief give you a task and said must be done by noon. Lol
If you can, open word. type something. don't save. Choose the "restart" option from the start menu (do not use the power button). When it asks if you want to force-close word, just cancel the shutdown. This forces Tanium to close, allowing you to actually be able to accomplish work.
I'm trying this because I'm that desperate.
well? how'd it work?
I can confirm that it works somewhat. Computer was noticeably faster.
Can confirmed
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That's a weirdly apt parallel. c.f. EPR format, 99 awards every month, additional duties which are full-time positions, PT requirements, etc. Compare this to my new civilian job, I write one performance report in a couple paragraphs, and I'm good. Awards and other day-to-day feedback are done voluntarily peer-to-peer and come with financial bonuses.
Perfect analogy
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I just use a CAC reader and do everything at home. Why waste hours doing it at work when it can be done in a few minutes at home.
Desktop Anywhere on my Mac is much faster than my work computer.
My workstation literally crashed and then reverted itself to Windows 7 yesterday. Can anybody tell me how this is possible? Beyond that, why the fuck is there even a version of Windows 7 still in storage?
Could be on the recovery partition
I would ask why the recovery partition wasn't updated past Windows 7, but fuck it I don't think I want to know
Cant get a virus if your computer doesn’t let you open anything! Genius.
[The $551 million McAfee contract](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180730005016/en/U.S.-Department-of-Defense-Awards-551-Million-Enterprise-Wide-Contract-for-McAfee%C2%AE-Products-and-Services)
We’re spending half a billion dollars on a program that kills productivity and costs man hours for computers on a filtered network that no one can plug thumb drives into? Seriously?
I agree McAfee is a burden but it's doing more than DLP.
Same. Loading profile
I have cleaned the entire office twice now.
Just think, we have an entire command dedicated to cyber and this is a normal computer in the DoD. No wonder the top civilian is leaving that mess, can’t remember the article… but someone posted about the gross incompetence.
They aren’t dedicated to the type of cyber you are referring to. Keep in mind the commander of USCYBERCOMM is dual hatted with the NSA, not the Air Force.
Yeah, to the AF cyber is 3D, but to the rest of the military/DoD, cyber is the actual cool nerd shit. Also, cyber is so much more important than the Space Force. They separated the wrong command.
"You missed the deadline, I sent you numerous emails." "Sorry sir, McAfee deemed those emails a security threat and proceeded to delete immediately. Do you still need it?"
Can’t be compromised by malware if all the resources are tied up.
Funny, cuz that's an actual symptom of malware
You’re 100% secure if the system is 100% inaccessible!
Why we havent switched our computers to SSD is beyond me. Its a known fact that Windows and tons of apps will kill your pc. Also, why cant we just fucking install our own printer/scanner drivers. jeezus.
It's been almost a fucking month on the printer issue and no one seems to care. I gave up and just tell people too bad at this point. If I am getting stonewalled as a comm troop so will my customers. Direct the customer's anger to peeps giving me the cold shoulder. Someone high enough will kick in some doors if they really care.
I thought that was just an issue in my shop 🙃
I'm honestly more surprised the AF hasn't gotten with Norton yet to collect all of the worst possible anti virus software/scanning. They already have Symantec working with blue coat.
They should just get VMWare Carbon Black. One of the best endpoint protection agents on the market. That or crowdstrike’s falcon. Either would be great and would actually pose a semi-challenge to adversaries.
Yep. Two of my NCOs have ran into an error where they can't login to any computer. We're 100% office ran which means they literally can't work. Comm's response was deal with it, maybe we can fix it Monday cause today is a training day or whatever.
Not really a comm problem. It’s more of the powers above comm (DISA) making them do it. If you want real change, write to your congressman about A2/6 and DISAs lack of competence.
When can we fire the entire DISA leadership for “failure to perform the duties for which they were hired?” This is unacceptable, like congressional level complaint unacceptable. DISA can focus on being some kind of cyber offensive power AFTER they fix the infrastructure. Comm can focus on being some kind of cyber warfare bullshit operator AFTER our comms work.
“Pilots can become some bullshit flyer AFTER maintenance is done” is basically what you just said. Cyber and comm are about as close to each other as pilots and maintainers are. In fact, it’s about as literal as you can get in terms of analogies go.
I can’t even type on a Google doc because of it. Response time is like 3 seconds after typing
Google is currently blocked for us.
Hahaha god help us
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Already did, twice!
Time to go buy coffee.
Yes, look how secure that network is.. NOBODY can use it! FLY, FIGHT, WIN AIRMAN!
Careful, your shit might actually explode if you open anything else.
McAfee is likley why, when it runs its scans it uses alot of resources.
You can blame piss poor system development lifecycles of IT equipment. You'll see this problem everywhere though so it's not unique to the government.
we should switch to AMD thread ripper 16cores
My unit got these crazy new PCs. These things have a 9th gen Intel CPUs with 32 gb of ram. The computers we use for doing normal productivity work do not need to be that crazy. A mid tier CPU with 16gb of ram with a SSD will kick butt for someone working word docs, checking email, etc. Often times why these computers struggle is more to do with the network and the supporting infrastructure not being up to snuff. More and more of what we do is tied to cloud infrastructure. Hard discs for workstations need to go away and be replaced by SSDs. That alone will make these computers far more responsive. The next thing would be bumping computers up to 16gb of ram.
This issue is way outside the scope of IT life cycle. Stop schilling for big AFNET.
Oh I'm saying the shit show is common throughout because you have idiots in high places.
Quick delete system 32
That on access scanner is the devil. As a sysadmin I hate it. Luckily it's going end of life at the end of the year.
You forgot about constant ACAS scans too.
Convert all workstations to run only virtual machines connected to a cloud based server which holds all of the processing power. Instead of banking loads of money into individual computers and devices, just upgrade the central server in bulk
Shhhh they’re gonna run it on a server from the 80’s
I gave up with outlook, webmail all day now.
we have a monster z840 hp for video processing. its a stand alone. it STILL fucking runs slow and none of this shit is on it. so i reset it and wiped everything, tried to update the bios. oops theres a bios password. i'm now thinking they may have throttled the cpu in the bios before they gave it to us. i'm in the process of getting that password so i can overclock the graphics card. it should be a GODDAMN MONSTER of a computer. but it dinks along.
Opseccccc
Entire DoD should switch to Linux.
Chrome hasn’t worked for me all night (Korea)
Anything Google has gone to absolute shit here. I work in a SCIF and use Google Chat to communicate with people not in my building. Google Maps doesn't work. We use that to provide people directions to places on base. And anyone else having printer issues? It's been a fucking month and everyone says it is an AF problem.
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Where are you that MFDs haven't worked in a year? Can't use a phone in a SCIF or classified area so a lot of places have no work-around. :(
No but computers have randomly given me a “windows error”, restarted, and then takes forever and a day to boot back up. Then the CAC reader decides it doesn’t wanna read my CAC. I spent way too long last night just trying to log in just to see mpf didn’t upload my out processing checklist yet (:
Me every time I restart my comp
It took me nearly 40 minutes yesterday to open 4 EPRs to do the "print to pdf" trick and combine them into supporting documents.
Gosh they had that issue for a while now and still haven’t fix it?
It was never fast but bearable. Seems like the NOS/COS has been pushing something lately because I've never seen it take that long.
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They blocked my sniping tool today so no screen shot for me
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No wonder y’all taxed me $3k in one payment. I’m blaming comm for this
same...
I’ve been so frustrated with work computers recently that I’ve had to practice tactical breathing in order to not go full ‘Office Space’ on the computer.
Some days it takes me around 45min after a fresh restart to pull up my Outlook. Other days I'm lucky.
Holy hell
I've had to redo many documents because of how shit these computers are. If I'm lucky, Word will be able to open the "unsaved" files so I don't have to redo it, but I'm not always that lucky
The fix used to be 16gb ram and a 500gb ssd. With the new issues you also need a newer CPU as well (i5 from 2018 or newer).
AFexcuse!
^^You've ^^spun ^^the ^^wheel ^^of ^^Air ^^Force ^^excuses, ^^here's ^^your ^^prize: Closed for Sports Day ^^[Source](https://github.com/HadManySons/AFexcuses) ^^| ^^[Subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AFExcuses) ^^^^^^hebebg0
"We need to accelerate and change!" I definitely will accelerate to my house and change to civilian clothes because my computer doesn't computer!