My views on things often differ from those in my social circle. I am often bombarded with article links and videos from people with no words of their own attached. It is very easy to send a link. It takes a bit of effort to form a coherent paragraph expressing a single thought....
I would describe this kind of communication as lazy and not very good.
I personally think that if their meaning is getting through, it’s a perfectly fine mode of communication. Lazy, maybe, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with laziness, wanting to do more with less work is kind of a basic part of the human condition, it only presents a problem if it’s preventing something from getting done. If there is a meme or a short video or something that perfectly sums up what I’m trying to say, why shouldn’t I use that resource instead of trying to rephrase everything into my own words? This isn’t 10th grade English class, you’re not going to fail life for plagiarism because you linked someone to an existing Wikipedia article instead of trying to rewrite it yourself.
Now if their meaning isn’t coming through, that’s of course an issue, but not one that necessarily reflects poorly on them nor on you. People absorb information best in different ways, you’ve almost definitely heard about people having different learning styles, different types of intelligence, and of course everyone has their own life experiences and frame of reference. Different forms of communication will reach different people in different ways. To everyone absorbs meaning from written words well, not everyone can effectively put their thoughts into words, not everyone speaks meme fluently, different experiences can lead people to interpret something in wildly different ways, etc.
Communication is a two-way street, it’s partially on them to tailor their message to their intended audience, but it’s also on the audience to interpret that message, however they may receive it, in a way that makes sense to them, and it’s on both halves to clarify things and make sure the meaning is being effectively delivered and received.
If you’re getting links and videos from people to explain their positions, odds are that they feel that the information you’re looking for is in their, and probably presented in a better way than they would be able to themselves. That’s probably how it was presented to them, and in the way it was presented it made a lot of sense to them, and that’s the best way they know to present that information to you. From there it’s on you to watch or read what they sent you and try to interpret it. If you don’t want to do that, then you’re the one being lazy, and not in the good way. And from there if you need clarification, ask for it about specific parts that aren’t making sense to you. You can’t sum up a 10, 20, 30 minute or hour+ long video in a few sentences and not loose a whole lot of context and details, it’s on you to explain what’s not making sense.
And if your counterpoints aren’t getting through to them, it may be on you to find a different way to explain it, if they’re sending you videos, it may work better to send them videos back than to flood them with paragraphs of text that they may not absorb properly.
If we’re talking about traditional broadcast or cable TV, or online services like YouTube TV or Hulu live TV, etc. it’s basically 0 and has been that way for years. Pretty much the only things I watch that way are the Superbowl, random bits of the Olympics, maybe the ball dropping on new years Eve if I’m at a party that I’m not hosting, some of the world series if my local team happens to make it, the very occasional breaking news story, and whatever my parents have on when I visit them.
If we’re talking about sitting in front of the TV streaming something, it’s significantly more.
If we want to split hairs, I work every other weekend, so on those weekends it’s still pretty much 0. On weekends or other days that I’m off (the way my schedule works, my “weekends” might also be a Monday & Tuesday or a Wednesday & Thursday,) it could be a few hours. I work a weird night shift (3pm-3am) and I usually pretty much keep to that same schedule on my days off, while my wife and pretty much everyone else I know works a normal 9-5 kind of job, so it’s usually pretty much just me and the dog left to entertain ourselves between about 10pm to maybe about 4 or 5 AM when I go to bed, and often a good chunk of that time will be spent in front of the TV in some fashion, sometimes actively watching stuff, sometimes just to have background noise while I work on other stuff.
I won’t usually spend much if any time watching TV during the day until about 6PM or so, then my wife and I will usually watch something while we eat dinner.
I keep an eye on what my local Indy/art house theaters have coming up, it doesn’t catch everything by a longshot but it usually does a pretty good job of catching some of the highlights.
I am lucky enough to have a good handful of those theaters reasonably close to me, and to some extent they seem to coordinate with each other so they’re not all showing the exact same movies.
Even if I don’t get a chance to see the movies in those theaters, it at least gives me an idea of what’s out or coming out soon.
Also support your indy theaters in general. The ones near me are generally a bit cheaper than other theaters, and while the seats may not have the latest reclining gimmick or whatever that the major chains are rolling out, the floors aren’t sticky, the audience stays off their phones, the staff actually gives a fuck, and often the buildings are just a lot more ornate and interesting than modern theaters. Just an all-around better experience.
If you live in or near a larger city, there’s likely one around somewhere, there’s also some smaller chains that show indie movies, Landmark theaters come to mind.
Even if there aren’t any near you, nothing stopping you from checking out what theaters in other areas are showing to get an idea what’s out there.
Also once upon a time I stumbled on a Google calendar that had all of the movie release dates in the US (assuming you’re in the US of course) that included a lot of Indie films, but the link I had for that is long-since broken, but that may still be out there somewhere in the Internet for anyone who cares enough to search it out.
I haven’t seen too many shows make fun of Indian food, but to be fair my taste in TV often isn’t very mainstream and doesn’t tend to include a lot of comedy, so I may not be the right one to answer this.
When I do see it, usually I see them joking about the smell, and I can kind of get that. Don’t get me wrong, I love Indian food, I love the flavors and smells and all that goes with it. But all of those wonderful spices can create a powerful smell, it can kind of cling to clothing and such, if you live in an apartment it’s very likely you’ll smell when your neighbors are cooking Indian food, etc. and I can get how that can be annoying or unpleasant for some people. Honestly, if I was constantly smelling Indian food wafting into my apartment through a shared vent or something, I’d probably get sick of it too.
There’s also the fact that a lot of Americans just have a very bland palate, and all of the spices, not to mention heat, can be very overwhelming to people who aren’t accustomed to it. Personally when I see these jokes, and again, my experience may not be typical, it tends to be more at the expense of the American having boring taste in food than actually making fun of Indian food itself.
And since I mentioned that people may not be accustomed to it, let’s not forget that America is a big, diverse country, and not every part of America has a big Indian population, which means a lot of the country doesn’t necessarily have a lot of exposure to indian food. I do happen to live in an area with a lot of Indian families, but you only need to drive maybe about an hour away for your options to dry up pretty quickly. I have friends who genuinely do not have any Indian restaurants anywhere near them, and their grocery options are sometimes kind of limited which may get in the way of making it at home if they wanted to (and not everyone is a great cook or willing to risk messing up dinner with unfamiliar recipes) And that much spice and flavor when you’re not used to it can be a bit off-putting. I’m a fairly adventurous eater, but I didn’t grow up eating Indian food (my mom is one of those kinds of people who thinks a McChicken is too spicy,) and I know the first time I had Indian I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it, I didn’t dislike it, but I had to have it a couple times before I really came to appreciate it.
Personally, in my circles the people who don’t like Indian tend to be the odd ones out that get made fun of, but again I’m not necessarily representative of America in general, that’s just been my own experience. I even know some people who love indian food but can’t/shouldn’t eat it due to all of the spices and such not sitting well with their stomachs (and there may be a discussion to be had about many American’s bland, super-processed diets having negative effects on their gut microbiomes possibly making it harder for their systems to handle certain cuisines, but that’s well outside of my depth to really go into, I’m a foodie, not a nutritionist, so take my speculation with a heaping helping of some coarse finishing salt)
Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen....
Nitrogen is, as far as our biology is concerned, effectively inert, we don’t really do anything with it, it more or less just goes in and out of our lungs. For most practical purposes under normal atmospheric conditions it could pretty much be replaced with just about any nonpoisonous gas. As far as your body is concerned that part of the atmosphere might as well be helium, and in fact for certain deep sea diving applications and such we do replace some or all of the gas mix with things like helium because nitrogen will sort of dissolve into your bleed at high pressure, which causes issues when you start to resurface and it creates nitrogen bubbles in your blood (known as “the bends” or more technically as “decompression sickness”) and those other gasses don’t dissolve into our blood as readily.
Pretty much as long as oxygen is at the right percentage, your body doesn’t care what the rest of the gas mix is as long as it’s not outright poisonous.
Now there could be issues for nitroget-fixing bacteria that do use atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into other nitrogen compounds that are absolutely necessary for plants and such to grow (and by extension for us and everything else that eats those plants, or eats things that eat plants) to live, and I’ll be honest, I have no idea at what level of atmospheric nitrogen that would start to be a problem, and unless we want to start growing crops in underwater domes it’s probably not something we ever really need to worry about on earth, nitrogen is very plentiful in our atmosphere. It could possibly be something worth investing for long-term space exploration and such, but we’re not quite there yet.
Overall you’re not on a bad track with thinking that other elements in the same column could substitute for nitrogen, often those elements will have similar properties.
However it doesn’t really apply in this particular case, the other elements in its group are all pretty reactive and solid, and include elements like phosphorus and arsenic. Even nitrogen compounds can be pretty damn reactive, it’s just kind of a quirk of chemistry that diatomic hydrogen (N2) which makes up most of our atmosphere is pretty stable and nonreactive under most circumstances.
We need certain nitrogen compounds as part of our biological processes but we don’t get that nitrogen from the air, we get it from food we eat, which ultimately get it from the air mostly from microbes in the soil that are actually able to take nitrogen from the air and turn it into other chemicals.
However since atmospheric nitrogen is, for the purposes of this conversation, inert, you can pretty much replace it with any other nonpoisonous gas, like we often do for deep sea divers, because under high pressure nitrogen will dissolve into our blood and then when we resurface it creates nitrogen bubbles in our blood which is very bad.
I admit I only skimmed the article, and I haven’t been keeping up with the day to day goings on over there, but off the top of my head even if there is a ceasefire in effect I can think of a couple reasons they might still be doing it
They want the ceasefire extended, or are prepping for another ceasefire further down the line after things resume
General raising awareness
They believe one or both sides aren’t holding up their end of the ceasefire agreement and want to hold them accountable
They’ve now pivoted to the next issue regarding the conflict, like what can be done with the time the ceasefire has bought, what the next steps should be after it ends, how to bring about an end to the war, what should happen after the war, etc.
[…] Parcelforce texted the delivery slot. No delivery. Parcelforce and HP’s tracking systems then claimed I had refused the parcel. I scheduled a redelivery for the next day. Parcelforce then rang me and the agent acknowledged a delivery had not been attempted and that the tracking information was false. It claimed HP had...
Only tangentially related, but I’m still kind of pissed about HP buying VoodooPC and doing basic fuck-all with it and just slapping the Omen name on stuff once in a while.
For those who don’t remember, VoodooPC used to be a higher end prebuilt gaming computer company. You can go ahead and argue about why prebuilts are trash, not really the point, I don’t know if they were at all good computers or worth the cost, but I thought they made some really cool looking computers if nothing else, and occasionally had some pretty cool ideas. The omen was one of their flagship offerings.
I may be misremembering, it’s been like a decade, but I think HP acquired them pretty soon after Dell bought Alienware so it was probably their way of trying to stay competitive. I think by most accounts Dell kind of turned Alienware into shit, but at least they’ve kept the branding around and still make some cool-looking computers if nothing else.
Would love to know what you guys think and your reasoning for it. I’m starting to see a lot of Apple Watches/Fitbits/Galaxy Watches in my area compared to more traditional timepieces.
I really want to get onboard the smart watch thing, but my usual daily wear watch for the last decade or so has been a Casio protrek prg-550, which is solar powered so I haven’t even had to change a battery in all that time, let alone worry about charging it, so I really kind of don’t want to switch to something I have to remember to charge every day or every couple of days
Yeah, there are definitely a few options that have better battery life than others, but so far none of them have quite put the whole package together for me, I’m a bit picky about what software and interface I want, what kind of features and options, and most importantly I want it to look good.
The Garmin is pretty close to what I’m looking for, and has some nifty features, but after all these years wearing my protrek I’m kind of looking for something a little dressier looking for my EDC watch. The Garmin would probably be a pretty good fit for my camping and hiking and such needs, which is a main reason I got the protrek years ago, but isn’t quite what I’m looking for in my day-to-day life right now
I’m 32, I’ve never really been one to rank my friends but there’s a few I’d consider to be frontrunners
I have a guy I’ve been friends with since pre school, we sometimes forget to talk or hang out for months or occasionally years at a time, but always end up picking up right where we left off.
There’s a handful of friends who I can always hit up to do something and if they’re free they’re always up for an adventure or to lend me a hand with whatever I’m working on.
There’s of course my wife, which feels like a lame cop-out of an answer because of course my wife is my best friend
And there’s my dog, which is even more of a kop-out.
An interesting thing that’s happened this year is that probably about a half dozen people, both people I’d consider to be in the running for best friend, and ones who I wouldn’t necessarily rank that high (not that I don’t like them or think highly of them, just never quite thought of them that way) have told me how much they value my friendship, which I guess means I must be doing something right.
The thing with kids keeping you busy is that oftentimes friendships will tend to decay if you aren’t able to keep up with them, and if you put too much time into your kids you may end up as an empty nester 20 or so years down the line having raised your kids to adulthood successfully, only to discover you don’t have any friends left.
That kind of happened to my dad, I genuinely can’t name anyone that I’d really call his friend. Luckily he’s a bit of an introvert and my mom is sociable enough for the both of them, so I don’t think he’s exactly suffering for it, but it’s weird to think of kind of having to start from scratch at 50+ years old going out and trying to make some friends.
For my part I do my damnedest to keep my friends with kids in the loop, but it gets hard sometimes, and to make it work I’ve had to drag along far more rugrats on hiking and fishing trips than I ever really cared to.
Gator- tastes like chicken, kind of tough and chewy, but come on, have you ever seen an alligator? Of course it was going to be chewy.
Frog legs- pretty much a dead ringer for chicken wings if you didn’t know what a wing was supposed to look like. Maybe just the tiniest hint of something fishy going on there.
Escargot - an excellent excuse to eat a bunch of butter and garlic and for some reason it’s fancy even though you’re eating a garden pest
Squirrel - kind of greasy, but not bad, darker meat than I expected. Not really enough meat on them to be worth it though, at least not the squirrels we have in my neck of the woods, I’ve seen some pretty big squirrels in other parts of the country though, so maybe they’re a little more worthwhile. If you had a handful of squirrels I suspect they could make a pretty good soup or stew though.
Rabbit- tastes like chicken, I’ve had it a few different ways, I don’t know that I would know the difference if you swapped rabbit for chicken in any of them, but I had a rabbit pot pie at a restaurant a few years ago that has been my happy thought ever since, probably the tastiest thing I have ever eaten.
Deer venison - very similar to beef, a bit gamey but I dig that.
Quail - tiny chicken, that’s pretty much all there is to it.
Pigeon- much darker than chicken, a bit greasy, overall pretty tasty (these were country pigeons, I don’t recommend eating city pigeons) a single pigeon breast is pretty much exactly the right size to make a pigeon nugget.
Bison- lean beef, maybe a bit stronger tasting but overall pretty well within the beef spectrum. If you didn’t tell me it was bison, I’d probably assume it was either really cheap or moderately expensive beef.
Wild boar- pork but not, kind of hard to explain this one, and the way I had it prepared had a lot of spices and seasoning so I can’t really give a straight appraisal of the meat itself.
Kangaroo- it tastes like it evolved on a different continent than any other mammal you’ve ever eaten. It’s still very much in the red meat family but there’s something else going on there that’s kind of hard to place, sort of gamey and stronger tasting.
Goose- kind of like a mix of duck and turkey, leaning more duck-like, and yeah, that tracks, you could probably just about assume that from looking at a goose.
I wouldn’t really consider these to be exotic, but a surprising amount of people don’t seem to have tried them, and they’re some of my all-time favorite meats.
Duck- its more like a red meat than chicken, can be kind of greasy/fatty but in a good way
Lamb- red meat, kind of a strong gamey taste (that again, I personally really like) oddly somehow gamier than venison despite venison actually being a game meat and lamb being domesticated. You could probably serve me deer and tell me it was beef and slip it by me, but I don’t think you could pull it off with lamb.
Goat- lamb, but moreso.
Liver- it’s kind of hard to describe liver in any way but livery, but iron-y and minneral-y are probably the best adjectives I can come up with. I’ve had beef liver and chicken liver, beef is definitely a stronger flavor but both are recognizably livery. Chicken liver is probably mild enough that as long as it’s prepared well most people could enjoy it, beef liver is definitely more of an acquired taste.
Chicken hearts- stronger flavored and tougher than regular chicken, but still recognizably chicken, imagine dark meat but lean. Little bit of a irony/mineraly taste, but not in a livery way, can be a little tough/chewy, and if you’re inclined to batter and fry them, they are the perfect size to make sort of a popcorn chicken thing with, or if you want to have little bits of meat for a stir fry or something and don’t feel like chopping up the meat yourself. They are also dirt cheap, at least around me.
Tripe- a bit chewy, honestly not too much going on flavor-wise, there’s something going on that tastes/smells of a barnyard but in a very pleasant way, but it’s almost more of a suggestion of a taste than an actual flavor.
Beef tongue- recognizably beefy, but definitely has something going else on, not quite livery but leaning that direction. Definitely something you need to braise or sous vide or something for a long time because it will be damn near impossible to chew otherwise, and it has its own unique texture, it will probably make you think a lot about your own tongue while eating it.
Chicken feet- look, there’s really no meat worth speaking of on a chicken foot, it’s basically all skin and connective tissue which is tasty and an interesting texture, but not worth it to me to eat themselves, some people do, but it’s not for me. ut if you want to take you chicken stock to the next level, use some chicken feet.
And these are probably the opposite of exotic, just weird or have bad press
Pickled pigs feet- salty vinegary vaguely porky jello with bones in it. I like salty vinegary things, so that’s not a bad thing in my book.
Scrapple- local delicacy for those of us in the Delaware valley, if you’ve ever heard spam described as everything but the oink, well scrapple has some oink in it too. It’s soft and mushy and fries up to a real nice crisp on the outside. Taste is sort of in a similar vein as a breakfast sausage, really nothing too wild about it.
Pork roll (you north jersey folk calling it Taylor Ham are crazy, it says pork roll right on the package, you’re wrong) is basically just spam with a better PR department, less salty, slightly different spices, doesn’t come in a can.
And on that note- spam, it’s delicious but very salty. If you like ham you’ll probably like spam.
Which ancestor? I’m a mutt of several different European ancestries, I don’t speak a word of even modern Polish, Italian, or Albanian, let alone any archaic dialects, so I doubt they’re going to be able to sus out that I’m a time traveler, what they do make of me is up for debate, probably nothing good but I doubt they’d land on time traveler from the future. If I end up in one of my Irish ancestors’ villages, odds are they’re speaking Gaelic, but can probably find an English speaker somewhere who might catch on that my dialect is very unusual, though unless I do something to tip my hand about my future knowledge, I still doubt they’d suspect time travel. Scientific knowledge could be written off in different ways, and I don’t know enough 16th century history to really be able to say or do anything prophetic.
If my goal is to avoid being outed as a time traveler, I can probably play dumb well enough not to tip my hand. They might assume I’m an idiot, insane, a witch, a demon, a fairy, etc. but I can probably avoid being outed as a time traveler.
The future is harder, if time travel is a known technology/phenomenon, I imagine I’d be outted pretty quickly. If not, I suspect I’d probably be treated as insane or an amnesia patient or something, I can’t think of any reason they would assume I’m a time traveler unless I make it a point to bring it up, maybe if they run some blood tests and notice I’m missing immunity to common future diseases or radioactive contamination from WWII or something. Even then they would probably assume I’m a descendant of a secret bunker cult or something along those lines that wouldn’t break the laws of physics.
I’m sure it’s a quite different experience, but there are people whohave gotten magnets implanted under their skin in order to feel magnetic field.
I’m not quite ready for that myself, but I did do a little experiment my supergluing some tiny neodymium magnets to my fingernails. I suspect the implants are probably more sensitive since they better able to wiggle around but I could feel some things. The forklift charger and pencil sharpener I had at work got probably the strongest responses I noticed for the week or so I had them.
I also got really used to picking up paperclips and such with them really quick, I caught myself trying to do it now and then for probably about a month after I no longer had the magnets.
Somewhat related to that, certain Australian aboriginal languages don’t have words for relative directions like left/right and use cardinal directions (north/south/east/west) so they tend to keep track of their orientation subconsciously.
So if you were to help one of them, for example, move a couch, they might tell you to move your end a bit to the west and avoid any “my left or your left?/No your other left” shenanigans.
Probably also a very helpful thing to be aware of if you find yourself trying to navigate the outback.
If you’re careful and can’t just get it off with your fingernails, a razor blade is young best friend for scraping off stickers, if you’re less careful they sell plastic razor blades for scraping stuff that also work pretty well.
For residue, goo gone, cooking oil, isopropyl alcohol, lighter fluid, or just some soap and water if you’re careful. Or just let the residue wear off on its own if you’re lazy.
I was at a music festival, we were camped out across from a bunch of really obnoxious frat bro types. They weren’t causing any real issues and we were an decent terms with them as campsite neighbors, they were just really loud and obnoxious and had a different sort of energy than my group.
One guy in my campsite had one of the big 1 litre German boot glasses. Frat bros found out about this and wanted to give it a try, so we let them.
We watched them pour 2 12 oz PBRs into it (it will hold about 3), and fail to chug it.
I’m a pretty proficient chugger, so I decided to show them up. Filled the glass up with a considerably heavier beer, started to walk over to demonstrate how it’s done. As I’m walking out of our site though, it dawned on my already slightly innebrated brain that it had been a while since I’d chugged a litre, so I wanted to make sure I could still do it, so I downed a full test boot, immediately filled it back up, and walked over to demonstrate how it was done for our rowdy neighbors and executed the maneuver flawlessly.
So with 2 liters of beer in my stomach, I then went into my tent to have a little power-blackout to recharge my batteries for a night of debauchery.
Dr Bronners peppermint soap and classic Old spice deodorant.
Dr Bronners because it’s cool and refreshing and I’m a sweaty dude, plus I can buy it in a big jug that lasts me forever.
Old spice because I’ve used it forever, it works for me, is widely available, fairly affordable, and I get a surprising amount of compliments asking what kind of cologne I have on (I don’t normally wear cologne.) I’m pretty sure I got a little sample stick of it back in 5th grade when we had a sex ed/wear deodorant because some of you stink assembly, and I tried a couple others over the years but always find my way back to old spice.
It just occurred to me that my internet dialect in my IRL dialect are slightly different in a few ways. Curious to hear others dialectal differences and thoughts on the subject.
I think my online voice is pretty similar to my IRL voice, probably the biggest thing is that my accent doesn’t come through
I’m from outside of Philly and while I don’t necessarily have the most strong, stereotypical accent, I do have a lot of the typical linguistic quirks, but a lot of it tends to be pronunciation differences. As far as actually words and phrases, I use "jawn” and “youse” or “youse guys” a lot less online.
For example I might grab myself a cup of cawfee or an ahrnge juice and a begel for breakfast, before I head down to the crick to do some fishing. Before I go I’ll leave a note for my wife telling her when to expect me back, but I can’t find a pen so I use some crowns. Then when I get back I’ll warsh off my boots with wooder from the spicket outside, maybe wipe them off with a tal, and put them inside by the rattyator to dry off, while I sit down to watch the iggles game (go birds!) Maybe I’ll hit up my friend, and ask him “Jeet?” and he’ll reply, “No, jew?” so I’ll stop at Wawa and tap MAC so I can buy us some hoagies, probably paired with a lager, and maybe get some wooder ice or maybe some ice cream with jimmies for dessert.
I had a warehouse job for a textile company that made mostly work clothes, chef coats, table linens, etc, and part of my duties was processing returns. Once in a while we got stuff back that couldn’t be put back into stock for one reason or another (items had been altered, discontinued, slightly damaged) so I took home some chef coats, aprons, cloth napkins and such that otherwise were going in the trash.
I also was in charge of ordering our supplies from uline. If you’ve never ordered from uline (not that I recommend it, last time I checked their owners’ politics were trash) when you hit certain order amounts you can get free stuff. The previous guy in charge of ordering was a manager or supervisor or something, and would give those freebies out to people, when he left they didn’t really hire a direct replacement and most of his duties fell on me without any real promotion or raise so I started keeping those freebies for myself. There was never any official policy about it, and I just never really mentioned it to anyone and did it on my own since I was the guy receiving the packages anyway. Just before I gave my two weeks notice one of the other warehouse employees asked me about giving out the free stuff like the previous guy did, I wasn’t there long enough to make another order after that, but if I had been she always kind of treated me like trash so I might have started giving stuff out to everyone but her.
I also probably walked out of there with a few box cutters and pencils and such, not intentionally, just putting things in my pocket and forgetting about them until I got home.
It’s not necessarily the weirdest, but it has a pretty great story behind it
I have a relative, I believe he’s like a second cousin or something along those lines who has an actual coffin that he uses as a Halloween decoration.
He decided he wanted a coffin, so he goes to one of the local funeral homes to see what they have around that’s not too expensive and looks a bit spooky.
It just so happens that he’s has a pretty nice wooden coffin that’s just been kicking around in storage for a couple decades.
Why has this coffin been kicking around in storage? Because some local guy died back in the late 80s while visiting family in Poland. They had to scramble a bit to figure out how to get his body back to the US and pretty much got the cheapest wooden box they could find to ship him back in, and then buried him in a different casket. And it had just been kicking around since then since he had no use for it but also didn’t want to get rid of it.
And that guy that died in Poland was my grandfather.
My mom’s a bit salty about the situation, she thinks it’s disrespectful or something. I personally think it’s a cool piece of family trivia, and although I never had the opportunity to meet him, from what I know of him I think my grandfather would have gotten a kick out of it.
Kind of bridging the Sci Fi an Fantasy angles, someone could probably come up with an interesting mechanic about how the blood is grown in a lab
Could be that just straight-up blood cultures grown in a vat don’t have the necessary life force, but growing some genetically engineered organism that is just a living blood factory, basically a meat bag of bone marrow, circulatory system, and just enough of a nervous system to keep things going checks enough boxes for it to work.
Sort of tangential to lab-grown blood, but maybe there’s a little industry preying on the families of brain-dead patients who insist on keeping them on life support and convincing them to move their loved ones mortal vessels into a blood farm when the medical bills start piling up too high. Or desperate women taking dangerous drugs and getting pregnant in hopes of having an anencephalic baby that they can sell to the vampires to make ends meet.
Maybe there was a plague that causes widespread birth defects and millions of babies are being born without any higher brain functions. The church is having an absolute conniption over this, they won’t condone aborting them or taking them off of life support, but the only way many can afford to keep these human-shape meat puppets alive is by giving them over to the vampire blood farms, and they’re certainly not about to condone anything having to do with those demon-spawn bloodsuckers either.
For me it was “buy high quality pillow” because you sleep for one thrid of a day etc. I needed a new pillow anyway so I came to the store and bought the best they had. And it was … ok. Like it’s a fine pillow but my sleeping haven’t improved really, it’s basically the same. So I was disapointed :(...
I disagree with it being garbage though. It’s true, most of their merchandise isn’t the highest quality, but when you need a tool for just one project that you don’t already own and can’t seem to borrow from anyone it’s a great place to get that tool on the cheap, and for some oddball tools there’s may be no convenient place to track them down.
I was recently working on a small project I needed a router for. In this case I was able to borrow a router from a friend but he only had one bit for it and it wasn’t one I needed. If you haven’t priced out router bits recently, they tend to go for like $20-30 a piece from the usual big retailers.
I was able to get a set of 15 bits from harbor freight for about $30-40 and they did exactly what I needed them to.
I’m sure they probably won’t last as long as the good bits, but for how often I need a router these will probably last me the rest of my life.
Needed a rivnut tool for a different project a few months ago, and nowhere else around me carries them, beat waiting a couple days for one from Amazon.
Also have a bike rack from them that’s doing the job just fine, and a handful of little weird tools for various hobbies.
I wouldn’t trust them for anything my life or livelihood depends on, but for little incidental things I can’t borrow or find anywhere else they do just fine.
I’ve been known once or twice to find my keys (or phone, that wrench, etc.) get distracted immediately after, then go back to looking for thembecause that’s what I remember doing before I got distracted while they’re right there in my hand.
You could arguably say that I re-lost them and started a new search, but I think it’s funnier to say I kept looking after it’s been found.
Heat increases bleedflow and can help relax muscles
Bodies are complex, there’s a lot of systems all connected together which means injuries often have multiple aspects to what’s wrong.
Probably some of the most common injuries you’ll see this kind of treatment for are things like sprains and strains, where you’ve stretched muscles, tendons, or ligaments a bit too far and maybe tore them a bit. Ligaments are tissue that connects your bones together, and tendons connect muscles to your bones.
Your body responds to this by swelling, it sends extra blood to the area to start working on repairs. It may also help somewhat to cushion and/or immobilize the joint slightly to prevent you from making it worse. Heat opens up blood vessels and gets even more blood flowing through the area, so it can help speed up the healing a bit, and if it gets your muscles to relax it can take some of the stress off of whatever’s injured, don’t want your muscles pulling on some damaged ligaments too much, you want them to relax so they can heal.
But that swelling can be pretty damn uncomfortable on top of any pain from the actual injury itself, your skin, muscles, and other tissues can only stretch so much to accommodate that extra blood so it’s putting pressure on everything around it. Cold sort of slows down your nerve cells so they can’t send as many pain signals to your brain. And like how heat opens up your blood vessels, cold makes them contract so you don’t get as much bloodflow and so less swelling.
So you can see that both have their benefits and drawbacks, overall cold is more of a pain management thing, and hot is more to expedite the healing, and depending on the type of injury, how much pain you’re in, etc. it can be beneficial to do one, the other, or alternate between both.
This is sort of an ELI5 answer, im sure there’s a bunch of special cases or ifs, ands, and buts that could be sprinkled in there, but I’m no medical professional, but hopefully that gives you the general gist of it. If anyone spots anything I got wrong, please let me know.
I mean, I dont actually mind ads… within reason. But over the past few years I have watched less and less youtube content due to the ratio of ads to the actual bloody content I wanted to view....
The thing about Nazis (and other flavors of racist shitbags if anyone wants to play the “well akshually they’re not Nazis, theyre…” game) is they don’t care, they’ll pretend to be reasonable, break bread with their enemies, etc. as long as it’s convenient for them. But they don’t view those others as being equal human beings, so once they’ve accomplished whatever they set out to do, they’ll turn on them as soon as they think they have the upper hand without a moment’s hesitation.
That’s the Nazi playbook and always has been. You can see it happen in WWII, you can see it in the lunatic fringe taking over the Republican party over the last century or so, it’s how these types operate.
They’ll happily throw their lot in with whoever is convenient to their cause in the moment, why should they care? They’re just planning on turning on them down the road anyway, hell, it probably even gets them a better look at how these temporary allies/future targets for extermination operate and gets them in closer for when they eventually make their move against them.
That is your end goal, it’s not theirs, their plans go much deeper and throwing your lot in with them makes you a part of those plans, even if just as a pawn.
I’m all for holding the Israeli government and netenyahu accountable, but if I see a Nazi I tell them to go follow their leader regardless of what they happen to be saying at the moment. There’s plenty of people who aren’t total pieces of shit who are sympathetic to or could be converted the cause, but most of them are going to be turned off from it by the presence of Nazis.
Purely annecdotally, I definitely haven’t done any serious research on this, but I work in 911 dispatch and every time we change the clocks it seems like we get more weird calls from people who probably have mental health issues for a few days. My pet theory is that it screws up some of their medication schedules and/or throws off their circadian rhythms.
▶ 4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
I believe the mods of this community usually choose not to actively enforce that rule, but if I’m in a news community, I want news, not memes and jokes. If we want to discuss it and even joke about it, that’s what the comment section is for.
▶ 4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
I believe the mods of this community usually choose not to actively enforce that rule, but if I’m in a news community, I want news, not memes and jokes. If we want to discuss it and even joke about it, that’s what the comment section is for.
Pope Francis prays for an end to the violence in the Holy Land, especially in Gaza where a humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded, as well as for the ...
I suppose he could call for another crusade or maybe dispatch the Swiss Guard to the region. /S
Somewhat more seriously, though not something I’m actually suggesting or would necessarily want to see, he is a head of state and a prominent public figure, it wouldn’t be out of the question for him to play a role in some sort of negotiations as an intermediary or something.
He also has the ears of potentially every Catholic in the world, as well as non-catholics who may want to hear his perspective, and while I’d personally very much rather the church mind their own business and not get involved, he could potentially give guidance to them about how they should feel about the situation, what they can/should or should not do to help, what they should be asking of their governments, etc.
Again, I personally would rather the church keep out of it, but those are some options available should people feel that the Pope should involve himself.
I was thinking about how fire guns are very loud and how its worst in close environments (I had never shot a gun cuz im not american) and I remembered the Mirror room scene in John Wick Chapter 2....
The answer probably needs to have a whole lot of “it depends”
What kind of firearm, what kind of glass, thickness of the glass, how far away was the gun when it was fired, etc. will probably all have an effect, and maybe even some more exotic variables, resonant frequencies, atmospheric conditions, temperature,angle you fired the gun at relative to the glass, etc.
Glass absolutely can be broken by vibrations and pressure waves similar to those made by a gunshot, and I would probably expect a high caliber supersonic round fired within inches of a thin piece of weak, brittle glass to break the glass, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, a low powered subsonic round fired far away from a thick piece of strong tempered glass I would expect to have little to no effect whatsoever.
Those are both fairly extreme examples, and I certainly don’t have the science/mathematic background to tell you where the limits are in the middle.
I live in the Philly suburbs, our highways are all a bit of a clusterfuck but if I had to choose
I476 (Northeast Extension to the PA turnpike) between about midcounty and Lansdale, maybe Quakertown isn’t usually too bad traffic wise, above that is probably the prettier drive but there is always some mind-breakingly bad traffic and/or construction whenever I go that way.
I76 (Schuylkill Expressway) between the city and Conshohocken is kind of nice if you’re on it at like 3AM when there’s no traffic, some really nice views of Manayunk and Boathouse Row and such, most of the rest of the time it’s a parking lot.
I76 (PA Turnpike) is usually pretty nice further out west when you’re away from major cities
It’s an absolute madhouse of different lanes and is always busy, but the NJ turnpike somehow manages to keep traffic moving better than nearly any other highway I’ve ever driven on.
A lot of the smaller highways further up in the mountains (usually) don’t have too much traffic and are very scenic, but you have to be at least an hour and probably 2 or 3 out of Philly to get the most of that, and at that point I often can’t recommend getting off the highway to interact with the locals.
So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let...
I can’t find anything about this dome in a google search
I gotta question your methodology here a bit, because just googling “firmament” will get you quite a lot of results and you don’t have to read very far into the actual Bible to come across the term (depending on the version of the Bible you read, different translations use different terms, sometimes I’ve seen “vault” used instead) its probably going to be right there on the first page of Genesis.
Now the Bible doesn’t exactly do a great job of describing the firmament. Coming up with an actual model for for the heavens and the earth kind of fell to various scholars over the years trying to make sense of it.
In general, if you take it literally, the firmament is normally interpreted as a sort of solid structure somewhere up above the sky that separates heaven and a whole bunch of water from the rest of creation and probably more or less resembles a dome above a flat earth. The exact structure of all of that will vary quite a bit depending on which denomination and scholars you listen to.
Even the word firmament should kind of clue you in that it’s supposed to be kind of solid, you can really go down a linguistic rabbit hole through all manner of English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, etc. words with this but for the most part you’ll get the impression that you’re supposed to believe there is some sort of physical barrier there
Most of the mainstream sects have adopted somewhat less-literal interpretations over the years because obviously the science doesn’t support that interpretation at all.
But of course there are a whole lot of absolutely wacky Christian denominations (all of them are at least a bit wacky, but some really go the extra mile into the heart of crazytown) and even in the less-insane denominations some individuals pick and choose and come up with their own batshit interpretations of things.
Off the top of my head, I don’t know which sects stick to a literal interpretation of it being a solid dome, but I’m absolutely sure they’re out there, but most of them are probably not very mainstream, most of them are probably independent churches not affiliated or only loosely affiliated with any larger organization. And a lot of people who believe it are probably picking it up outside of any organized church and either coming up with their own interpretations or getting it from some wackadoo on the internet.
Trying to talk sense into her is probably an exercise in futility and I would not have even the faintest idea of how to go about doing that. If you do want to learn more about her specific beliefs though, a good place to start is probably going right to the source and figuring out which church she goes to and where she’s getting her info- what websites, books, YouTube channels, etc. and the best way to do that is probably just to ask her. Don’t try to argue with her and convince her she’s wrong, you’re not going to get anywhere, just get some links and recommendations, she’s probably going to view it as a chance to convert you and born again types are all about that, she’ll probably dump a whole bunch on you.
I had a teacher once who used to work at a school for the deaf and he told us about their school dances. Apparently they would crank the bass way up so everyone could feel the vibrations, and apparently a lot of the kids would carry balloons around because you can really feel it in the balloons, it actually sounded like a pretty cool experience
I work in a 911 dispatch center, we had a shooting at a bowling alley a few years ago, it was probably one of the craziest, most stressful incidents we’ve had since I’ve been working there. So that hits a little close to home for me.
The incident we had wasn’t a mass shooting, just some assholes who shouldn’t have had guns got into a fight and started blasting.
It was right after shift change, we had pretty much all just sat down and logged in, usually at that time of day there’s not too much really going on, and then suddenly everyone in the room’s phone went off at once and everything became chaos for the next hour or so.
The shooting was over by the time we got the first call, the shooter was probably even long-gone, out the door in a car speeding away.
My first caller was just hysterically screaming, I couldn’t really get any useful information from them, but from what I could hear in the background it sounded like they were close to the victims, maybe even had been part of their group.
We had about 3 or 4 wildly different descriptions of the suspect. Was it one person or was it three? We’re they old or young? Black or white? We’re they wearing trench coats, hoodies, military style jackets?
We had a caller who had grabbed some kids and pulled them into a utility closet to hide.
We had calls coming in for the rest of the night and even the next day from people who were there and fled as soon as it started.
I don’t think you’d see a shoe size drop from that (since it’s more volume loss than length)
For people with wide feet, it can sometimes be hard to find shoes that fit properly and you may have to go up a size or 2 to get shoes that work for you
I normally wear a US men’s size 11 wide and my shoes tend to be a bit long for me, but my feet aren’t fitting in anything much smaller comfortably. Wide shoes are usually an E or EE width, if I could more reliably find EEE width shoes I could probably go down to a size 10 or 10½, so I could definitely imagine someone in a similar situation going down a size by losing some weight
It’s especially frustrating when I go looking for safety toe shoes because usually that toe cap isn’t actually doing much to protect my feet and just kind of makes the shoe more uncomfortable
It’s also only about half the battle for me, because my toes are pretty wide but the rest of my foot and especially my heels are actually kind of narrow, so trying to find shoes that actually fit me well is basically impossible unless I start shelling out big bucks for custom made shoes.
Hi Guys, I’ve been following Louis Rossman and Rich Rebuilds on YouTube. I love their videos , do you know other youtubers who make similar content and are also Funny ?
I lost interest in AVE during COVID when he started supporting the Canadian trucker protests. Wasn’t surprised that he was conservative but that definitely didn’t sit right with me and haven’t watched him since.
I also felt like his quality was going downhill around that time anyway, not sure if he picked it back up since then or not.
For me instant coffee is for backpacking, because when you’re busting your ass on the trail for a few days literally anything you can eat or drink tastes amazing
What is a term to describe expressing one's opinions with links and memes instead of words?
My views on things often differ from those in my social circle. I am often bombarded with article links and videos from people with no words of their own attached. It is very easy to send a link. It takes a bit of effort to form a coherent paragraph expressing a single thought....
How many hours do you watch TV on a weekend?
Which sources do you follow to learn of new indie/small movies?
Sources as in sites, blogs, people, columns, etc....
Indian Food is praised worldwide and celebrated in countries like the UK and Germany. Americans, why do all your comedy shows rag on Indian food?
Why are we so concerned with oxygen production yet we never hear about nitrogen production, though we actually need 78% nitrogen vs 21% oxygen to survive?
Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen....
Activists calling for Gaza ceasefire begin hunger strike outside White House (www.theguardian.com)
HP says I should have known its £399 laptop bargain was too good to be true (www.theguardian.com)
[…] Parcelforce texted the delivery slot. No delivery. Parcelforce and HP’s tracking systems then claimed I had refused the parcel. I scheduled a redelivery for the next day. Parcelforce then rang me and the agent acknowledged a delivery had not been attempted and that the tracking information was false. It claimed HP had...
Do you prefer to wear a smartwatch or a regular watch?
Would love to know what you guys think and your reasoning for it. I’m starting to see a lot of Apple Watches/Fitbits/Galaxy Watches in my area compared to more traditional timepieces.
So I just watched "Watch please dont destroy the treasure of foggy mountains". The movie is about friendship. Do any of you guys (over the age of 30) have best friends ?
Are there any good Black Friday deals this year? (kbin.social)
Feel free to share links and talk about what's good about the deal
What is the most exotic meat you've eaten? How was your experience?
In which scenario would you last longer before being outed as a time traveller?
Being dropped 500 years ago into your ancestors’ community....
Which heightened/different senses of other animals would you most like to experience (while still being human)?
Of the senses we’re familiar with or aware of, anyway, e.g. taste/smell/hearing/vision/touch.
How to get rid of factory applied laptop stickers?
Hi, I got a used laptop from an family member. It did have this this annoying sticker on it (see picture). Apparently for years already....
whats your best drinking story?
Don’t dox yourself btw. It’s the storytellers prerogative to take a bit of creative license.
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In what ways does your internet dialect differ from your IRL dialect?
It just occurred to me that my internet dialect in my IRL dialect are slightly different in a few ways. Curious to hear others dialectal differences and thoughts on the subject.
Have you ever taken something home from a workplace without permission, to keep it? (kbin.social)
Big or small, cheap or expensive....
Weirdest thing you use / you've seen used for decoration?
I use a menu of a restaurant like a poster. I haven’t ordered from them. It’s a simple large burger menu.
men not having shirts on in public is gross (kbin.social) French
also applies to women wearing crop tops and bikinis...
Could vampires drink lab-grown blood?
Which Life Pro Tip disappointed you?
For me it was “buy high quality pillow” because you sleep for one thrid of a day etc. I needed a new pillow anyway so I came to the store and bought the best they had. And it was … ok. Like it’s a fine pillow but my sleeping haven’t improved really, it’s basically the same. So I was disapointed :(...
Actors’ Union Says It Receives ‘Last, Best and Final’ Offer From Studios (www.nytimes.com)
What the fuck are the studios gonna do, make movies and shows without actors?...
How is it that there are cold treatments and hot treatments for the same injuries/conditions?
Is it just “extreme temperatures” in general that can have medicinal properties?
Do you feel, as I do, that this adblocker ban by Youtube will harm all of Alphabet's companies? [discussion]
I mean, I dont actually mind ads… within reason. But over the past few years I have watched less and less youtube content due to the ratio of ads to the actual bloody content I wanted to view....
Neo-Nazis and the Far-Right Are Trying to Hijack Pro-Palestine Protests (www.vice.com)
Neo-Nazis are showing up at protests in an attempt to push anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and tropes into the mainstream.
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‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens (amp.cnn.com)
Pope Francis calls for a ceasefire in the Holy Land (www.vaticannews.va)
Pope Francis prays for an end to the violence in the Holy Land, especially in Gaza where a humanitarian catastrophe has unfolded, as well as for the ...
Can a gun break glass with just sounds alone?
I was thinking about how fire guns are very loud and how its worst in close environments (I had never shot a gun cuz im not american) and I remembered the Mirror room scene in John Wick Chapter 2....
What is a freeway/expressway/motorway/highway in your local area that you consider more pleasant to drive on compared to other roads in the area?
Is there any christian religions that don't believe in space?
So I have a born again christian family member in their mid twenties who stated with complete confidence that there is a dome in the sky called the firmament and beyond it is where heaven is. She believes space doesn’t exist and rockets just blow up because the bible said so. She is not the brightest and normally I would let...
Are there any people who hates music?
I’m not saying particular genres, we all have our less desired musical genres, I mean music in general....
Lewiston, Maine shootings leave at least 16 dead (www.cnn.com)
Can your feet get ... smaller??
Over the last 4 years i’ve barely worn shoes like 30 days in total. Today I noticed my previously best fitting shoes are like a size too big....
Funny Repair Youtube channels?
Hi Guys, I’ve been following Louis Rossman and Rich Rebuilds on YouTube. I love their videos , do you know other youtubers who make similar content and are also Funny ?
Does anyone drink instant coffee anymore?
For some reason I think of it as an older concept. Now Starbucks and coffee chains are popular....