A pack of six light bulbs. Five of them sheared right off the metal base like wet tissue when I screwed them in, just one right after the other. Fortunately the last one worked. I was a poor college kid with no transport then, so getting that pack of bulbs for my single lamp was a lot of effort, I was disappointed.
I felt this way too, he was too twee in an off-putting way.
Maybe not dumb just dark and absurd, but called the cops.
Worked at a retail computer store with repair shop. Extremely assholish customer drops off his machine for an install of a “defective” piece of hardware he couldn’t manage to install on his own, arguing that install should be free because it’s our fault, somehow. Service manager cuts him a deal anyway just to make him happy.
He drops off his PC. Tech takes the machine, boots it up, bam… CSAM on his desktop. Cops came and got the PC, never saw the piece of shit again.
Actually this happened a few times but only once was the customer rude at first.
Retail is depressing.
Personally I haven’t had luck with diatomaceous earth and ants, they seemed willing to sacrifice a few ants to push a trail through the powder and then they were fine (I had to admire this strategy, something I would have never considered). I have had great luck with those ant baits that are a mix of sugar water and borax.
Yeah you should. Look into soil testing with your local city, county, or University Extension office. You send in a little sample of dry soil and they email you the results. It’s usually pretty cheap and will tell you if any soil is unsafe. My local library, for example, has sample boxes for free. Definitely a good idea for anyone in a place where lead paint could have been used, let alone other horrible stuff.
When I first started gardening I had this idealistic view of, “I will just grow a surplus, if the animals take some I will still have enough.” Nope. They eat everything, to the ground. They can do it in one night. There are different pests that specialize in eating the seeds, the roots, the stems, the leaves, and the fruit. Deer will “sample” entire plants just to confirm they don’t like them. Squirrels will take a single bite out of every tomato. Bears will push down an entire fruit tree just to get one fruit. Energy is scarce in nature and these organisms aren’t fucking around.
Took me awhile to finally admit that barriers aren’t just nice, they are required.
KDEnlive is improving, however Resolve is still more powerful and mature. That said, DaVinci’s business model seems precarious. It feels like they could, at any moment, enshittify Resolve and force users into a subscription just to maintain access to old edits. I think for that reason KDEnlive is better for almost all users. If you are a professional filmmaker then the color and vfx workflows of Resolve are probably worth paying for, but in that case it’s probably a FinalCut vs Resolve question anyway.
This one is pretty obscure but I feel like it fits this question.
For people who don’t know deep meme lore, YTMND was/is a site where people uploaded extremely short audio clips and images/gifs that went together. This all sprouted from a short clip of Sean Connery saying “You’re the man now, dog!” in the movie Finding Forester. Here’s the Know Your Meme page. Sometimes these were funny, sometimes they were artful and surreal, sometimes they were meta, usually they were just stupid.
One day back in the stone ages I was browsing the site and I found this one:
(CW racism):
I have to say it struck me. I reverse image searched the painting and discovered it’s by an artist named Slowinski whose work is explicitly about fucked up shit in American society. In this case obesity, lotteries, a terrible food supply, etc. are literally murdering a black man but its presented like a carnival attraction. The music seems so fitting to me because it mimicked both how “Black is Beautiful” and Black American art fights against the narrative but is also co opted by capitalism to push the exact same poison. I even thought, “Wow, the name is a play on the N word but also its homophone which means someone who is miserly, perhaps additional commentary?” Fucking excellent, especially for YTMND.
So I clicked the little “source” icon in the corner to see if the author had some insight on this and it’s literally just some kid who slowed down the song, thought it sounded like a “fat black guy”, and googled that then posted the image. Well fuck.
I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece but I still remember it, especially the irony of it, and it was a fucking YTMND of all things, so I guess that counts for something.
The movie “The Peanut Butter Solution”.
Apparently the whole thing in on Youtube. Here is a link specifically to the scene that was in my memories but I couldn’t remember what it was from, or if it was real (32:47): https://youtu.be/pDGyweCl7ik?t=1967
Warning it’s bizarre and gross. It’s a kids film so nothing about it is actually obscene or violent, but something about the texture of this movie makes everything bizarre and gross. It’s like a shag rug in a barber shop.
This reminds me of the Blaster Worm back in the early 2000s. Infected users had to patch their PC without the internet, because connecting is what would cause you to reboot (so many PCs were infected it was basically instant). I worked at a computer store and we burned a bunch of patch CDs and were giving them out like hotcakes. My boss decided to slap a price tag on them for a day or two but we convinced him the good will was worth the cost and he eventually made it free again. People were fucking pissed off and handing out the free CD made them very grateful.
Literally why witch hunts existed. It was just a way for authorities to expropriate the wealth of some random dowager who won’t remarry (and therefore automatically cede all property to her new husband).
In Luke, when Jesus says (again) to love thy neighbor literally the next question someone poses to him is “but who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the tale of the Good Samaritan. In this story there is a man, a traveler from a foreign land, who was robbed and beaten and left on the roadside, suffering and ignored by passing strangers (including a priest). The Good Samaritan feeds him, fixes him up, and puts him up at an inn.
There’s two laws… two. The first is to love God, the second is to “go and do likewise” as the Good Samaritan did. I’m a godless commie and I know this shit.
The study of this is called allometry, and if you know the bone lengths of a creature you can generalize the formula to figure out when that animal will change from any one gait to another (like trot, canter, gallop, etc). This was used on Jurassic Park to figure out when the T-Rex would run (although I believe they ended up fudging it for coolness factor).
I think the last time I celebrated any holiday was buying some champagne when Kissinger died.
Also quite a few great books in the public domain. Here is a website that curates, fixes up, and publishes free copies of classic public domain literature: https://standardebooks.org/
I’d like to specifically highlight the Swill Milk Scandal also.
The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk. The milk from swill-fed cows, produced in dense urban areas and often priced as low as 6 cents per quart, was affordable to most of New York City’s poorest residents. Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases.
Sound familiar?
The Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey, known as “Butcher Mike”, defended the distillers vigorously throughout the scandal—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation… Tuomey assumed a central role in the ensuing investigations and … shielded the dairies and turned the hearings into one-sided exercises designed to make dairy critics and established health authorities look ridiculous.
Sound familiar? However people were so enraged that eventually laws passed regardless, and then finally at the federal level.
Most people don’t know about it, but this was basically THE incident that led to the modern FDA. It keeps coming up too. Recently we’ve had the raw milk fad, but also various melamine adulteration incidents (melamine is used to fool modern protein assays, but is basically the 21st century version of swill milk). There’s also occasional “grass roots” efforts to loosen the regulation on milk labeling, ostensibly for plant based milks, but I am suspicious this is astroturfing by the dairy industry because it’s exactly what they’ve been fighting for since the Pure Food and Drug Act passed.
School dreams are very rare now, and when I have them the “cast” is all people from various adult jobs. I never knew my actual school mates as adults, so I guess my brain just can’t fill it in. If I was actually transported back to high school and saw them again it would probably feel like being surrounded by babies, so makes sense that “central casting” sends in adult stand-ins.
I’m always an adult too. What’s weird is I remember being a child. I remember my body being clumsy and awkward, I remember being confused by adult concepts, I remember being small. It never comes out in childhood dreams, I’m always my present age.
Finally getting a generator. I live in a rural area. Not having a generator was a huge hole in my setup. We also got a wood stove earlier this year for backup heat. I had longer term plans for solar but now it looks like that may be impossible since China makes all the equipment, and it’s already difficult to balance the utility with the expense.
I was forced to take 4 years of Latin and I’ve basically reverted to “Salve Magistra, Italia Peninsula Est” levels. It never clicked with me. Every week was a struggle, I was a terrible student, and I remember jack shit. At best it helped me remember the names of stuff in anatomy class, which was actually interesting. I think the way it was taught is the worst fucking way to learn a language, like most 19th century educational theory.
This is probably just because it’s DC. The rules get really muddy there. For a long time the highest elected position in DC was head of the school board, and even though ostensibly there’s “home rule” now, Congress still loves to punish the local populace by overriding anything they think scores points with their base back in Idaho. If you get convicted of a felony in DC you actually get transferred to federal prison.