• 0 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle
  • You mentioned that the house is a century old - I’m assuming it was built as a single dwelling, and subdivided later.

    If that’s the case, my best guess is that the basement had a problem with flooding during bad weather, so they busted holes in existing drainage pipes to allow water to drain from the basement. The leaky walls were most likely sealed when it was converted to an apartment, but… Well, drains drains are great until they back up - I would be concerned about water coming up through them in particularly bad weather.


  • So, uh… We have the same thermostat at my job. It’s not great. You can’t just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

    Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says “heat.” Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.



  • It was more the lack of an explanation that hooked people, rather than just the not pooping - IIRC, we never ended up getting any real explanation for why this guy needed to not poop for a week.

    It was honestly pretty great, people came up with everything from “he’s smuggling himself internationally in a shipping container” to “he’s determined to be the winner in a really weird Mr Beast video” to “he’s giving up on society to live with the sloths” before it started to turn into kind of a circle-jerk.

    And of course, suggestions for stopping the poop included butt plugs, eating only cheese, butt plugs, a liquid diet, and more butt plugs.


  • Unfortunately, no… I’ve seen one of those things, and they’re honestly kind of scary to stumble across in the wild. They’re huge, and they can swim.

    I do agree that this picture looks weird, but I think it’s just a weird picture. The spider is hanging backwards, with his belly facing upwards (that little nubbin at the back of the abdomen usually angles down), but the way that he’s lifting his head to bite the turtle makes it look like his body is facing the other way. As for the ripples, it looks like he’s lifted the turtle high enough that we’re getting a shot of them without the water directly below them. The ripples look like they’re probably relatively calm water 5-10ft behind the spider, which is why they don’t match up with the action in the photo.





  • That is amazing.

    Best we had was some idiot who thought he could get away with smoking in the bathroom like the jocks in an 80’s movie… Someone walked in, and he threw his cigarette butt in the trash can, where it started to smolder.

    A lot.

    All told, it was a pretty boring fire. No real damage, but the school was closed for a couple of days while they cleaned up the soot.


  • In a way, it feels like we worked backwards to “cooking.” I’ve heard “cooking with gas” for ages, but just “cooking” feels more recent.

    Tbf, they’re kind of the same thing, but at different levels of speed/intensity.

    If your friend is working on something and they’re in the zone, they’re cooking like a trendy zoomer. If they’re absolutely plowing through whatever project they’re working on, then they’re cooking with gas like a crusty gen-x-er.


  • Their math was flawed, but I’m not really sure how to explain the math part better. I get what they were going for, though.

    It’s closer to decimal divisions of an inch, so a .223 caliber bullet would be a hair shy of a quarter of an inch (.25) wide.

    Edit: just realized you had the second part of that already



  • Even for those who don’t build their identity around their job, a lot of folks are just used to having something to do.

    I work in retail, and I’ve had a surprising number of old folks ask if we have any part time jobs available - they’re not looking for steady paycheck, they’re looking for something to do two or three days a week. Even if your job isn’t necessarily who you are, it’s still a reason to get out of the house.



  • I’ve never had an induction stove, but I grew up with an electric stove - IIRC, it was on a separate fuse from the rest of the kitchen, and it had a weird plug because it needed a different voltage than most other appliances.

    I would assume the requirements for an induction stove are more or less the same… Switching from regular electric to induction would probably be easy, but gas to induction would take a lot more work.


  • I never really thought about their succession of consoles, but to me, seeing them listed like that feels surprisingly additive.

    Like, the N64 had analog sticks, and the Gameboy was portable… And people liked both of those, so they released the GameCube, which had analog sticks and a handle, so you could take it to your friend’s house. They followed up with the DS’ touchscreen and the Wii’s motion controls, and when people liked those too, they bundled all of that into the Switch: it has analog sticks, a touchscreen, and motion controls; it’s a handheld and a very portable plug-in console.

    But, as they’ve done that, they’ve always pushed the limits of what they could do. As it stands, there’s not much that can be added to the Switch, so they’re releasing an improved version - like they did with the Gameboys Color, Advance, and SP. Essentially, the limiting factor isn’t Nintendo’s ability to innovate, but rather the technology available to them.

    Give it a few years for other aspects of technology to advance, and I’m sure they’ll start pushing the envelope again. They’ll probably wait until they can pack an entire console into a VR headset without a bulky battery pack, then release it with something wacky like a charging dock with a built-in projector, or something crazy like that.


  • A lot of people conflate “knowledge” and “intelligence.” Not the guy you replied to, they seem like a troll; but still, a lot of people.

    Our ancestors had intelligence in spades. They figured out an insane amount of stuff just to survive; and it’s not too far back in the grand scheme of things that they had to remember it all because they had no way to record it. The first caveman to make a handaxe had absolutely no idea what he was doing, but they figured it out. Wheels, bows, fire, the entire concept of agriculture… They figured out how all of that worked from scratch, with no reference material.

    Modern humanity builds on that with knowledge. We’ve figured out how to record everything our ancestors discovered, and all of our new discoveries as well. We’ve put men on the moon, figured out how to make electricity from things like waterfalls and glowing rocks, and almost everyone has a tiny computer in their pocket.

    None of that means that we’re more intelligent now, though. All of that knowledge is iterative, so we’ve just been applying that same intelligence at a continually higher level throughout history.



  • I grew up rural too, but in a less conservative area, and… Honestly, it made for some hilarious moments in sex ed.

    I think the crowning moment was in high school health class - at the start of the sex ed unit, they split us up by gender, and had both groups try to draw both reproductive systems as a baseline for what we knew. Both groups did pretry well with the male stuff, but there was a stark (and unexpected) difference in the diagrams of the female reproductive system:

    The girls group did an excellent job of drawing and labeling a vagina, but almost none of the internal bits.

    The boys group, though… One dude had noticed something about the general shape of female reproductive system in an earlier class, and came up with a his own mnemonic for it: turns out, you can sketch oit the general layout of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and birth canal pretty neatly over the dodge ram logo.