Yeah…my meds for sure.

What a fantastic mental image

No clue who tf downvotes this, but obvi someone who has never tasted elk.

Good job, much appreciate

It’s okay to verb.

So deep.

Still not sure why they didn’t name it “octarine.”

Life Hack: don’t plug it in. Ta-Da!

I’m used to measuring in mRem which is a whole body dose equivalent. But you’re on the right track.

They never had any intention of hiring you.

Those are exactly the questions you ask during an interview.

IN my home? Not that many, just the extra special ones. Sapphires and opal I dug myself, a few fossils that are kind of fragile, and some… um…“spicy” rocks. In double containment.

In my office are tons of neat hand specimens I found over the years. A few in my car I haven’t categorized yet. A decent quantity of B-tier rocks that I could still do something with around the yard. Ooh, and 2 different landscape collections I keep at work.

Oh, and then: I have a house in another town that I lived in for 15 years. That place is fully landscaped and half buried with rocks :D It’s the “home base.”

Groucho Harpo Chico Zeppo Gummo … Mario Aragorn And Geront (just to be an edgy goth twit)

My grounding music is old blues. Like scratchy old records.

I love knowing this more than words can express

It’s physically painful. Decades before diagnosis, tho, I found I could sometimes gaze at the bridge of someone’s nose. Seems to pacify most people. Not easy to keep looking at one spot more than a few seconds tho.

As a dad who makes said noises, and a linux devotee, I approve.

As a defender of the word-origin pronunciation approach, I can actually get behind this.

Appreciate this. I’ll read whatever is going thru others’ minds. It’s kind of like parallel play, just “hearing” other people talk about what’s got their attention atm

There is a garnet species only found in the Urals. So, there. Demantoid is gorgeous.

I’m going to strongly recommend Chef John’ videos, and his recipes are on Allrecipes.com The guy is real, and he cooks the way I like to. His recipes are bomb, and he’s dad-joke funny.

I did not mean to imply the cessation of public spending was causal, just indicative. First ran across it studying mesoamerican civilizations, but I think there are academic papers about Eurasian examples as well. Usually the cause is periodic shifts in rainfall patterns, or other environmental factors. This is an ok place to start, but I would have some work to dig up the textbook. https://www.oerproject.com/OER-Materials/OER-Media/HTML-Articles/Origins/Unit5/Cycles-of-Collapse-in-Mesoamerica

Edit: here’s a good paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980221105418

In archaeology, you can peg the beginning of an empire’s end when it stops building public architecture, whether it’s art or infrastructure (equal to spending on the public). Once the government stops giving back to the populace, it’s over.

Separate and complex discussion defining “empire” in archaeology without written records, so I am just referring to a particular geographic center exerting cultural and economic influence on its neighbors.

Stop public spending. People move out. Economy declines. Some other political center rises to prominence.

Obviously there are a ton of other factors affecting this, but it’s a broad-brush pattern seen repeated over thousands of years.