I think they were bigger on spears though.

I slacked off in high school and went to community college.

Where I continued slacking off. I sat in the back of one of my history classes because it was near an outlet, so I could plug my laptop in, pretend to be taking notes or whatever, but in actuality was just goofing off for most of the class

Next to me sat another slacker, he was goofing off in much the same sort of way, and we hit it off.

He became, and still is, one of my best friends. Most of my friends I can actually trace back to him in some way or another. He’s one of those people whose ability to meet and befriend people everywhere he goes borders on the magical.

One day we met up to go wander around a local flea market/farmers market. We ran into his best friend who also happened to choose that day to go wandering around the aisles of junk looking for hidden treasure.

And that friend brought his girlfriend with him. Years later she would become my wife.

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. We all wandered around together for a while chit-chatting, and eventually we ported ways. She didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time, nor I on her, I actually don’t think she even remembers this story.

Since we shared pretty much the same circle of friends, we would bump into each other occasionally at parties and such. For a few years I don’t think either of us really thought much about the other, we were just friends of a friend who seemed cool enough.

Eventually, of course, the two of them broke up, as tends to happen. We all stayed in pretty much the same social circles, but she and I didn’t have a whole lot of direct interaction.

One day, that friend from community college hits me up. He’s heading over to the house that she was renting with a couple roommates, no real plans, just chill, have a few beers, watch movies, maybe get some food. So I tag along.

It was basically the three of us hanging out in her living room, and her roommates occasionally wandered in to grab a beer from us before disappearing back into their rooms.

We refer to that night as “The Accidental Nazi Night” because just picking random movies from Netflix, we ended up choosing Iron Sky (about Nazis on the moon,) Equilibrium (dystopian movie with an authoritarian state surprising free expression and such,) and Fire with Fire (where the main villain is a Neo-Nazi)

So that was my first time really spending any sort of quality time with her, just chilling in her living room, killing a case of beer, and watching movies of varying quality.

We became pretty good friends after that. The house she rented basically became the usual hangout place for everyone, so I spent a lot of time there. Funnily enough, she tended to hang out in her room away from all of the action while we were all making a ruckus downstairs.

And so things went for a few years. I’ll be honest, I never really had her on my radar as someone I was interested in dating and was content to be friends.

Apparently she was very interested in me though, and was laying the flirting on pretty thick, and it all went over my head. Eventually she realized she would need to resort to more drastic measures, and one night as we happened to be leaving a friend’s party at the same time, as we got to our cars she grabbed me and kissed me.

And I’ll be honest, that broke my brain a little. From my perspective it kind of came out of nowhere. I kind of had to rethink everything about us and decided, “yeah, fuck it let’s see where this goes”

And so here I am a decade or so later, married for 7 years, and pretty happy with how things all turned out.

I work in 911 dispatch, trying to inject a bit of reason into stupid and scary situations is a big part of my job.

–

I had a call one time, they guy had been threatened by a bunch of teenagers with knives on a bus

The bus came to its stop the teens got off and so did this rocket surgeon (instead of, you know, not getting off at the same stop as a bunch of armed kids who were just threatening you)

That’s about when he called and I answered.

This idiot was following them.

I told him not to, and reminded him that they have knives.

He told me it was ok because he had a knife too.

So I basically had to explain to him why that was fucking stupid.

–

Another time, I get a call from someone because there was a crazy guy with a machete out on their porch.

Her stupid fucking husband wanted to go outside to fight him. So I had to keep telling her to make him stay inside.

–

We had a domestic once, we actually got calls from both parties. One half was outside the house, the other half was inside, and they’re basically standing at the front door yelling at each other.

My caller was inside. I told them to just close and lock the door and wait for the police. They did. Problem solved, right? Arguing stopped, the other party even walked away from the door after that. I get all the info I needed and hang up.

Except like 2 minutes later, I see that we’re now sending EMS out to that house.

Because my stupid fucking caller opened the door to start arguing again and got pepper sprayed by the other party.

–

Those are probably the three biggest stand-outs I’ve had so far, but I’m really hard-pressed to think of any disturbances or domestics, that couldn’t have been resolved, or at least kept from escalating if at least one party would have just walked the fuck away. Close the door, roll up your window, go into another room, step outside, walk down the block, go sit in your car, etc.

Or hell, even just sit there and ignore them.

But no, they always need to get the last word in. They can’t swallow their stupid fucking pride for even one second.

And it’s really disturbing that those kinds of people are making their ways into law enforcement type positions.

It’s not a new phenomenon, and it’s not just ICE, it’s regular cops and such too.

But these aren’t the kinds of people who can help solve problems. These are the kinds of people who are problems.

I feel like that kind of illustrates the point though

There’s a lot of precise grammar rules because the language is a little bit of a clusterfuck (I say that with love, I like the French language and speak a bit myself.) If you were to create a language from scratch, you’d probably choose to make one with much simpler grammar.

Like most languages, French evolved organically out of other languages. There wasn’t really a point in time where someone said “hey I made a new language, here are the rules, I call it ‘French.’” Instead, for centuries people just kind of picked and chose what parts of Latin, Gaulish, Frankish, etc. that they liked and didn’t like, mashed them together in whatever way felt “right” and eventually French happened.

Then when some eggheads decided to write down the rules, it was more of a “Ok, here’s all of the weird bullshit most of you are already doing, and there’s kind of a lot of it. It sounds very pretty, but let’s just all agree that thats enough and this is how our language works. Try not to add any more weirdness” (and they’ve been remarkably good at sticking to that, l’Académie Française doesn’t fuck around, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your views)

You got a lot of words with letters that don’t make sounds or make very different sounds that you might think if you weren’t already familiar with the language’s eccentricities, you got some very common verbs that conjugate in weird ways, you sometimes mash words together with an apostrophe basically because it sounds nice, the Académie Française, when confronted with a new thing, sometimes decides that the terms that most of the rest of the world have decided on for that thing just aren’t “French enough” and goes and makes up a new word for it, etc.

And again, I like French, I’m not shitting on it, English isn’t any better and the rules are certainly less formalized

International Wombat-Tamer Lobbyists

Some of it comes down to the way so many of us are underpaid.

I’d get a hell of a lot of use out of a pickup truck if I had one. Not enough to want to daily drive it, but enough that it would be worth having.

But for most of my daily driving, I could just about get away with an electric golf cart (the way laws are in some states I probably could use something like a golf cart, but my own states implementation of NEVs and such are a little stricter)

In an ideal world I’d have some little electric sedan for most of my daily commuting and errands, and then a truck (though probably a small one) for when I need one.

But I don’t have the budget for 2 vehicles, nor the parking space for them.

Personally my compromise is a mid-sized SUV that fits most of my needs well enough. Others may decide that the best compromise for them is to daily drive the truck. I don’t think most of those people have actually thought too deeply about whether that’s actually a good choice, but I’m sure that for some people it does actually make sense.

I think it might be worth re-reading this comment through the lens of the other comment where you dug up the details of the (alleged) actual story. Not too sure which came first due to the edit in the other comment.

The guy pulled his car over to grab her and lecture her after the incident happened. That’s not ok and shouldn’t be covered under good Samaritan laws. Really that could be grounds for something like assault charges in some jurisdiction. Potentially if she wasn’t a minor she could have even had a decent shot at a self-defense claim if she’d shot him when he grabbed her (this is 'murica after all) he continued to escalate a situation that was already resolved and introduced physical force into circumstances where it wasn’t warranted.

What you probably pictured (I know it’s what I had in mind) was probably more like someone grabbing a girl to keep her from walking into traffic. That would probably be covered under good Samaritan laws.

But holding onto her after that to yell at her probably wouldn’t/shouldn’t, that’s uncalled for, though there may be a little more leeway there since it would still sort of been in the heat of the moment. Odds are probably pretty good that she wouldn’t have even pressed the issue since he just potentially saved her life if that were the case.

As for it being considered a sex offense, I think that’s a case of the laws being poorly-crafted, the insane way we craft laws to “protect the children” (except when the rich and powerful are involved apparently) and the justice system being broken because that aspect of it is kind of bullshit and probably should have been thrown out on appeal. What he did was wrong and I think there should be consequences for that, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think it was wrong in a sexual way unless there are other details to the story that have been glossed over.

And the person you had the conversation with that prompted this either misunderstood the circumstances, possibly because they only got the information second hand themselves, or are trying to twist the details to suit their agenda. The first is probably more likely, but we can’t really know for sure.

I love small trucks. My parents have a '93 ranger, it gets pretty good mileage with that little 4 cylinder engine, and has a 7ft bed, and it’s hauled all of the lumber and furniture we’ve ever needed it to.

It’s only rwd, so it’s kind of shit in any kind of weather, and it’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually” but that’s realistically all I need from a truck.

I like the maverick, but I’m not a fan of the short bed. I’m crossing my fingers that maybe they manage to finagle a midgate into it somewhere down the line.

Otherwise I’d really love for them to bring back something like the 90s style rangers (or Tacoma, S10, Dakota, etc.) as a hybrid or electric, or hell even a decent modern 4 cylinder turbo could probably give a nice mpg and performance boost. The modern versions of those small trucks are significantly bigger than I need them to be, and in at least some cases you can’t even get them in a long bed configuration anymore.

You can and I’ve looked into them

Fact of the matter is still that I live in a townhome with no parking besides my 2 assigned parking spaces, an HOA that definitely wouldn’t like me leaving it on the front lawn, and to put in in the back of my home I’d have to get it over a curb and drag it through about 5 neighbors’ back yards to get it under my deck (and the HOA might still have something to say about that)

So to have a trailer of my own, I’d have to find somewhere to store it, and since I don’t have any friends with extra space in their driveways who will let me leave it there, that would mean more ongoing expenses.

Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

It’s just banal, saccharine, faux-folksy bullshit.

And my sister absolutely played it to death when it came out.

Parking is an issue in a lot of places. I have 2 parking spaces I can use, and they’re needed for my car and my wife’s. I don’t have anywhere convenient that I could park a trailer.

And I could rent a trailer, but that can be a pain, the handful of times I’ve done it the places nearest me didn’t have the trailer needed in stock on the days I needed it, and if you need it frequently enough it can get pricey

And, frankly, towing a trailer is a skill that some people just don’t have. They might do just fine in truck, but throw a trailer into the mix and things can get weird quick.

If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

There’s a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if that’s the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it’s a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

That’s still a dumbass assumption, but I’d at least get it.

And I’m pretty sure it’s much more likely that it’s just making up numbers out of nothing.

I am not at all an expert on bikes, I’ve always been told that you shouldn’t use WD-40 on bike chains, but I’ve never really dug into the details on that. And not for nothing my own bike is a belt drive so it’s not even relevant to me.

Every time WD-40 comes up you’re going to get a whole lot of regurgitated, half-right information.

A lot of people are going to tell you that WD-40 isn’t a lubricant. That’s wrong. It’s not a particularly good lubricant for most applications (I think I’ve heard that it actually makes a pretty good cutting oil for certain machining tasks in certain metals) and there’s usually going to be a better, more effective, longer-lasting lubricant you should be using instead, but it does, in fact, provide some lubrication. Rub a little bit of it between your fingers, feels slick and oily doesn’t it? That’s lubrication.

People will bang on about it being a water displacer. Know what else displaces water? Oil. Grease. Pretty much anything else that doesn’t mix with water.

As for being a degreaser, like dissolves like. Non-polar chemicals like oil and grease are generally miscible in other non-polar substances, so a lighter oil will help to thin out thicker grease so that they’re easier to clean away.

I believe it also contains some other more volatile solvents that also help with degreasing. This is part of how it does it’s water-displacing/rust-preventive thing. The oil is further thinned out with those solvents so it can coat the surface better and those solvents then evaporate off leaving a thin film of slightly thicker (though still pretty light) oil.

And being so thin and light, it makes an OK penetrating oil so that it can soak into the tiny gaps around seized-up bolts and such to lubricate them, and the solvents help break up any other dirt and grime in there to help break it loose.

Again, not a bike mechanic, take my advice for what it’s worth (not much) but WD-40 is probably just too light of a lubricant to use for long. In a pinch if I had a bike with a really rusted, gummed-up chain that I only needed to ride maybe a couple blocks to get home (and just walking it on throwing it in a car wasn’t an option for some reason) I personally wouldn’t hesitate to douse it in WD-40 and hope for the best until I get it home to properly clean and lube it.

My general DIY philosophy for WD-40 is "this will get things moving right now so that I can diagnose the problem or finish the immediate task at hand, then I need to run out and get the right oil/grease to do things properly.

I’m still looking for what to do if I’m alone and something happens.

You can do abdominal thrusts on yourself, or you can use something like the back of a chair or a railing to rest your fists on and use your body weight to basically perform the same action

So I’ve been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.

1. Back up any important documents you really don’t want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn’t actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that’s really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that’s where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn’t is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.

If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that’s a bit of a chore, but again if it’s anything that can’t be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.

2. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it’s intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can’t just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend’s computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you’re not going to totally fuck up anything.

3. Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can’t break anything from that live USB.

4. If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you’ll have learned something from the experience. I’m actually at the point now where I’m kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I’m not trying to break something, but if it happens, it’s an opportunity to try new stuff.

5. Maybe I’m weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn’t know was there before.

The guy who keeps creating new communities and posting them here, not sure if that’s you or part of your admin team or just someone who’s really enthusiastic about porn.

Can we see if there’s a different way of handling that?

Nothing against porn, not even generally against porn here, but the way it’s currently happening it’s filling up like half my feed with posts about new porn communities.

And I get it, you’re trying to get a whole new instance up and running from scratch, you need to rebuild the communities that existed on the old instance etc.

I have no personal experience with admin and moderation, so take my thoughts for what they’re worth, but here they are

1. I think we may need a temporary moratorium on this community against posts for new NSFW communities except for maybe a once-daily megathread listing all of the new ones created since the last one came out. I don’t want that to last forever, just for the next couple of days or maybe week or two depending on how the rollout goes until things slow down a bit.

2. Create a separate newNSFWcommunities community, probably over on the new instance, where all of those communities can get their own post. Maybe see if we can get a post about that stickied here.

3. Less of a suggestion, more about a concern, but seeing one guy creating and modding a bunch of communities kind of gives me some worries about reddit-style powermods, and I remember after a bunch of people migrated here after the reddit API debacle there was a little bit of a problem with people creating communities and not doing much to grow them, just kind of squatting on them or abandoning them, and I’d hate to see that happen with this. I’m hoping maybe that’s one of your admins, or maybe just a single well-intentioned person working on their own creating them as placeholders to eventually turn over to someone else, and that’s valid, but I do think it may be a bit misguided and it may be better to let those communities spring up on their own more organically to be started, run, and populated by people who have an actual interest in those communities, so that may be something to keep an eye on.

He’s also been a little sloppy and didn’t properly mark a couple of his posts as NSFW at first, and that’s not cool. Seems like he’s keeping on top of changing it when that’s pointed out, but that’s still a problem.

Anyway, happy fapping.

Yeah, it’s absolutely a weird curve like that

I’m kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I’ve managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it’s really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.

My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They’re not totally helpless, they’ll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.

They’d been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn’t feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they “upgraded” their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.

Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.

My dad couldn’t quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he’s been using that just fine since then.

Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They’re old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It’s not a beefy computer and they don’t need one, I’m pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.

On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they’ve had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it’s been running smoother than windows 11.

So when I go visit them tomorrow I’m gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.

Pretty much the one program they use that’s not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can’t use that anymore, but fingers crossed I’ll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don’t think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.

In addition to my advice on your bloody Mary abomination chili

Around 10 or 15 years ago, I learned this chili recipe from this comic I probably found on Reddit. It has always served me well, and it is the basis for how I make chili today

To this recipe I also add some chili peppers, usually jalapenos (because otherwise it’s not chili)

A can of chipotles in adobo

I’ve tweaked the ratios spice blend a bit to my taste and added a bit of cocoa powder and cinnamon.

It should probably be noted that I tend to make bigger batch, often working with 2-5lbs of meat (and I prefer coarse ground or something even finely cubed meat as opposed to regular grocery store ground meat)

I usually have 2 or 3 different cans of beans in mine because I like beans

I’ll usually do 2 or 3 bell peppers, usually of different colors

Some bacon, some chorizo

Screw that “a shot of beer” it gets a whole can. Occasionally wine instead if that’s what I’m drinking while I’m cooking.

Often some coffee and/or various liquors (whiskey, rum, tequila, or Brandy)make their way into the mix at some point. Sometimes there’s beef stock involved.

I also pay really fast and loose about what canned tomato products go into my pot, whole, crushed, diced, sauce, doesn’t matter too much, it’s all gonna cook down into unrecognizable red-brown deliciousness by the time I’m done. Just try to get roughly that sort of ratio of tomato products to beef

For bonus points, get your cowboy on and do this in a pot hanging from a tripod over a campfire.

Normally I end up letting this simmer for up to around 6 hours. If it starts looking too thick/dry, add some liquid, usually beer in my case.

Credit for the original recipe: cookingcomically.com

Yeah that’s basically what I’m describing.

I think you just have more of a precise, technical way of describing it probably because you’ve actually professionally worked with color and received some formal training

Whereas I’m a guy with some self-taught Photoshop skills who paints minis, so my color theory is a little rough and ready.