Brains do weird shit when you’re not around. Try not to dwell on it.

This is true, but anecdotally it happens quicker with some words than others.

Snail

Hospitality worker here. Working weekends means less time to socialise with friends who are on a M-F schedule and less opportunity to attend events in general because they’re usually scheduled on weekends. You’ll have to put more effort into staying in touch with people and finding things to do on your days off.

Core 2 Duo.

Uhh… Did nobody check with Intel about this?

I have a terrible feeling it’s a compromised webcam.

I suspect that’s kind of the point, or at least works in their favour. If you don’t know about it, you’re probably pretty new here and therefore a better candidate for a victim.

Saw it coming but I didn’t think it’d be that quick.

deleted by creator

Yes, fuck Amazon and Bezos. No argument there. But this also helps people who have previously paid for content to break out of Amazon lock-in while keeping what they’ve paid for. You don’t have to buy new stuff, but this means you can keep the old stuff.

Behind!

If you’ve worked in hospitality, you know.

Subdermal armour. Like a flexible, slash-resistant, heatproof mesh under the skin. I work in a kitchen so it’d be nice to be able to ignore those pesky little nicks and burns.

I definitely relate to that. I spent a good chunk of my formative years just hanging out at the mall after school with my friends, sitting on the outdoor balcony with ridiculous coffees, openly smoking although we were underage, and just shooting the shit. Maybe we’d have hit up the music store beforehand and we’d chat about what we’d bought, read the liner notes and talk about the artwork. I miss music stores too, but I think a lot of people my age do. The mall used to be somewhere you could just hang out. I don’t know what’s changed, maybe it’s me. In my area they seem to be as busy as ever, but they all seem so sterile and hyper-optimised now, even though the floorplans are still the same as they were decades ago.

Me, I miss the proliferation of arcade video game cabinets. I miss arcades too, but I don’t think that’s out of the ordinary for old nerds. Going to them for a lock-in session was always a fun event, even by myself. Also having one at nearly every mall and being able to just go there and drop a few bucks and kill half an hour while you wait for a bus. What I really miss though, are the machines they’d just have randomly in places; corner stores, video rental places, restaurants, bowling alleys. We’d spend entire days riding around, scouting out new places for good games, which place had the cheapest Street Fighter 2, discovering weird obscure import titles no one had ever heard of. Of course now if I have a few minutes to kill I can game on my phone, but it’s such a non-event. Arcade cabinets were special, they had -presence-. When you found a good one you kept that location burned into your brain, told only your closest friends, and when they removed or changed it, it was such a tragedy.

It’s still shitty because they ship with a 3.5mm -> 3.5mm cable (literally straight through, no inline silicon) that’s billed as replaceable. It is, but only with -their- cable. It’s a way of making a standard connection proprietary.

Aside from the pigtail USB-C -> 3.5 socket adapters which absolutely do suck, you can also get USB-C -> 3.5 plug cables (link for example purposes only, not an endorsement of amazon or this product) which can be pretty decent length and quality. This, together with headphones with a replaceable cable (also just an example) might open up a few more options for you. Added bonus that if the cable fails it’s … well … replaceable.

Just be mindful that some manufacturers do the extremely shitty thing of placing the socket on the headphones in a very specifically shaped recess that only their cables will fit.

Trauma Team IRL

Not sure it’s my favourite, but Wipeout XL/2097 deserves a mention.

I’m either really late genX or really early millennial depending how you define it, but Pump Up The Volume was the one that did it for me.

There’s a couple things at play here.

Firstly, the math. Nutrient requirements in a given population tend to be normally distributed (there are a couple that aren’t). RDA is considered enough to meet the requirements of 98% of people. EAR (estimated average requirement) is the middle of the bell curve, so most people’s actual requirement will be closer to that. RDAs are used for diet planning in individuals though, so as to minimise the risk of deficiency. There’s a huge margin of safety between EAR and anything that would cause problems from excess (e.g. Vitamin A toxicity) so using RDA won’t cause issues there. Actually working out an individual person’s requirement for a specific nutrient is a bunch of really complicated biochem, so it’s easier and safer to just aim for the RDA in that context.

Secondly, RDA is kind of a misnomer. You don’t actually need to eat that every day, because the body stores and uses a lot of nutrients as needed. It’s really supposed to be used as more of an average over time. This is why it’s important to eat a good variety of different foods within the main food groups. Meatless mondays don’t cause you to instantly collapse from iron deficiency.

Third, there’s a commercial aspect to it. Food manufacturers love using RDA because it lets them imply their product is healthy, and they love it when public health messaging is “eat more X” when X is a major component of whatever they produce, or something that’s cheap to fortify (e.g. iron fortified cereals). This way they can encourage people to freak out over “oh no, I need this product or I won’t hit my RDA!” Really, most people better off eating generally healthy (roughly 50% fruit and vegetables, 25% protein and 25% whole grains) with a good variety of foods than aiming to hit the RDA of everything, every day. There are a few caveats to that for certain nutrients in some circumstances, but on the whole, no. You don’t need to hit your RDA every day, but it probably should average out over a week or so.

Schrödinger’s asshole. It’s testing boundaries. If you say something, they’ll claim it was just a joke. If you don’t they’ll keep going and likely get worse.