I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?

I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.

I remember as a kid, I was mystified by this other girl on the block who could do this. I didn’t understand why anyone would care. A car is a car?

Eventually I realized it’s because she was super into external social status signs. She wasn’t a gearhead, so she hadn’t picked it up the way guys do bonding over technical stats of whatever, but she was hyper-sensitive to social status, so she picked it up along with anything else related to fashion. And cars can be considered fashion, right up there with makeup and having the right purse.

Random addition to your post…

There’s early/limited studies suggesting the drug valproate, which is used for bipolar and epilepsy sometimes, can re-open the perfect pitch acquisition capabilities of the human brain even if the individual is no longer an infant and has aged past the language acquisition stage of childhood development.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

Different use of it in an 8 year old girl with language regression: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11230735/

Acting, literally. Playing a character to entertain. Some characters are villains.

I think this is why random wrestling dudes sometimes successfully slide into Hollywood acting careers.

The thing that makes me cackle about this movie, as a Fandom!Old, is that it’s basically written as the crackiest crack-ship you could ever find on AO3.

And yet…it’s had one of the biggest box-offices ever.

This brings me no end of glee.

Roberts send bob pics, not dick pics.

I suspect if we visit Robert A Heinlein’s grave, his spinning will provide limitless energy.

Doesn’t help you now I’m sure, but I’ve found gently banging around the rim or lid of a jar on the concrete outside usually loosens the seal enough to open the jar.

(Outside on concrete because I don’t want to dent anything inside.)

That’s how you end up washing your earphones

I finally realized this guy’s name reminds me of some in house menswear brand at Sears or K-Mart or some other department store that suffered and wheezed and whimpered before going out of business.

I wonder if Ukraine is having an effect on attitudes.

Anyway, I can’t speak for others, but one thing I’ve come to realize through life experiences is that the best way to resolve differences is to behave civilly and talk. BUT. I’ve also seen that there are people who do not ascribe to or live by my preferences and ideals for this. There are people who don’t value rationality, there are people who can’t be shamed or pressured by society into behaving nicely and getting along with others. Those people respect the stick, and only the stick. I don’t want to use the stick. But these people do not live by my ideals (which are to talk things out and behave civilly), no matter how I say pretty please to them, and it’s foolish to project my values onto them when I see with my own eyes that they behave and react in patterns different to my own. They respect things that scare them or directly threaten them only, and continue to misbehave if all they’re going to get for it is a finger-wagging and a scolding.

So it seems very wise to “speak softly and carry a big stick”. The military is our stick. There are people out there who will behave in the most horrific uncivil ways right up until the moment they realize you have a big stick, then they’ll suddenly rein themselves in, and you can then be civil and talk things out. But that opportunity to talk doesn’t appear unless you actually have the stick when you’re dealing with folks of that sort of mentality.

It’s very important to look at your opponents with clear eyes and see what they ARE doing, not what you wish they would do, and not what you would do if you were in their shoes. As the saying goes, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Weirdly enough, the only game I tried to play that didn’t run was this random Indy game. Didn’t even have fancy graphics, it was one step up from macromedia flash games

The AAA games I’ve played are fine on Linux. Baulders Gate, No Mans Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Crusader Kings III.

Without laws letting child workers maintain their own bank account in their own name without parents being co owners allowed to drain it at any time, children working become money pinatas for abusive parents.

I say this as someone who would have benefitted from being independent earlier. My uncle did have me work at 14, and when I went to the bank I found he had stolen every penny, and because I was a minor I had no legal recourse to get it back.

A few years later the courts emancipated me, but it didn’t return the money he had stolen. Mind you, he was not working at the time himself and he got a few hundred from the state a month to care for me, and he spent what he stole on computer parts so he could game.

Children working only is in the child’s benefit if there are ironclad laws allowing them to keep their money, and right now there is not.

I remember my grandma being referred to like that, and I always felt it horrifying that women essentially lost their own names in this way once in married Society basically changed your name to make you an accessory to a guy.

It’s actually worse, can make you really sick if you get unlucky

The part that gets me is this…

You can get salmonella from unpasteurized milk. This happens a lot…especially considering America pasteurizes the majority of its milk…but when you hear of a milk-related outbreak a lot of the time it’s from unpasteurized milk even though percent wise it’s a small portion of our milk supply.

Anyway. A healthy adult might get through salmonella ok. BUT. Salmonella can completely fuck up a 3 year old’s kidneys FOR LIFE. And it can be just as bad for the elderly.

These are both groups that have other people providing their food. If a 3 year old or child is given milk by mom and dad…well, they drink it. They have no choice in whether it’s pasteurized or not. That’s why government regulation of milk steps in, to make sure dumb people having babies don’t harm their kids through their poor choices.

Giving unpasteurized milk to kids is similar to anti-vaxxers not vaccinating their kids. Basically, the parent involved has gone haywire over any smaller/imagined detriment or benefit, and chooses the action that could bring the MOST harm while thinking they are taking the route of least harm.

With raw milk, parents think the “nutrients” are better or something (even though…you know…we cook most of our food so MOST of our food is heat treated), and the food poisoning from possible salmonella minor/non-existent, when reality the nutrient profile isn’t much different between pasteurized/unpasteurized milk, but the salmonella can kill the vulnerable or cripple their organs for life.

It all comes down to people being alive now in an era where we no longer have elders/grandparents telling others about how people used to DIE from these things.

People hear about getting cancer or dementia or whatever all the time, but haven’t actually seen the old-school childhood illnesses from tainted milk or viruses or the like, so people make the wrong choice because it’s not apparent from their own life experience how bad those illnesses were since they don’t have family that talks about people they knew who got sick and died. The science is too abstract for them to internalize, but “choosing your own food” feels good and feels like you’re in control…so people go down that route instead because they haven’t seen the consequences of salmonella in their own family or in their friends (because there’s a lot of barriers in places, including pasteurization of milk, to try to stop/prevent outbreaks.)

If you explore the dynamics of people migrating en masse and severe drought causing crop failures and small countries mismanaging famines you jump right into war which makes for exciting movies

Instead of nine lives, it has ten venom claws, and one breaks every time it stings. Once it’s out of claws, its dead.

You can’t tell if it makes buzzing noises or purring noises.

Leaving its carnal meaning in oblivion, eh?

That sounds like a challenge…

This is definitely one of those truths. In situations like this, it’s both right that someone should be their best happiest self…but it’s also true the other partner had their own expectations for a relationship, which might not be one where she’s partnered to someone taking their life in a wildly different direction than what was expected early in the relationship.

It’s a case where neither party is necessarily wrong, but things can end up hurting on both sides. Kind of like if other things were thought to be communicated early on, and is changed…like someone saying they’re child free then trying to have a baby, or someone saying they intend to focus on career then doing something to wildly impact finances of the couple. Changing one’s mind isn’t wrong, nor is growing and learning about yourself, it’s natural, but it can cause an incompatibly to pop up in a relationship that hurts or ends it, esp if it’s not talked about, and esp if it’s on a topic that greatly changes the nature of a relationship from the original agreement or assumptions and beliefs.

You know how you end up with socks that don’t have a mate?