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

help-circle
  • 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.


  • 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.





  • I’ve worked in retail, and… That’s not an actual RFID alarm sticker, and it’s not just there for the potential theives.

    Some manufacturers will actually put an RFID tag on the inside of the box. These tags work exactly like the RFID stickers, and they’re deactivated the same way (usually a magnet underneath the store’s counter).

    This sticker is actually a “chip away” anti-theft sticker. They frequently go on the same products that get RFID stickers, but all they do is tear apart instead of peeling off. They’re mostly an internal tool for LP to try to link thefts and fraudulent returns (that number is the store number that it came from). This one just happens to conveniently have “ALARM” printed on it as a secondary feature, letting thieves know that the item will set off the alarm without showing where the RFID tag is.

    Edit: I should probably add that they also put them on high-theft non-alarmed items, but they probably didn’t get separate sets of stickers.






  • I don’t want to be a downer, but… The rats probably aren’t high if they’re just eating weed. Buckle up, y’all, time for a stoner science lesson:

    THC is present in cannabis in two main forms: THCA and Delta-9 THC. Throwing around those delta numbers can seem scary given all of the unregulated Delta-8 in illegal states, but it’s really not. THCA breaks down into Delta-9 THC naturally with time and heat, through a process called decarboxylization… Which is great, because THCA isn’t psychoactive, while Delta-9 THC is. Because of this, smoking a joint or eating a properly made edible will get you high, but eating an entire ounce is just having a terrible salad.


  • That’s actually a really good analogy. Mind if I throw some numbers on it to flesh things out?

    Let’s set that moving walkway going at 5mph, and we’ll put ourselves on that walkway, on a turned-off rascal scooter. The scooter is stationary on the belt, but it’s still moving at 5mph - that’s your tailwind pushing the air around the plane forward.

    Now, let’s turn that scooter on and throttle it up to 5mph. The scooter is plugging along comfortably at 5mph, but it’s actually moving at 10mph. This is your plane flying with a tailwind, performing normally for its indicated air speed, while having a much higher ground speed.

    Curiously, this does make the phrase “supersonic speeds” somewhat debatable. While they were traveling over the ground faster than sound would, they weren’t moving faster than sound would in the air around them.


  • I feel like I would use it voluntarily if it put the sponsors in the “add a destination” menu. I tend to use Google maps for longer trips, and I try to add any stops on the way to my route so I don’t miss them - if I hit “add destination” and it offered, for example, Citgo stations, 7-11s, and Dunkin Donuts on my route, then I would probably get gas and snacks at sponsored locations almost every time.

    As it is, though… Well, just having a Dunks on the way to the laundromat doesn’t make me want to stop in and buy a coffee. Driving by ten of them “randomly” on my way to another state isn’t going to make me any more likely to stop at one.


  • It really bugs me when people do stuff like that… I grew up in VT, where laws are lax, tons of people have guns, and nothing ever happens. Responsibly handled and in the hands of a stable person, guns can be pretty safe - but, if you remove either one of those things, they’re incredibly dangerous.

    In light of that, I wouldn’t mind if access were restricted somewhat. I’m totally fine with my neighbor having a rifle to kill varmints on their property, but way less fine with folks like my paranoid uncle having a safe full of assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammo in a densely populated suburb.




  • Basically, yeah.

    Essentially, old folks have always taken up a good chunk of the housing market by having a bunch of small households (think two sets of grandparents vs a family of four). However, the baby boom was, well, a baby boom - as the boomers are aging, they’re taking up a lot more housing than the preceding generation did at their age, which is squeezing the market as younger folks try to buy houses.



  • I feel like some of that comes down to… Well, us, the adults. For some ungodly reason, we’ve been calling it things like “a love story” and “a tragedy,” and now people just don’t know what to expect.

    We’ve also somewhat sanitized it. The pop-culture focus on it tends to be the lengths they go to in order to be together, or the families coming together at the end; but we tend to ignore that the couple is just trying to be together to bone, it’s full of dick jokes, and at the end they basically get cockblocked so hard that they die.

    Actually, now that I think of it, Kenneth Branaugh is great and all, but I’d love to see a Seth Rogen adaptation of this one.