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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I’ve felt that. In my story, I’m an adult out on a date. I order a molcajete dish from the local Mexican restaurant. I’ve had this dish before at a few places. I know it’s usually spicy. I want this. I have a vague memory of the waitress confirming I was okay with a spicy dish. I enthusiastically confirm.

    I had never encountered this level of spicy before. Those other molcajete dishes I’d had were milquetoast. This was flavortown gone nuclear. My entire head turned red apparently. The sweat started on my forehead, then my neck, and eventually my entire head was running like a sock over a faucet. I hadn’t encountered real heat like this before. I was in experienced, so I didn’t know that drinking my beer between bites was only making the heat worse. The waitress kept bringing them though. At one point I could hear people laughing together in the kitchen. It was a quiet restaurant, we may have been the only ones there at this point.

    I was not bowed or broken. I ate the whole damn thing. It was otherwise also a delicious dish and now that I had broken through into the fire dimension I was tasting flavors I didn’t even have words for. These flavors were here the whole time but I couldn’t experience them until I had set my mouth on fire. I eventually won the day, or so I thought until the next day when dinner had it’s revenge on the way out.

    Jalapenos don’t get the respect they deserve. Sure they don’t have the face melting power of some other peppers. But they taste fucking great in ways the other peppers can’t match. They are also sneaky. I’ve had jalapeno with little to no heat, almost like a better tasting green bell pepper. And I’ve had jalapeno that were face melty sweet awesomeness. The secret I eventually learned was to seek the peppers with those little brown stretch marks. More stretch marks mean more fire.



  • The best part is the random bill.

    • Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
    • Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

    The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

    Or another variant.

    • Go to the emergency room.
    • Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

    The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.


  • You were always only a few clicks away from some program that look liked it hadn’t been updated since Windows 95.

    That remains true for 10 and 11 too. For a quick trip back to 1995, just do something that you probably haven’t done this millennium, change your mouse pointer. Instant nostalgia. Device manager in general hasn’t changed much either.

    I wouldn’t even count that against them, working functionality shouldn’t be changed without good reason, except that it exposes how much windows is a patch job on a fundamentally flawed design. If it were a boat or car, it would be more Bondo than metal at this point. Why are these dialogs so stuck in the past? Shouldn’t it be a simple matter to have them use the latest design elements to at least look consistent, even if the functionality hasn’t changed a bit.




  • It’s a misleading legend, but the note at the bottom tries to clear it up a bit. This map seems to more be like “We took the range maps of 238 species of fish and overlaid them. The red area is where practically all of those range maps of each 238 species of fish overlapped.” Of course there are other fish, but they were not included here because the map maker didn’t have the right kind of dataset for them. To me that seems to indicate that this map isn’t so much a map of actual biodiversity measured, but the potential for biodiversity of the region. Given that it’s fish, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that this area is somewhere between/near the northern continent’s biggest river, a large gulf, and ancient mountain range, and a coast with a strong warm current (for now…).




  • Go to a library. Ask a librarian. They may not be able to give some magic bullet answer (a fantasy anyway), but they can point you in the right direction to answer these kinds of questions for yourself.

    But I suggest you narrow your focus. You might want to start out looking for topics a little less broad and vague as “time” and “joy”. That would be like trying to research 20th century music that incorporated drums or guitars.


  • Glad I’m not the only one that noticed the odd bench. But I have another theory. It looks like a rotating device of some kind for the seat so that if the bench is wet from rain or covered in snow, one can rotate it to a dry side for a dry seat. I doubt the homeless, even the poor or lower classes, would have been allowed anywhere near such a garden as this anyway unless they were serving someone.










  • It says “not to scale”, which in the world of mapping means very specifically that the scale is inconsistent. An exaggerated vertical scale would not include the disclaimer for “not to scale” and is very common, as I already said. It’s common for maps showing vertical reliefs like profiles or cross sections to have a horizontal scale of something like 1:20 while the vertical dimension has a scale of 1:5 or 1:10, which would still be considered “to scale”. If you still can’t fit everything on a single sheet, you can add a break line or a jog to indicate a discontinuity, but the map would still be “to scale”. This map is “not to scale” because it says so, so the only real information we should be able to glean from it are the connections between things; size, angles, and lengths as are meaningless because that’s what “not to scale” is specifically warning us about.