That’s a big part of the reason we went with it. Even if it didn’t destroy the washing machine, you just know eventually it’s gonna break open somehow and then you’re gonna be stuck cleaning up those beads.

And the weight distribution on some of them just isn’t very good, more like having a pile of beanbags on you than an extra heavy blanket

We have a bearaby blanket. It’s a little different from most weighted blankets in that it doesn’t have a bunch of little beads or whatever sewn into it for weight, its just knitted from a ton of fabric. Because it is knitted it’s very breathable which is nice because I’m a pretty hot sleeper.

It’s also probably a little more washable than a lot of other blankets because of that, but you may need to make a trip to the Laundromat to use the big washer.

If you’re not a fan of the knit, I imagine you could probably stick it in a duvet cover.

Congress already basically has the power to overturn court rulings. They make laws.

Courts only rule on whether things are or are not in line with those laws.

This is of course simplified and a bit absurd for humorous effect, but in broad strokes this is how things work.

Let’s say there’s a law on the books that says people are not allowed to wear hats. Someone gets arrested for wearing a bandana on their head. They go to court challenging that arrest arguing that bandanas are not hats.

The court hears the arguments from both sides, the guy who was arrested arguing that the law doesn’t apply to bandanas, and the lawyers for the police arguing that the law applies more broadly to other forms of headwear.

The court listens to those arguments, and considers previous similar cases to look for precedent, (like maybe there was a guy who was arrested for having a baseball cap tied to his belt and whether that counted as “wearing” a hat, or someone was arrested for wearing a KFC bucket on his head and whether that met the legal definition of a hat, or someone who was arrested for wrapping a hat around their feet and whether that counted or only if you wore it on your head) Maybe they even consider whether wearing a hat should be considered a form of free speech and whether that law is legal.

And then that ruling establishes further precedent, which will affect how/if that law is applied going forward. If the court has already decided that wearing a bandana doesn’t count as a hat, then it doesn’t make sense to arrest people for it in the future because the court will just throw the case out based on that precedent.

Now whatever the outcome, let’s say Congress doesn’t like what the courts decided. They can pass newer and more specific laws concerning the legality of bandanas and other headgear, maybe even going so far as to add a constitutional amendment to specifically protect or exempt hats or bandanas as free speech.

And then going forward, the courts would need to rule on cases based on that new law or amendment.

So if the court rules that bandanas are ok, then Congress goes and makes a new law specifically banning bandanas and goes through the trouble (for some reason) to amend the constitution to say that bandanas are not free speech, then future arrests based on that would be based on that. You couldn’t retroactively arrest someone for wearing a bandana before it was made illegal, but you could sure arrest them if they do it again.

I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)

And I’m not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn’t do delivery.

But I’ve stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices

But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.

And that happens, I’m not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I’ve been there

But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.

When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.

And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.

That’s what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.

And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don’t have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I’m going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.

I once heard Spam described as “everything but the oink”

And so when I describe scrapple, I usually start with that, and then describe scrapple as being “mostly oink”

My wife and I did a quick courthouse thing because I got a new job and she needed health insurance. The plan was to do an actual wedding of some kind a year or two later but COVID and a bunch of other stuff happened so it’s been on the back burner. I think we’re looking at a 10 year thing now, which is nice because it’s given us a lot of time to think about guest lists and such.

We have a pretty decent amount of friends we want to invite, I think we’re in the ballpark of around 30

Some of those are gonna have +1s, so that gets us up to around 50 or 60

Then we have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and some of them have +1s, depending on the size and relationship you have with your family, that can make things balloon really quickly.

And if you’re able to budget for it, it can be advantageous to invite as many people as you can, money and other wedding gifts can add up pretty substantially. That’s not a major factor in our guest list, but for a young couple, maybe looking to buy a house and have kids or whatever, that can be huge.

I’m not too sure about what the version of scrapple you received was, it sounds like some kind of bastardized hash, but scrapple is a common breakfast thing in the Mid-Atlantic/Delaware valley area.

The version I’m familiar with as a Philadelphian, admittedly doesn’t sound a whole lot better on paper, but the actual eating experience sounds a lot more pleasant. It’s basically pork scraps and organ meats simmered down until they’re falling apart and mixed with cornmeal and buckwheat then formed into a mushy loaf, which is then sliced and fried.

You’re not going to identify any particular piece of pork or anything else in it, it’s a pretty uniform grey mush, and the only real texture comes from frying it to give the outside a nice crispiness. Nothing tough or chewy about it, you barely need to chew it, the texture is probably more like polenta (which it kind of is) than anything else you might be familiar with. It also usually doesn’t contain any apple or potatoes.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you find yourself near Philly don’t let whatever you were served in the south turn you off from trying actual scrapple.

Parts of Ohio have goetta, which I think is supposed to be pretty similar to scrapple but with oatmeal instead of corn meal.

I’ve also heard of “livermush” and “liver pudding” being served in some parts of the south, which honestly sound like dead-ringers for scrapple to me, though I have some friends from the south who insist that they’re different from and better than scrapple.

I feel like whatever you were served was some southerner trying to recreate something they heard described one time but never actually tried themselves, or just slapping the name on something without knowing that there’s another dish out there with the same name.

Got up bright and early and had my mom drive me to target for the game cube launch

I’ve done a lot of midnight movie releases, and a couple Harry Potter books releases

It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing, but I worked late at the time anyway, so when Skyrim came out I just swung by game stop after I got off work to get that at midnight

I think you’re confusing e85 with 85 octane gas

E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gas (and e15 is the other way around)

Octane rating is a measure of how much you can compress a fuel before it ignites by itself. Higher octane gas is more resistant to that. (And e85 actually has a pretty high octane rating, usually somewhere north of 100. Regular gas often contains up to 10% ethanol, in part because it boosts the octane rating)

To expand on that a bit, if you compress gas enough, at a certain point it just catches fire on its own. This is actually a big part of how diesel engines work. Diesel is actually pretty hard to ignite, in some cases you can even put out small fires by pouring diesel on it (don’t try this at home) so they rely on getting high enough compression in order to work.

Gasoline is a lot more flammable though, you don’t really need to compress it at all for it to burn. Sure, ideally you probably want a certain compression ratio because something something stoichiometry but gas is more forgiving in that regard. As long as your air-fuel mixture is about right, it’s gonna burn when your spark plug goes off.

In fact, gas is maybe a little too forgiving, if your octane rating is too low and your engine compression is too high (mostly a problem with higher-performance engines) that gas can just kind of go off too early before the spark plug goes off, which causes “engine knock” which will cause damage.

But the other way around, high octane in a lower compression engine, basically does nothing spectacular. It still goes boom when the spark plug goes off and not until then.

Anecdotally, 40-ish years ago, one of my mom’s relatives came to visit from Poland. There are a whole lot of wild stories about that visit and from when my mom visited Poland around that same time that highlighted a lot of differences between life in the US and from behind the iron curtain at the time.

While he was here, her relative was amazed to see cars pulling off to the side to let emergency vehicles pass, that was apparently something totally new to him.

The real shame is that the coffee table isn’t really visible because it’s pretty cool itself, it’s a hatch from a ship (I believe a WWII Liberty ship)

Bit of family history with it too. My dad originally had it, but my mom hated it, so eventually it went to live with my grandfather. He died, and it ended up back in our basement. My sister and I both really liked it, and we had a bit of an agreement that whoever moved out first got the table, and I won.

EDIT: Also for anyone else who likes my setup, the entertainment center and shelves in the wall are IKEA Fjallbo, no pretty affordable. The shelf of the far right is just an IKEA Kallax.
And I have the TV synced up to Phillips hue lights behind it and in the ceiling

I’m not totally sure where the bottles came from, we don’t really drink chianti, and they’ve just kind of been hanging around on a shelf somewhere, but they ultimately ended up on this chandelier

I started reading it just before COVID hit. My reading habits are very sporadic, sometimes I’ll devour a book in a day, other times I’ll read a chapter or two once a week and it takes me months to finish a book. This happened to be one of the later cases

It was really good, but holy shit that was not the book to be reading when people were getting into fights over toilet paper.

So I did not finish it, I intend to eventually, but it had to go on the back burner.

Everything about it just kind of oozed bleak hopelessness. I’ve caught myself starting to say I enjoyed it, but “enjoyed” is really the wrong word, there is no joy to be found in that book, perhaps you appreciate it, maybe you feel it, maybe you just read it and acknowledge that it’s a good book.

I find it pretty weird that you’re obsessing over this so much and have posted about it several times tonight.

Yeah, it’s a bit strange, and it warrants investigation, and as the article says it is being investigated.

But also as someone who has spent a lot of time around water fishing, boating, swimming, etc. there are a whole lot of ways you can get yourself in trouble in or in the water, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that it was just plain bad luck.

My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)

It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.

And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.

Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession

It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.

I keep a fake Facebook profile around because some businesses and such don’t have any online preference besides their Facebook page so if I want to know about deals and events they’re running that’s the only place I can find them

I do admit that I occasionally get sucked into scrolling through the feed, but especially over the last few months it’s becoming increasingly full of nothing but AI slop

I never really had much of a social media presence besides that. Was on Reddit for a long time, deleted my account over the API bullshit, once upon a time I had a twitter, never used it much, deleted it when musk took over. Never had an Instagram or tiktok.

I have some friends who used to have a really shitty apartment, first floor and basement of a shitty rowhome that by all rights should probably have been condemned.

The basement was two rooms, a larger room with nothing much but an old claw foot bathtub (that appeared to be hooked up to a drain but had no faucet or any obvious pipes nearby where it could have ever had water running to it)

And the spider room. I shit you not this room was almost nothing but floor to ceiling spider webs. Being a bunch of broke college kids with little enough use for the basement in general, they decided that they weren’t going to do anything about it. They just placed a sheet of plywood in front of the doorway and let the spiders do their thing.

And the spiders, accepted and respected this arrangement. They lived there for several years and not once did they ever see a single spider in any other part of the apartment.

The centipedes were another story, they frequently ventured into other parts of the house. One of those friends still likes to go on about how you can reason with spiders but not with centipedes.

But, I can only assume due to the high spider and millipede population in this apartment, there was basically no other bugs to be found there. The house was in the sort of perpetual state of squalor that you’d expect from 3 guys living on their own for the first time. The pipes leaked, everything was drafty, there was often a thin coating of grime on nearly everything, they had mice and maybe the occasional rat, but there was not a single roach, beetle, or fly to be found.

Mi komencis per duolingo, sed nun mi plejparte nur legas vikipedio en Esperanto.

Mi instruas min mem jam ĉirkaŭ 3 jarojn, mi ankoraŭ ne estas tute flua, sed mi progresas.

I’ve been learning Esperanto, which is basically just all loanwords from different European languages, one thing I’m a little embarrassed to have learned that way is that “Peking” as in Peking Duck, is just a different/older spelling/transliteration of “Beijing” since it’s “Pekino” in Esperanto

Been eating Peking Duck for years, never really stopped to consider where or what Peking was until then.

Alright, so what do we do with that “slightly” (infact quite a bit) warmer water?

Can’t just discharge it into a river. That hot water is gonna cause all kinds of havoc on the environment. Even if the temperature doesn’t outright kill things, warm water holds less oxygen so that’s going to harm fish, it’s probably gonna fuck up their spawning cycles because suddenly they have warm water in the middle of winter, it might cause algae blooms, etc.

So we have to cool that water down. How are we gonna do that? We can spend even more money and energy to refrigerate it I suppose, but of course that would be stupid since these data centers are already using ridiculous amounts of energy.

So most likely we’d just put it in some giant holding tanks and wait for it to cool off or maybe run it through a massive radiator to cool off. That’s even more land being taken up by these monstrosities, more maintenance needed, and at the end of the day, that’s still water sitting around somewhere besides in our aquifers and waterways where it’s needed, and we’re probably going to be losing even more to evaporation in the process.

And while it’s being pumped around in those data centers, I’ll bet you it’s being run though all kinds of plastic pipes and such, maybe coming into contact with lead solder and such because these aren’t potable water systems, sounds like a great way to introduce more heavy metals and microplastics into the environment to me.

And that 2% or so that’s being lost to evaporation? Some of these large data centers are using well in excess of a million gallons a day, so that’s 20,000 gallons a day lost to evaporation, so roughly every month you’re losing an entire Olympic sized swimming pool to evaporation. Again, that’s water that’s supposed to be in rivers and aquifers that’s now not.

And what doesn’t evaporate? Well now any minerals, heavy metals, etc. that were in the water are now concentrated by that much. Hope your water treatment is prepared to handle that.