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At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.

There are two types of dashes. One is the “n-dash” (or “en-dash”), which takes up one space, and is most often used to hyphenate words; and the other is the “m-dash” (or "em-dash) which takes up two spaces, and is most often used to bracket off parenthetical information within a sentence, like kind of a lighter weight parentheses. Em-dashes get used a lot in novels and other published writing that is subject to correction from a professional copy editor, but very rarely in the daily typing of regular people. So now when people see it getting used they just assume it must be a clanker.

but hover each one just above the water for about 5 seconds before gently putting it in. This prevents the shells from cracking due to shock of the hot water

If you want to keep your eggs from cracking from the temperature shock, put them in a bowl, fill the bowl with the hottest water you can get from the tap and let it sit for a minute before you put the eggs in the boiling water. Unless you have some crazy volcano of a hot water heater, the tap doesn’t get hot enough to crack the shell, but will warm the shell up uniformly to much warmer than you’d get hovering the egg, or doing that weird thing where you try to lower the egg into the water a teeny tiny bit at a time.

There are horns from a dozen animals which are made of keratin. There are HORSE HOOVES that get routinely trimmed. Why are these not being used to replace actual tortoiseshell, despite being chemically closest to it?

They are. Not by Fender, Dunlop, or D’Addario, but there are tons of little mom and pop businesses making picks out of horn, antler, bone, wood, coins, and anything else you can think of. You can even get picks made from the milk protein casein. They’re out there if you want them, and picks are actually pretty easy to make so there’s nothing stopping you from making your own if you want to.

Also, I’ve had the opportunity to try real tortoise shell picks, and while it had a nice tone, it wasn’t life changing. It was a pick, it sounded nice, but it was hardly the hidden special secret to ultimate tone. Lots of players had already switched to celluloid and nylon picks even before tortoise shell became illegal in the 1970s. Personally, if all the legal and ethical problems around tortoise shell went away tomorrow I’d still stick with the Jazz IIIs I play with now.

I read Different Seasons right about that age and it remains one of my favorites to this day. A collection of novella-length stories might be an easier introduction than some of the 900 page doorstops he’s written. I mean, you definitely don’t want to give him The Tommyknockers as his first one.

No. Not really. They’re different things. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how previously good tech companies break their own platforms to maximize short-term profits. The AI bubble is just a regular investment bubble where people are throwing too much money at a product that can’t deliver on its own hype.

A good example of enshittification is why Google search sucks now. A while back they noticed that the number of search queries was hitting a plateau. It hit a plateau because Google controlled over 90% of the search market, there are a finite number of humans on Earth, and there’s a limit to how many things a person needs to google in a day. But Google is a publicly traded corporation and line needs to go up. So what Google did was to make their search engine worse at searching so that people would have to perform multiple searches to find what they’re looking for. More searches = more ads delivered. More ads delivered = line go up. Their flagship product doesn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do now, but the shareholders got a bigger return on their investment that quarter.

The AI bubble is the tech industry promising a fantastic blowjob machine, and selling investors on the vision of a future of unlimited bespoke orgasms where you’ll never have to foot the bill for taking a woman on a date, or pay a prostitute, ever again. Everybody started throwing money at that because, duh, it’s a magic blowjob machine. But now that people are using it they’re finding out that, yeah, sometimes it sucks your dick, but a lot of the time it just punches you in the balls, or it hallucinates that the definition of “blowjob” is anal penetration with a leaf blower. And sometimes it randomly turns into a nine-legged spidergoat that vomits acid on your crotch, and nobody really knows why. Also, it seems to be burning through a crazy amount of energy and water just to punch me in the balls. So now people are getting less and less enthusiastic about throwing money at it. And when the market can no longer buy into the hype because of all the testicle punching, the big investors will dump their holdings while they can still do so at a profit, and the bubble will pop.

I grew up when you’d read the same shampoo bottle 10 times every time you took a shit, hoping you’d find some new detail you once missed.

Tell me your family didn’t have a subscription to National Geographic without telling me your family didn’t have a subscription to National Geographic.

Slackers used it, but that story is an urban legend that goes back long before that. When I was a little kid in 80s my dad told me that exact story about a guy who supposedly did that at his college, and he went to college in the 60s.

Don’t worry they’ve included a free year of credit monitoring from a company they recommend.

It’ll be Experian, and you’ll get ten times as many emails trying to get you to sign up for some credit card than anything related to your credit status.

Using Shoe Goo to hold a patch in jeans. It’s orders of magnitude better than those crappy iron-in patches that usually fall off after a couple times through the wash. It lasts longer than needle and thread because it gets into the weave, stabilizes and reinforces the weakened denim around the hole/tear.

Shoe Goo is great for fixing lots of stuff. It’s basically liquid duct tape. Of all the things I’ve attempted to fix with Shoe Goo, the only ones that failed were, ironically, shoes.

Big difference between having cops, and having cops that you can trust to protect you.

Also, even if for argument’s sake we assume that the police will act in your best interest when they show up, not everyone lives in a large city where you’re never more than five minutes away from a cop. The US is huge, and the vast majority of it is rural and isolated. If you live in one of those places help from police might be hours away rather than minutes. You’re on your own until they show up. If they show up at all.

Yeah, that’s super weird. I wonder what happened that made everyone change their opinion about them. Quite the mystery.

Man, it’s been a heck of a year for Tren De Aragua. Just a few months ago they were completely unknown, then a single slum lord in Aurora Colorado uses them as a scapegoat for why his tenants have to live in filth and squalor, and they’ve managed to take that clout and spin their organization up into an Escobar-level international drug cartel in an implausibly short amount of time.

Say what you want about TDA, but you’ve got to admire the hustle.

/sarcasm

Like winning the Charles Bukowski award for sobriety.

No vampire wombats that we know of.

It’s entirely possible that every scientist that went to study them is now a bloodless dessicated corpse slowly turning to jerky under the Australian sun.

As someone who worked nights for a long time, there is a crazy amount of people who don’t have the mental capacity to conceive that a different work/sleep schedule is possible. The number of people who, upon finding out I worked 11pm to 7am, genuinely assumed that I still woke up at “normal” time in the morning, and just sat around watching TV all day until it was time to go to work again was pretty astonishing.

Almost certainly fly as in birds came first. Trousers with a fly are a pretty recent fashion development, like within the last 200 years or so, whereas people have been watching birds since before the invention of language.

Ok. 3-2-1, let’s jam!

Pulling that stupid ahegao face. I don’t know who that’s for, but it’s definitely not me.