A fridge stocked full of Orbitz
I don’t even remember if it was any good, and the handful of times I had it I’m pretty sure it was already discontinued, I remember getting it from a discount grocery store that sold a lot of stuff that was damaged or near its expiration date.
But it left a mark on my childhood.
I think a whole lot of “maker” type channels have all stayed pretty solid, off the top of my head
This Old Tony
Adam Savage
Xyla Foxlin
Clickspring
Blondihacks
Colin Furze
Inheritance Machining (though compared to some of the others he’s relatively new)
Stuff Made Here
Jeremy Fielding
Branching out a bit
How to drink
Caitlin Doughty (ask a mortician)
LockpickingLawyer
NileRed (and NileBlue)
Tasting History
Townsends
Useful Charts
EDIT: Almost forgot Technology Connections
Some of them have changed their format a bit over the years, I don’t think that’s been a negative for any of them. Also due to how YouTube revenue works these days a lot of them have had to rely more heavily on sponsors, patron, merch etc. don’t hate the player for that, hate the game.
I believe you’d still be controlling the player character, you’d just be seeing through the eyes of the enemy
I don’t know how well it would work as a game mechanic, but I could see a cool take on this in a cyberpunk setting where the player character is blind, but can hack into other people’s eyes to see, so you go around seeing yourself from different viewpoints
I imagine it would get weird
You shoot someone and suddenly you can’t see through their eyes any more since they’re dead. Or maybe their bionics are still powered for a while but they’re not facing any useful direction, maybe they fall face down and all you can see is the floor tile they’re laying on, or they’re facing up and all you can see is the ceiling until you walk right over their corpse
Maybe after you kill a room full of enemies you need to lug around a corpse or maybe just a severed head so that you can find the exit because none of them fell looking the right direction.
I’m not normally much of a writer, but that idea actually inspired me a bit, so here’s a little short story I guess
I walk into the lobby and I begin to see through the eyes of the security guard seated at the desk. He’s reading a newspaper - an actual ink-on-paper newspaper. I didn’t know they still made those.
The door chime beeps and his eyes are immediately on me, zooming in, trying to get a read on me. I see my own features, distorted by the fisheye lens of his implants.
These security types always have some high-end bionics- night vision, thermal imaging, zoom, image stabilization, extra-wide field of view, facial recognition, the works. They think they can see everything but somehow they never seem to see it coming.
A notification pops up in his vision “Unrecognized person detected, check ID” the angle changes as he begins to get up. I see the back of his hand as he raises his arm in a “stop” gesture. He’s wearing a wedding band. That’s unfortunate.
I see movement in the bottom corner of his vision. He’s doing something with his other hand but I can’t tell what. Is he reaching for his gun? Is he smoothing out the wrinkles from his shirt? Is he just trying to put the newspaper away?
Maybe that’s why he reads an actual newspaper. He’s supposed to be alert and paying attention, if he read on his phone or tablet like anyone else his employers could track it, they’d know he was slacking off. Smart.
Through my own ears I hear him ask for my ID.
Through his eyes I see myself reach into my coat pocket he zooms in slightly. I love it when they zoom, it makes what comes next so much easier.
I see my gun come out. The angle changes abruptly but strangely smoothly, that image stabilization is doing some heavy-lifting as he tries to duck for cover and reach for his own gun.
His eyes are fixed on it, he’s staring right down the barrel, I can even just about line the sights up through his eyes, he’s making it too easy.
A flash. A loud bang heard through my own ears. Flashing warnings at the corners of his vision reporting critical vital signs.
The angle changes again, I think he’s fallen backwards and is propped up by his chair. He’s not looking straight up at the ceiling, but he’s not looking straight forward at me either. I can catch glimpses of the top of my head here and there as I stumble blindly towards him.
My face comes into full view as I make my way around the desk. I start going through his pockets looking for a key card to let myself into the elevator.
I find a rectangular piece of plastic on a lanyard stuffed into his pocket, and hold it in front of his eyes to confirm that it’s what I was looking for. I tap it on the sensor on the desk and hear the elevator doors slide open.
I point his head towards the elevator so that I can see where I’m going. A message notification pops up in his vision from “Bae💜” asking if he’ll be home for dinner. I see myself sigh as the door closes behind me.
The steel and concrete of the building sever me from his ocular feed as the elevator starts climbing and everything goes black once again.
They have 3 different peelers (4 if you count the left and right handed versions separately, 5 if you count the julienne peeler.
We have the swivel peeler which comes in left and right handed versions.
And on that note, think about how you peel. I tend to do long things like carrots and cucumbers in long strips away from myself, which is the opposite direction from what the right handed peeler can cut.
Round things like apples or potatoes though, I generally peel towards myself like a paring cut, which is what the right handed peeler is designed for.
If you’re splurging on a peeler for yourself, you could do like we did and just get both to cover all bases. Otherwise it may be worth taking an extra moment to consider the person you’re gifting it to’s handedness and what they’re likely to be peeling with it.
The stabby looking one should, I think, be ambidextrous. I haven’t used that one, I suspect it’s probably a cut above the cheap peeler you may have in your drawer now, but I can’t actually vouch for it. It also doesn’t look like the blade is replaceable on that one so I’d be less inclined to splurge on something that’s ultimately going to be disposable once it gets dull unless you want to get really fiddly trying to sharpen it. That said I think it’s probably going to be made of better steel than most regular peelers and will probably last a good long time before getting dull.
Or get the crosswise peeler which also has the replaceable blade. Can’t quite vouch for that one myself either, but we do have the julienne peeler which seems to be essentially the same but with a (non-replaceable) julienne blade, and I’ve been quite happy with that as well (though I do feel that it could have been designed to use the replaceable blades) the crosswise basically seems to be the julienne peeler but with the replaceable swivel peeler blades, so I’m pretty confident that it’s also a solid piece of kit, just not my preferred style of peeler.
Final note, the plain cylindrical steel handles may not be everyone’s aesthetic or ideal ergonomics. I like it just fine or even prefer it, but that’s just me.
My wife worked in a fancy kitchen store for a while, and has strong opinions on just about every kitchen tool or utensil you can imagine, and to her credit I agree with most of them.
A while back she ordered a Rösle vegetable peeler and due to a shipping error, instead of one single peeler we were sent, what I assume to be, one entire case’s worth of peelers.
Having now used it for several months I strongly believe this is the best vegetable peeler I have ever used. Also the blade is replaceable, which is, I think, pretty damn cool.
So since we have a bunch of them, pretty much everyone we know is getting one for Christmas.
They’re pricey if you’ve got a bunch of stockings to stuff, but not outrageously so if you only need to get one or two for people you know enjoy cooking. And they’re the kind of thing a lot of people probably wouldn’t spend the extra money on themselves. If it weren’t for my wife I’d probably have whatever the cheapest peeler in the kitchen aisle at target is, and it never would have crossed my mind that there was room for improvement.
Otherwise, I’ve never personally been disappointed to find a flashlight or pocket knife in my stocking.
My wife and I are on-and-off casual magic the gathering players, so a pack or two of that often finds its way into our stocking, substitute whatever your trading card game of choice is there.
Or various other small card or dice type games. It’s kind of nice having some little game you can carry around in your backpack or purse and bust out when you have some time to kill with friends.
Small Lego sets
Fidget toys
Snacks
Soaps, lotions, lip balm, etc.
Real tree
I don’t really want to do a tree to begin with but if my wife’s gonna make me do it I’m going to do it right.
Also I don’t have to wrestle the damn thing up and down the rickety ladder to my attic, it’s bad enough that I have to do that with the bins of ornaments.
And I get the catharsis of getting to burn the damn thing after the season is over.
Also it gives my house a slight piney scent.
I don’t know what to buy anymore.
I have a problem where because I’m so hard to advertise to between adblock and premium subscriptions, that I am usually very out of the loop on what movies and TV shows are coming out
The biggest ones usually make their way into the news or Lemmy somehow, but there’s definitely a lot I’m clueless about until I see them pop up streaming somewhere a couple years later
Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.
I actually looked up the actual (alleged) French quote, and it’s “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”
So I actually hit the nail on the head, it’s literally “let them eat brioche”
Still can’t really be attributed to Marie Antoinette, and it’s not unlikely that the entire anecdotal was just made up entirely
I had a French teacher who claimed that “let them eat cake” was a bit of a mistranslation and that “cake” was just a different, maybe fancier, type of bread.
Like the situation was more like someone said “Marie, the people don’t have any baguettes to eat.” And she replied “Well then let them eat brioche”
Still probably apocryphal, but I think maybe a little more believable if it were true while still showing the tone-deafness.
It also just feels very French to me.
What they were actually using prior to the space pen, and what the soviets used, were grease pencils, which really basically are crayons
If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right
Sure there’s advent leading up to Christmas
But “christmastide” really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the “twelve days of Christmas” the first day is Christmas.
The lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” (otherwise known as “that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics”) starts with the titular king looking out his window “on the feast of Stephen” which is the day after Christmas.
Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it’s fair to assume that these weren’t exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can’t really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.
Honestly, even when I was in middle and high school (so we’re going back around 20 years now) I don’t remember a whole lot of that
The main topics of conversation I remember were sports, video games, music, movies, TV, weed if you were a stoner, vacations, parties, and other plans you had and things you’d done recently, etc.
Pretty much the same shit I’d talk about now.
My personal experiences of course may not be representative of everyone, and like I said, it’s been about 20 years so it’s very possible my memory is faulty.
“locker room talk”
Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally “manly” men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.
I have basically no clue what’s going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women’s appearances, and when we do it’s kept to just a very quick observation, “man, she’s hot” kind of thing.
Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it’s our female friends stoking the fires.
I’m pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.
Maybe it’s because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren’t exactly the gym or team sports type.
Oh yeah, it’s absolutely primarily an infrastructure issue. Some proper bike lanes would go a very long way.
There’s a good smattering of the usual things- some people are dumb, some parents suck at parenting, etc. also at play, but that’s not particularly unique to bikes.
Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.
As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.
If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.
And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)
To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.
There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.
And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.
Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that
There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.
As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.
They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.
They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.
There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.
And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.
I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.
One of my friends lived in a really old house that had been converted into apartments. Everything was of course laid out really weirdly because they crammed a bedroom, living room, and kitchen into what I’m pretty sure was originally 2 bedrooms and part of a stairway
One of the only built-in light fixtures in that house I’m pretty sure was an old gas light that someone screwed a lightbulb holder onto about 100 years ago and has been there ever since.
Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link
But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.
While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge
Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)
But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire
The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger
Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.
So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.
For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.
And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.
And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.
The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.
There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra
In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)
And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies
Couple weeks back, but this is still one of the things I’m most proud to have ever done in my life
My friend works security at a bar. He texts me a pic of a guy sitting at the bar wearing a shirt with some SS lightning bolts, and said the girl he was with was wearing them too.
They’re not otherwise causing a problem, so the manager won’t let my friend kick these guys out, but he really wanted to.
I’m at work, probably 5 miles away, and I can’t leave to go start a ruckus. But I like this bar and I’ll be damned if I let Nazis get a foothold there.
So I think through my options. I remember that the bar has a jukebox with an app you can queue songs up on. I open up that app and see that I, for some reason, have a ton of credits on there.
And even better, you don’t actually even need to be at the bar to play songs there.
So I begin queuing up every anti-nazi, anti-fascist, anti-racist song I could find.
According to my friend, after a couple songs he got visibly frustrated and steps outside to have a cigarette as All You Fascists Bound to Lose comes on (sadly the jukebox did not have much Woody Guthrie, so I had to settle for the Billy Bragg and Wilco version)
He comes back inside and is created with Youth Against Fascism by Sonic Youth.
I keep it up. I find a version of Bella Ciao to play, Racist Friend by The Specials, This Is America, etc.
This bar has their jukebox set to a family friendly mode, since they also operate as a restaurant during the day. This limited my options somewhat, but I managed to put together a pretty solid dozen or so songs.
He starts looking around the bar, trying to figure out who is playing all this music obviously targeted at him. Of course I’m not even in the same town, so he finds nothing. My friend is keeping busy checking IDs and such at the door and occasionally texting me an update.
At some point in the middle of this someone queued up a single kid rock song, and I strongly suspect it was them.
It only took about an hour and they decided to close out their tab. He walks out to Michael Jackson’s They Don’t Care about Us.
But that’s not the end of this. I’m on a warpath now. I fire up a throwaway Google account and leave a 1 star review of the bar complaining about the Nazi. This causes a bit of stir with the management, and my friend is successfully able to argue for more authority to throw Nazis out.
Nazi punks can fuck off.