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

I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here’s a couple standouts

Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo

Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce

Mac & cheese

Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato

Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions

Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping

Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon

Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots

Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns

Chicken Tika masala

Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic

And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.

A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don’t think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

Anecdotally, really just shoplifting in general.

I work in 911 dispatch, been there for about 7 years, so long enough to have a decent feel for how things have changed since before COVID.

And while I’m not keeping a personal tally, it definitely seems like over the last couple of years I’ve been getting a whole lot more calls about shit like people stealing a single red bull from a convenience store. (Yes, they call 911 for that sometimes, and we also answer a lot of the 10-digit non emergency lines, it all pretty much has to go through us one way or another, it’s the same cops responding whether it’s an emergency or not so at some point it has to end up with central dispatch)

We actually have a couple convenience stores with security guards now because of this.

Most burritos I’ve had have the ends folded in which may make them a calzone

nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in

There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around

Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)

I think the basic premise of your question is kind of flawed.

Generational age brackets are always a little fuzzy, but most definitions tend to define millennials as people born from about 1981-1996

Which means come the end of the 90’s, the oldest millennials were just turning 18, the youngest were just entering preschool, the “average” millennial would have been about 10. Personally, I was 8 in 1999.

So most of us weren’t exactly politically-aware in the 90s, let alone actively criticizing anything besides homework. And a lot of us probably had parents who wouldn’t have let us listen to RATM because of the parental advisory sticker on their albums.

My main concerns at the time were things like video games and cartoons

Then right around the time we started to be old enough to really form political opinions, 9/11 happened and the world went insane around us.

I have a big bushy beard which somewhat limits my costume options if I’m going for any kind of accuracy unless I want to wear a mask

My two standby costumes that I dust off when I find myself with unexpected Halloween plans are

A lawn gnome. I dye my beard white, put on a blue ren faire sort of tunic, a wide belt, and a red pointy hat

And a Monty Python lumberjack. Red flannel shirt partially unbuttoned over a bra, suspenders, high heels, and a knit hat. I also have a big ol’ double bit felling axe I may trot out if the occasion warrants it.

I suppose I can also lose the heels and bra and just be a regular lumberjack.