Yeah, it is probably largely dependent on the parts of the internet you inhabit, I can’t see it coming up in gamer forums outside of maybe in-depth discussion of piracy laws, but it’s definitely something I’ve seen around the internet as long as I can remember (my family got online in the mid-lato 90s, I feel like I first encountered it in middle school or early high school so early 2000s-ish.
But by that point it was pretty well-established, it wasn’t hard to google what it meant at that time.
People have been throwing that kind of disclaimer on online comments so long that they came up with the abbreviation “IANAL” back in the 80s or 90s, back when the World Wide Web was either not even a thing yet or brand-spanking-new and Usenet was king.
There are, frankly, a whole lot of absolute morons out in the world.
Sometimes those people are the ones asking for advice, sometimes they’re the ones trying to give it.
Some people who will take anything you say at face value, won’t verify any information for themselves, won’t do any research, etc. and if they follow your advice and screw up they sometimes like to lug litigious about it.
And when they’re the ones giving advice, they’ll confidently state stuff that is just flat out not true and sometimes dangerous.
Hopefully you can see at least some of the ways those could be a bad combination.
Personally when I make those kinds of disclaimers, it’s because I’m
Looking out for myself, I don’t want to get sued, I dont want some asshole to harass me or dox me or ruin my reputation or anything because they followed advice I gave because they thought I “sounded like I knew what I was talking about”
I’m looking out for the other person. I’m not a professional and I know it, I’m warning them that they should only take my thoughts or advice for what they’re worth which may not be much, and there’s a real chance the person I’m talking to is an idiot.
I also feel like it kind of invites someone who does actually know better to come in and correct or add on to what I’ve said, and I always welcome that sort of learning opportunity.
And it can sometimes be a way to slip in a little humor if you slip in something like “I’m no octopus psychologist” or something when you’re discussing the behavior of an octopus. (To the best of my knowledge, "octopus psychologist is not a real job, and that’s why it’s humorous, at least to someone with the same kind of dry humor as me)
My dog is very aggressive/reactive to other dogs.
We got her when she was just a few weeks shy of a year old, from a family friend who rescued her from some random guy on Facebook who basically said “someone come take this dog or I’m gonna put her down”
I don’t know much about that first guy except that he was obviously a piece of shit. He was also at least pretty neglectful, she has a pretty low maintenance coat, occasional brushing is about all she needs, but apparently she was filthy and her fur was even a little matted when they rescued her. I also suspect he was kind of abusive, because for a while she was kind of afraid of people holding broomsticks, fishing rods, etc. and I can’t think of any good reason for that except that he hit her with something.
Again, she was still a puppy, less than a year old.
So needless to say she probably didn’t get any kind of socialization with him.
The people we got her from kind of suspect that he got her as payment for a drug deal or something along those lines.
She’s a very high-energy and intelligent breed (a malinois, she’s actually pretty lazy for her breed, but that still makes her more energetic than just about any other dog I’ve ever met) very driven, incredibly mouthy (we’ve long since trained it out of her, but I can tell that she still sometimes wants to bite me in a playful way)
The people we got her from are very nice, but already had 2 kids, 2 dogs, and a couple cats, not a very big house, and no experience with this sort of high-energy breed, and I am certain that she was an absolute terror.
But things went pretty much fine for a while, she got along with their dogs and even their cats, they thought about keeping her for themselves
But then she started getting into fights with their one other dog. She was getting into sort of her adolescent phase, pushing boundaries, trying to assert dominance, and probably just being a crazy little crackhead.
So she ended up getting bitten pretty badly by their other dog (and maybe kind of deserved it)
And since then she just hasn’t been good with other dogs. We’ve gotten her to a point where she can more-or-less ignore a couple familiar dogs around the neighborhood, but I doubt she’ll ever be at a point where she’ll ever be friendly with other dogs.
She’s been bitten, she doesn’t want to get bitten again, and her breed is pretty much all-fight no-flight (as in fleeing, watch a couple videos of military/police malinois jumping out of helicopters and shit and you’ll see they clearly don’t have a problem with flying, and their jumping game is probably about as close to flight as any dog can manage on their own,) so in her mind the way to stay safe is basically to go on the offensive and get the other dogs before they can get her.
Better early socialization and more experienced owners who knew how to manage her energy and instincts better in that first year or so of her life probably would have made a huge difference for her.
It also doesn’t help that she was a covid puppy, not easy to get proper socialization when your humans are stuck quarantining at home.
She loves people though, she rolls over for belly rubs from just about anyone, cuddles right up next to me in bed, and while she does get a bit uncomfortable in bigger crowds, she always wants to at least be near where the people are. I remember taking her on a camping trip with a few friends, some she knew, others she didn’t, and she wasn’t sure what to make of all of these people hanging out in the same place, so she didn’t really insert herself into the group, but she definitely sat nearby watching us, and anytime someone broke off to go to the bathroom, get something from their tent, grab a drink, etc. she was right there with them
I kind of think of myself as “prepper light” I keep a small stockpile of food and supplies around, have at least general plans for most emergencies that might arise, like I live close to a nuclear plant so I know the evacuation route I’m supposed to take from my home if something ever happens there, what radio station is going to have information, etc. I know what I’m doing if we lose power for an extended period of time, etc.
But I’m not devoting a significant amount of my time to it. A few minutes or hours here or there, a little casual research, the occasional “roughing it” camping trip for fun and practice
But most importantly, I have friends. I’m a pretty all-around capable guy, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. When it comes to fixing cars, spinning yarn and weaving cloth, more advanced construction, plumbing, gardening, etc. I’m kind of clueless. But I have friends who are really good at those things. If shit ever really hits the fan in whatever sort of “end of the world as we know it” sort of scenario you might be imagining, none of us are going to cut it long-term by ourselves, but with all of our various skills put together we might just stand a chance.
And also I like those people, I want to make sure they make it through it with me.
US
My situation is a little fucked up because I work 12 hour shifts, but PTO is based around 8 hour days because that’s what most employees here work and they haven’t made any special exemptions for us. These numbers are going to be based around 8 hour days because I don’t feel like doing the math
Vacation time- 10 days for new hires, and you get 5 additional days at 5, 13, and 19 years, so assuming I stick around for 19+ years I’ll have 25 days. You can carry over up to 15 unused days to the next year
5 personal days, no carryover
Sick days accrue at 1 day per month, so essentially 12, with unlimited carryover,
1 personal holiday
Certain things like perfect attendance, coming in for overtime, etc. can earn you “flex time” which actually is usually awarded in 12 hour increments.
I’m kind of bad at using my PTO. My schedule is kind of wonky and I work less days overall than most people and tend to just slot most of my vacation plans into that. If I plan things right I also only need to take 2 days off to get a whole week, and every other weekend I have a 3 day weekend. I don’t tend to take a lot of elaborate vacations, 3 day or less trips are kind of my norm. Every couple years I’ll do something a bit more elaborate and take a week or more, but more often my PTO tends to get used for other things besides going on vacation. I have a week coming up that I took off to paint some rooms in my house for example.
FWIW, if you haven’t already, it may be worth giving the packaging of your “regular” bacon and such a good looking-over
I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, it’s just something I tend to notice because like I said, I dabble in cured meats as a hobby, but at least around me a lot of bacon, hot dogs, etc. across the whole spectrum from bottom of the barrel store brands up to the fancy high-end name brands are touting that they’re “uncured,” and even if they don’t outright say that as a selling point they’re only listing celery powder and natural flavors in the ingredients and no sodium nitrite/nitrate
It’s not all brands by a longshot, but it’s a lot of them.
Not trying to push any kind of cured meat agenda, just kind of giving you something else to look out for, maybe it will give you a few more options or help you discover some other things you should avoid.
I think possibly the best steak I ever had/made was a cheap chuck steak that I gave a nice long sous vide treatment
There is a whole lot of flavor there, but it can be as tough as shoe leather, but with sous vide it came out as tender as any filet, but way beefier
FYI, a whole lot of “uncured” meats, at least in the US, are just kind of using loopholes. Often there’s a little asterisk next to the word “uncured”
And if you follow that asterisk to the bottom of the back side of the package or wherever they decided to hide it in small print you’ll see it says something like “contains no added nitrites or nitrates except those naturally occurring in celery powder or other natural ingredients”
And spoiler alert, celery has kind of a lot of nitates and nitrites.
And while there are regulations about how much pure nitrates/nitrites they can add to your food, there’s no regulation on how much celery powder they can add because it’s just considered a “flavoring” ingredient and not a curing agent. “Uncured” bacon or hot dogs or whatever could technically contain far more nitrites than would legally be allowed in their cured counterparts (though in practice I’m sure they’re probably roughly the same amount)
Regardless of if those nitrites are pure or coming from celery powder, it’s the same chemical doing the same thing in your food and body.
Other veggies contain a lot of nitrites/nitrates too, cabbage for example. I’ve occasionally had it happen when I make cabbage rolls in a pressure cooker that despite being totally cooked through the ground beef is still a pretty vibrant red/pink like corned beef because of the nitrites from the cabbage.
I’m not saying this to scare-monger or anything, there are valid health concerns about nitrates and nitrites in general, and of course people like you who have a particular sensitivity to them, and it’s well worth being aware of all of that. That said, I’ve been dabbling in curing my own meats and have a big jar of Prague powder #1 in my pantry which is 6.25% sodium nitrite, so clearly it’s not something that’s particularly high on my own list of concerns. I also intend to try curing my own corned beef at some point with celery juice and other natural sources of nitrites, not because I think it’s any healthier but because it sounds like a fun experiment.
Luckily most people with those sorts of implants I’ve seen are fairly scientifically-minded, and I’d like to think that’s the sort of thing they’d think of and would wear some sort of appropriate medic alert bracelet.
It’s not like there aren’t other sorts of medical implants, piercings, situations like people with shrapnel embedded in their bodies, etc. out in the world that could potentially cause issues with an MRI machine.
I read about people getting magnets implanted so that they can feel magnetic/electrical fields
Not quite ready to commit to implants, but i did try gluing some tiny magnets to my fingernails once.
I suspect that the implants are a bit more sensitive since they can kind of wiggle around under your skin more, but I could definitely feel some things, the two that stuck out to me were a forklift charger and an electric pencil sharpener.
I also got really used to picking up paperclips and other small metal things like that with them. I only had the magnets for maybe about a week, but I caught myself still trying to pick up paperclips with them for probably about a month afterwards.
All 3 of them, but no one’s home
He’s got a few other stupid tattoos. He’s got some more words tattooed above the stoplight in sort of a fancy script, but I can’t really make them out because he’s always wearing a hat. Some knuckle tattoos I can’t make out because in all his pictures he’s either holding a 40 of old English or flipping off the camera (or both) so his hands are always contorted weirdly, a few words that he probably thought sounded tough, some symbols I don’t recognize, and a crucifix on one arm and a devil holding a cross on the other that might be actually kind of well-done but I don’t have a great eye for tattoos.
He’s a shrimpy white guy with a patchy beard, who grew up in what passes for the ghetto in an otherwise pretty nice suburban area (not to sell it short, it is a pretty shitty town, once in a while it manages to crack some “Top X Most Dangerous Cities in state/country” sort of article, but compared to the “bad neighborhoods” in pretty much any major city it’s nothing)
I could go on for quite a while about him and the rest of that branch of the family, and all the dumb bullshit they’ve done even though I’ve never met most of them, their reputation far precedes them. All through grade school the prevailing advice from my parents was “if anyone asks if you know/are related to any other [our last name]s, just say ‘no’” and that’s always served me well.
None of his profiles seem to have been updated in about 10 years, so with any luck he’s locked up somewhere, or maybe dead. Or maybe he had just enough sense to stop broadcasting his dumbassery out onto the open internet.
I have a distant relative with a traffic light tattooed in the middle of his forehead, just a black rectangle with red, yellow, and green circles.
And on either side he has some graffiti style writing that I’m pretty sure says “con man”
I became aware of him because we share a fairly uncommon last name, and one day police came to my house grasping at straws looking for this guy because he had been breaking into cars, so the basically went to the first person with the same last name they could find to see if we knew where he was.
It was the first time I’d heard of him, we’re not at all close with the extended family. Eventually I looked him up and found his social media with those stupid tattoos.
The stick also has the advantage of being easier to drop than the finglonger in case whatever you happen to be poking decides it wants to grab hold and pull you down
I don’t know what actual products are out there, but there are other time signals that could potentially be used, for example GPS.
Off the top of my head I don’t think I’ve seen a gps-synced clock, let alone one with a pendulum, but I’ve also never really looked for one either. It certainly feels like a product that probably exists somewhere to me, I’m sure there’s someone out there who would appreciate a clock that can automatically detect the timezone, whether the region your in observes daylight savings time, etc.
That’s true for mechanical clock movements, but I think OP is looking for a quartz movement that includes a simulated pendulum for aesthetic purposes, which isn’t particularly uncommon, unless your circles include a lot of antique enthusiasts, people who inherited an old grandfather clock, or people who just really dig mechanical clocks (and I won’t knock that, I certainly think they’re neat) odds that a lot of clocks you’ve seen with a pendulum are that type, powered by a AA battery and stuffed into a fancy wooden case
Aside from not needing to adjust the time, is there any particular reason it needs to be WiFi enabled?
Because that kind of feels like an overly complicated solution to a problem that was solved decades ago with “atomic” clock movements.
Which aren’t actually atomic in any way on their own, but contain an antenna to pick up the signal from an NIST atomic clock to set the time (and I believe other countries and regions have their own equivalent if you’re not in the US)
As far as finding a pendulum movement, I don’t really know what is out there, but it may be another avenue for you to look into.
Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.
My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I’m less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)
Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There’s kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who’s trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.
And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That’s the hard part.
Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that “I grew it myself” which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.
I’ve had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.
The Shanty Swing Band
One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.
The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.
I feel like it’s also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.
I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn’t going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.
Part of the concept also involved a “gun player” who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.
Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.
There’s a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.
Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation
Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.
Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,
But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I’ll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.
Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.
I had one of the earlier model iPod Touches, maybe 2nd Gen? It was the first one to include Bluetooth (if memory serves, and it may not, I vaguely remember at launch Bluetooth that was disabled and I had to jailbreak it to use it, pretty sure Apple eventually enabled Bluetooth with a software update)
Around that time I’d also gotten my first job and had purchased a new laptop for myself, and sprung a little extra to get one with Bluetooth.
I saw the future, I was sick of wires and dongles, I got a Bluetooth mouse, a pair of Bluetooth over the ear headphones, and for my iPod I went to Best buy and got a pair of rocket fish “earbuds” (it doesn’t feel right calling them earbuds, since they were connected with a rigid band around the back of your head, but that’s what they were calling them) and sprung an extra couple bucks for the warranty because why not.
Those earbuds were a piece of crap. They worked fine, but they weren’t rugged enough to deal with everyday life. Getting knocked off a coffee table onto a carpeted floor was enough to break them.
So for a couple months it became almost a weekly ritual for me to go back to best buy to exchange them, until they just stopped stocking them and gave me my money back.
In those days, there weren’t many options for smaller profile Bluetooth headphone, you could get bulky over the ear models that were never really my thing, or you could get a mono earpiece. I’m pretty sure that those were literally the only model I could find at any reasonable price point.
It actually kind of soured me on Bluetooth headphones until fairly recently, and honestly if my phone still had a jack I’d probably still be using the Shure 215 earbuds I bought after that.
(Also, if you’re in the market for wired earbuds, I’m no audiophile, but I do not regret getting the shures one bit, they definitely sounded better than the Skullcandy buds I upgraded from back then, and they are damn-near indestructible, there may very well be better, cheaper, and more rugged earbuds out there, but for the $100 or so I spent over a decade ago, mine have gone through the laundry a couple times and had just about every other kind of abuse you could imagine inflicted upon them and they’re no worse for wear, and the wire is replaceable if that ever gets fucked up but I’m still on the original)