Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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3 yr. ago

This is very flimsy so take it for what it's worth, but I have a really bad feeling that bird flu is about to become a much bigger deal, at least in the bird population if it doesn't make the jump to humans

It's winter here, I live in an area where most of the birds migrate south for the winter. Some species don't migrate, some individuals don't, and some birds even migrate to here, so there's usually some birds around here for the winter.

This year I've seen more.

And when I'm out walking my dog at night, they're on the ground, not up in trees or in bushes where you'd expect to see birds, or even hiding out in the undergrowth of wooded areas they're out in the open on the grass, sidewalk, middle of the road, etc. in the middle of the night.

I see one almost every night, sometimes a few of them. And I have a bad feeling that these birds are sick and too weak to do much besides flutter away to a different patch of grass when I get close.

I've been in this house for about 5 years, been taking my dog for walks almost every night since then, rain or shine, summer or winter. This isn't something I've seen until this year. And I've seen it in a handful of places outside of my neighborhood as well.

It may be me being paranoid, it may be something other than bird flu, but it's not exactly giving me the warm-fuzzies.

I feel like the issue with steel might be more mold than algae, and most people who aren't biologists just aren't thinking too hard about what sort of organism the gross slime in their water is.

Going against the grain here a little, I don't like required reading in schools.

I really loved reading growing up, always had a book (sometimes more than one) that I was reading, read well above my grade level, chose books that challenged myself, etc.

My high school really pushed reading, lots of classes assigned books for us to read, I think even some of the math classes had novels they were supposed to read. For our homeroom period once a week we had to do mandatory SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) where we had to be reading something, we couldn't do homework or go see our teachers for help, or anything of the sort, we had to be seated at our desks reading silently. I often was juggling 2 or 3 assigned books along with my other school work, activities, and hobbies, which didn't really leave me much time for the books that I chose to read for myself.

And the pacing was terrible, we'd often spend weeks on a book, analyzing it to death, doing packets of worksheets, writing reports, doing that accursed "popcorn reading" in class, etc. for books that I could have read in a matter of days if not hours.

I think we spent nearly a month on Of Mice and Men, it's only around 100 pages, it can be read in an afternoon.

The whole experience really killed my love of reading. I resented a lot of the books I was made to read, and now almost 2 decades later I've never quite been able to get back into the same kind of reading habit I used to have.

I've made an effort since then to go back and reread some of those assigned books I hated back in school, and the wild thing is that, overall, they were really good books, strong stories, well-written, solid lessons to teach, different points of view to consider, etc. I totally understand why they were assigned reading.

But when I first read them I was just going through the motions, I just wanted to get the damn books out of the way so that I could read what I wanted to read.

And I think the key is to make kids want to seek out those books. Don't assign them 1984 (for example,) make them want to go out and read 1984 for themselves.

I don't know what the best way to do that is, but it's not just telling them to read those books. If anything, it might be telling them not to read them. I can only speak for myself, but I know that personally seeing a display on "banned books" at a book store or library always made me way more interested in those books than any amount of recommendations from friends or reviews online or any other form of marketing.

I'm worried about your ventilation and PPE situation.

It's vented outside through flexible ducting with an inline fan, I have VOC monitors around my basement, and I wear a p100 organic vapor and acid rated respirator, disposable nitrile gloves, goggles, and a rubber apron

But do go on being a judgemental prick for no reason. I'm not skimping on safety, but if I can save myself a few bucks not buying a boring piece of hardware I don't really need, I'd prefer to do that.

That's money that could buy me more resin, paints, disposable gloves, beer, coffee, ice cream, books, movie tickets, or countless other things that I'd rather be spending my money on.

They never went snooping, my mom occasionally would occasionally come into my room to put clothes away or pick stuff up off the floor or whatever but that was pretty much the extent of it.

She did occasionally do the fairly odd parents "I'm respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as your parent by coming in anyway" thing, where she'd knock but didn't really wait for a reply before opening the door or just took any sort of "what?" reply she got as an invitation to continue in, but I think that was more of her being on autopilot than any real intention to barge in on me.

I was, by most measures, a pretty good kid and didn't really have anything to hide anyway. I think my parents knew that so they never really bothered to snoop.

And on top of that, my grandmother was the queen of all snoop, and my mom hated that when she was growing up so she didn't want to do that to her own kids.

My grandmother was always the type to just come over uninvited, let herself into the house, and just kind of do whatever the hell she wanted, look at whatever mail we had sitting out on the counter (didn't open it, but if it was already open it I don't think she was above reading it) move stuff around, etc.

I remember one time when I was still living at home I was the only one home, it was the middle of the day and I worked nights so I was asleep. She let herself in and was doing who knows what downstairs, and she accidentally bumped the power button on my Xbox, and couldn't figure out how to turn it back off, so she came into my room and woke me up over it.

I don't think anywhere else is quite as dramatic as Costco but I kind of feel like most places that have rotisserie chickens use them as a loss-leader. At any grocery store around me they cost about the same or less than a raw chicken.

They're kind of perfect for it. It's not hard to rub down a chicken with some spice blend and skewer it on a rotisserie, not much else needs to be done there.

And if you're a grocery store you're selling chickens anyway. You always have them on-hand, you can rotate out stock that's getting close to expiring by just throwing it on the rotisserie.

And for someone who just needs a quick dinner, it gets them in the door. Grab the chicken and a couple quick side dishes and you're in business.

There hasn't been one around me in a while, but Boston Market's whole thing is/was pretty much rotisserie chicken, and at least the last time I went to one (probably a decade ago) I remember them running some kind of special that got me like 2 or 3 whole chickens for some ridiculously low price, but of course I also got a few tides with it and I feel like that's where they made their money.

No it's at least 2 chemicals- acetic acid and water.

And quite a few others if we're talking about something besides distilled white vinegar.

chemical free

Literally a chemical.

It's a common one found in lots of natural foods and such, nothing particularly scary or unusual, but you are presumably buying a purified, concentrated chemical and not just squeezing a lemon into your washing machine as a natural source of that chemical.

My buddy works security at a bar. A few weeks back he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there wearing a shirt with SS lightning bolts on it. The manager wouldn't let him throw the guy out because he wasn't otherwise causing any issues (as if a Nazi sitting at your bar isn't already a big enough issue)

I was at work myself, so in no position to go start shit at this bar. But I also wasn't about to just let these assholes infest a place I like to go drink at.

I remembered this bar has one of those tough tunes jukeboxes that you can queue songs up on from an app, and as it turns out you don't actually have to be physically at the bar to use that power.

This bar is also a relatively family-friendly restaurant during the day, so the jukebox selection is a little bit neutered, but I still manage to get a decent little anti-fascist playlist going. I played a couple songs, and when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on, he apparently got a little visibly frustrated and went outside to smoke.

When he came back in he was greeted with this song.

He then sat there looking around the bar looking around trying to figure out who was playing all of this music that was clearly targeted at him, but of course finding no one because I was about 5 miles away.

At some point in the middle of my little impromptu DJ set, someone queues up a kid rock song, I'm pretty sure it was him. It picked right up after that with a cover of Bella Ciao.

After only about an hour of this he was packing it up to leave.

It wasn't much, but it's one of the things I'm proudest of having done in my life. Those touchtunes credits I think were money well-spent.

But I wasn't quite done yet. I wanted to make sure I didn't have to do this again. So I fired up a throwaway Google account and left a 1-star review of this bar complaining about Nazi boy. This caused a bit of a stir among the management, and so now my friend is allowed to kick out Nazis.

If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes

-Diogenes

Just kind of spit-balling, but I imagine it dries them out really quickly, and as a bonus gets hot enough to probably kill off most bugs, spores, etc. that may be in/on them

Someone mentioned potpourri, I don't really know anything about how that's normally made, I don't think of these sticks and gumballs as being particularly aromatic, and even if they were the higher heat of an air fryer might cook off some of those aromatic compounds, if that's the plan maybe the idea is to infuse them with essential oils or spices or something after they're dried, but again not really my area of expertise.

It's probably not much of a fire hazard, depending on what temperature they're running it at, where the heating element is, and exactly what kind of stuff is in there. There's a lot of variables, but in general wood needs to get up to at least about 450°F/232°C, and often a good bit higher to spontaneously catch fire, and I'd imagine the gumballs are similar. Most air fryers I've seen max out at around 400-450, so unless you have one that is working at the higher temperatures and they're cranking it on max for a long time, probably not too much to worry about.

Like I said, a lot of variables there, might be something worth worrying about if there's maybe something like maybe pitch pine in the mix that has a lot of oils and resins and such that might have a lower ignition temp. Maybe there's some danger of the wood getting charred and smoking a bit but not outright catching fire or smouldering.

Wild guess at the motivation, they want to dry out the wood and kill off any pests to use it for some kind of art project. Seems like overkill to make fire starters or dry out kindling to me.

Harmony remotes, IMO, were actually pretty good.

But sadly they killed them off just before I got a home theater setup that I'm actually pretty happy with.

I had a small novelty Twitter account that Andrew WK followed at one point.

Without pay? No. But I do fortunately have some pretty generous PTO at my work, and a bit of a weird work schedule that helps me stretch it even firther if I plan my vacations right.

My wife and I manage to get a bigger trip in every couple years. We're not staying at fancy hotels or anything, but we can go somewhere cool and do some cool stuff, splurge on a couple nice meals, etc.

And usually one or two smaller trips a year, a couple camping trips, or a weekend away or something.

Would like to travel a lot more, but the travel expenses are what prevent it- food, lodging, plane tickets/gas/etc.

You know, it's now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It's been around forever, I've been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I'm pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

But I haven't the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don't think I've ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

And while I'm a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I've never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

I feel like I'm in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I'm not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I've never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.

Well now there's one more thing I can't unsee

My wife has this big painting that hangs above our fireplace. It's abstract, just some colored squares and rectangles, kind of blotchy.

One of those blotches looks a hell of a lot like a frog though. Almost like a frog hopped onto the canvas while the paint was still wet.

Can you find the frog?

Or "His Dudeness" or "Duder" or "El Duderino" if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

He did eventually sober up, I think he did a little bit of time in jail or prison along the way. As far as I know he is generally doing pretty well now, is married, has a kid.

But he's still an idiot. I remember seeing I'm parroting some bullshit about Trump being better for the middle class maybe about a year ago.

He did message me a bit after the election saying something about how he felt bad, but I was still pissed off myself and in no mood to hear him out and blocked him. I was within days of deleting my Facebook anyway so I was about to lose contact with him anyway since I've never had his phone number.

It wasn't much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.

There was one dude I wasn't exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.

He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn't out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.

I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn't drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.

So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he's going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn't ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn't know.) He also knew that he couldn't be trusted with his own money, he'd blow it on drugs or something else stupid.

So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He'd hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn't use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.

But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by "high school kids 20 years ago" standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)

And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.