Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

There's a small newspaper article someone unearthed about my great grandfather.

In 1920, he was sued by his neighbor for slander, claiming that he "called her bad names in the presence of other persons"

It stemmed from the fact that pigeons belonging to someone who boarded at her house, stole preserves belonging to my great grandmother. He went and got into an argument with the boarder. The neighbor came out and told him to get lost. She also said that judging by the racket in his house Friday and Saturday nights that he must be running a speakeasy

(Which honestly was not entirely unlikely, this would have been a few months before prohibition went into effect, but our home town did have its share of bootleggers and moonshiners back in the day. We are also an Italian family and I wouldn't exactly be surprised to learn there were some mob ties once upon a time, and it would kind of fit with some other random bits of family lore, but that's really just wild speculation on my part. It also could have just been that there were 7 kids in the house, plus probably assorted other family and friends at any given time, not many in my family have ever been accused of being quiet, and it was kind of a rough and tumble blue collar mill to n back in the day full of all kinds of colorful characters)

But anyway, he asked her "what kind of a house she kept and said some more" according to the article. And also said to the boarder that he had better be sending his money to his starving parents in Italy instead of spending on her.

Defendant (my great grandfather) made denial charges. Verdict for the defendant.

I love that it seems to be an agreed-upon fact that these pigeons did in fact steal my family's preserves, which I assume means jellies and pickles and such.

Your dog is awesome.

Your job is pretty cool. I don't think I'm ready for that yet, but I'll keep that on my radar.

Your beard and moustache are epic. Shame about the hair, but I knew that was coming.

Congrats on getting married, can't wait to meet her.

Donald Trump? Twice? Really? And they do what? Fuck, man...fuck.

Since we've established that magic wands are a resource that exists in this hypothetical scenario

We replace the entire constitution with a single clause: Any and all issues are to be resolved with the wave of a magic wand to produce the best possible solution.

No tattoos, only one piercing - a prince Albert, still pretty new but I don't see myself regretting it. I miss standing to pee at a regular toilet but can still manage urinals just fine. I might have timed it better, I didn't tell my wife I was gonna get it done and it turned out she was kind of planning on having sex with me that weekend. She's excited to try it out in a couple weeks though.

I don't regret any of my scars, at worse they're a reminder not to do something stupid, but most of them are just a fun story. I have one on my left eyebrow I got in a mosh pit that I think is pretty cool. One of my first dates with my wife involved her taking me for a quick stop to get my stitches removed.

I've had a fake account for going on 2 decades at this point, for a long time it coexisted with my regular account before I deleted that.

I have no idea how it hasn't been flagged as fake yet.

I've changed the name on it and all of my information a couple of times, I have like 2 pictures, both just stolen from Google image searches for things like "dude" and "guy with computer"

For a little while I used it for some memes and shitposting and occasionally tagged it from my main account.

At one point I unfriended just about everyone I actually know and added a bunch of randos from around the world.

For the last 10+ years I don't think I've actually used it to post, like, comment, or follow anything. Nowadays I just use it to log in and see what various pages I want to follow are posting.

At this point I think I'm mostly coasting on the account age being old enough that they assume I must be a real person. It probably also helps that the account has never really done anything offensive to warrant anyone actually looking into it.

In one sense, the egg. Animals had been laying eggs for millions of years before anything like a chicken evolved.

If we're limiting our scope to just chicken eggs though, things get a little murkier.

When we talk about chicken eggs, are we talking about eggs laid by a chicken, or are we talking about eggs from which a chicken can hatch? Or do both need to be true for it to truly be a chicken egg?

In the first and last case, the chicken obviously needs to come first, a non-chicken can't lay a chicken egg if that's the criteria you're going by.

That middle ground though is interesting.

The chicken is descended from the red junglefowl. Look up some pictures, they're pretty damn chicken-y, I might even say they may look even more like a chicken than some modern chicken breeds. If I was out walking around and a junglefowl ran across the street in front of me, I'd probably chuckle to myself while I pondered the age-old question of "why did the chicken cross the road?" If one showed up in my friends' backyard flock of assorted chicken breeds, it wouldn't look at all out of place.

But it is not a chicken.

Chickens, however, are junglefowl. We consider them to be a subspecies of junglefowl- Gallus gallus domesticus

Chickens did not emerge in a single instant. It took many years of selective breeding and evolution for the modern chicken to come into being. Countless generations of junglefowl gradually becoming more chicken-y until the modern chicken emerged.

At one point in time, a bird was hatched that checked all of the boxes for us to call it a chicken instead of a junglefowl. The egg it hatched from was laid by a bird that was just on the other side of the arbitrary line from being a chicken. Unless you sequenced the two birds genomes you would probably be pretty hard-pressed to say which was the chicken and which was the junglefowl.

So the first chicken hatched from an egg said by a junglefowl.

However, that is one true chicken in a flock of not-quite-chickens. Odds are that chicken did not breed with another true chicken, but instead one of those near-chicken junglefowl. So its eggs would not hatch into a true chicken, but instead a chicken-junglefowl hybrid.

And there was probably a long period of time where things teetered on that line, the occasional true chicken hatched, and then laid eggs that hatched into non-chickens, those non-chickens getting closer and closer to the line over many generations.

Until finally it happened. Two true chickens bred, and lay an egg that also matches into a true chicken. The first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken.

But again you'd be pretty hard pressed to pinpoint which bird that was in the flock. It was probably a wholly unremarkable bird that looked pretty much the same as all of the chickens and non-chicken junglefowl around it.

The lines we draw separating different species and subspecies are pretty arbitrary. It's more for our convenience to categorize things than it is to reflect any absolute truth about the animals around us. That line could have been drawn just about anywhere in the history of chickens and it would still be valid.

There's also potentially a nature vs nurture angle here. Chickens are social creatures who raise their young, they're not running on pure instinct, to some extent they learn how to be a chicken from other chickens. A true chicken raised by junglefowl may act more like a junglefowl than a chicken in some ways, and vice versa. Is that important when determining what the bird is? When the differences between them are so small, I think it might be. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

So there's perhaps an argument to be made that maybe the first true chicken didn't appear until at least a generation or two after that first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken. After all, if the young aren't being raised by and around other chickens, maybe they're not really chickens.

Why not just delete WhatsApp and tell people you're banned or it won't work for you?

I think it depends on the movie

If, after 30 years it still has a lot of cultural relevance, I'd think of it as a "classic" movie.

If it doesn't, if it hasn't aged well and/or faded into obscurity, I think it's fair to think of it as an old movie.

Probably around '95, I would have been watching Star Wars for the first time. It didn't feel like an old movie to me then and it still doesn't to this day. Other movies from that same era haven't aged quite as well and felt "old" to me.

Looking at some of the top movies from '95, some of them are just as enjoyable or relevant today as they were when they released, others feel dated and not relevant to me today.

It's going to depend on your personal tastes and experiences of course. I can also sprinkle in a lot of platitudes like "you're only as old as you feel" and "one man's trash is another man's treasure"

I think there's also room for some overlap. There's classic movies that also feel dated. I think some movies can be both old and classics. You'd be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn't agree that, for example, Casablanca, isn't old, but I think that just about everyone agrees that it's also a classic. Where the line is is pretty murky.

Not immediately relevant to your issue, but fun fact I wanted to share regarding the term "flashing" your BIOS

The term originates from a time when BIOS was stored on an EPROM (Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory) chip (not EEPROM, which later became the norm and stands for Electronically Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory)

So if you think about those terms for a minute, if EPROM was erasable, but not electronically erasable, how did you erase it?

The answer is, you exposed it to UV light, ideally a strong one like a mercury vapor lamp, but other sources could work they'd just take longer.

So you literally were flashing light at the chip.

The chips had a little window built into them to expose the memory array, and they were usually covered with a sticker you would peel off if you needed to erase it.

I don't exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I'm not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.

While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there's a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there's a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.

GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it's a lot easier to emulate them.

I've seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.

If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they're saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That's your computer emulating a GameCube game. There's not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.

Chinese and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.

Few more ingredients but my carnitas have always been a crowd pleaser

• Pork shoulder
• Coke
• Orange juice
• Chicken stock
• Canned Chipotles in adobo
• Onions
• Garlic
• Spices - I mix it up a bit, but salt, pepper, cumin, cayenne, and oregano will usually get you there. Packet or two of taco seasoning would probably do the trick as well

I tend to eyeball everything, but usually about a 12oz can of coke, oj and stock until it looks right, one onion chopped up, however many cloves of garlic I feel like peeling and chopping

If the pork shoulder fits I do it in a pressure cooker on high about 2 hours, if it doesn't I do it significantly longer in a slow cooker

When it's falling apart, pull the bones out, shred (I like to use a mixer)

Then like you, crisp it up under the broiler, and maybe mix in some of the cooking liquid

Also I want to apologize if my tone came off a little harsh, I feel like it may have, and that was not my intention, I was just sort of throwing thoughts out there while I had a couple free minutes.

Yeah, an account definitely makes sense to store characters online, totally get that.

Personally, and I can of course only speak for myself and the groups I usually play with, we tend to use character generators for initial character creation, then print out or manually transfer things to a paper character sheet, we just kind of prefer the pen and paper experience, but character generators sure are convenient, especially for one-shots or if you need to quickly whip up a few NPCs, so being able to save our characters isn't a huge bonus for us. Other peoples' play styles are different of course so I'm not knocking that feature, it's definitely something a lot of people find useful.

Also with that in mind, having not seen what the actual site is like, some sort of printer-friendly layout is always appreciated if you haven't already thought of that.

Personally I think the ideal is to have the character generator be useable without a log-in, and have a "create an account/log-in to save your character sheet online" option for people who want that.

I also personally appreciate a "save as a fillable pdf" option for when I do save a digital copy of a character sheet. But now I'm just spouting off wishlist items at your.

But most importantly, thank you for spending time to make something like this. These kinds of tools are always appreciated. And please don't bend over backwards just to accommodate my wants in a character generator, I'm just some stranger on the internet sharing my thoughts, and I don't pretend to speak for anyone but myself, don't give me any extra weight because I'm loud and opinionated.

Whenever I get around to running a game I'll definitely be be keeping your site in mind.

I've been interested in Kids on Bikes for a while just haven't gotten around to actually getting a game together.

I will say though that needing to create an account and log in to use it is a pretty big turn-off for me, especially without any sort of preview of what the actual site looks like so I can gauge if it's gonna be worth it for me.

Being able to use it without logging in would be really nice. Or at least include some screenshots or something. As it is you're kind of just saying "trust me, there's a useful tool on this website, give me your email address and password"

Not that I have any particular reason to distrust you, but I also don't have any reason to trust you either. Sure you're open source so anyone can audit your code, but I don't have the technical know-how to do that, and I don't really know how many people who actually know what they're doing have taken the time to audit it themselves.

From the article it does sound like this one may actually be biodegradable, the other implementations I've seen involve stripping lignin from the wood and impregnating it with resin, which all hair-splitting aside is basically plastic with extra steps. This is apparently using egg whites and some kind of rice extract instead of resin, so I don't see any reason this shouldn't be biodegradable.

Suitability for production and practical applications remain to be seen though.

I also assumed that was the process here, but from the article this does seem to be something slightly different. Overall process seems to be roughly the same, but they're using biodegradable materials instead of resin, apparently a mix of egg white and "rice extract"

Now I'm personally skeptical about how long-lasting something made from egg and rice can be, although I guess there are still tempera paintings (tempera paint is made from egg yolks) around from the Renaissance, so what the hell do I know?

And the chemicals used to strip the lignin from the wood aren't exactly the most environmentally friendly, but I guess arguably they're better than some of the ones used in plastic production.

It's cockney rhyming slang, it's best not to think too deep about it

Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It's not exactly flattering but it's not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

The same kind of logic has them calling "stairs" "apples and pears" because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

Or "cherry" meaning "lie" because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

OP specified a nail file, and that has a wood/metal file.

I'm probably about the last person to ask about nail files, I'm not sure if it would do the trick in a pinch, but when I look at the wood and metal files I have around my workshop and at my wife's nail files, my files are mostly a lot more aggressive than a nail file.

It of course depends on your students, but I'm just gonna chime in that I read 1984 in 9th grade, so I would have been 14 years old, only a year older than your students. It was admittedly an honors English class, but depending on their skill and maturity I don't think that you necessarily need to avoid it as an option. Maybe not as a take-home book for them to read on their own, but maybe as one to read in class to sort of guide them through and challenge them a bit.

I don't know much about "kids these days," it's been 20+ years since I was their age, and probably around 10 years since I reread 1984, but nothing in my memory sticks out as something I would have been too bothered by as an older middle schooler and honestly probably pretty tame compared to some of what we were watching and reading on our own time (if I recall, the original Saw movie came out around the same time and I remember seeing it)

Again, you certainly know your students better than we do, but I assume that "dystopian literature" isn't a required course but some kind of elective, and your students are signing up for it and probably wanting to experience some darker and more adult themes, otherwise they probably would have chosen a different class.

They're definitely out there, but folding bikes are somewhat less standardized than full-sized bikes so it's a bit harder to guarantee that you'll have a good place to mount the batteries, run the wires, etc and still be able to fold the bike properly.

And anecdotally I see far less folding bikes and even less folding conversions around me. Maybe (probably) they're more common in London than in a semi-rural American suburb like where I live, but I suspect by overall numbers there's probably still less folding bikes (electric or otherwise) than full-sized bikes. From a numbers perspective, are you more concerned about the fire risk of say 1 folding e bike, or 100 non-fording e bikes?

Yes, most ideally it would just be a ban on unsafe electronics, but you run into an issue with enforcement. Are they going to have mandatory safety inspections, approved vendors and installers, a list of safe models, etc. and check that every e bike that passes through checks out? Sounds like kind of a nightmare to implement. Probably easier to just accept the smaller risk due to smaller numbers of folding bikes and blanket ban regular ebikes.

Also, I don't know the situation in London, but a fair amount of non-folding e bikes around me seem more like underpowered electric motorcycles with token pedals than traditional bikes, bigger, heavier, fat tires, really not well-suited to taking on the subway. If that style is common over there too, this kind of has the added advantage of keeping them out too.

I also don't like fish

I find that sushi is less offensive to me than cooked most of the time, so that's one place to start. Still not something I'd actively seek out but if it's what's offered to me I can deal with it.

I also overall find freshwater fish to be more palatable, I enjoy fishing so if I catch some decent sized trout worth keeping I'll eat them (it's more for my wife, but if we're already cooking it I'll eat it)

My mom's also not a fish eater, but can stomach flounder.