þat is indeed þe guy

I also love how bent-out-of-shape people get over the thorns.

I haven’t stalked his profile, but I feel like every time I’ve seen him come up he’s also seemed like a pretty cool and reasonable dude (I suppose it’s possible he’s off being a dick in the parts of Lemmy I don’t frequent, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt)

I generally don’t recognize usernames and don’t look at them too much

There’s the guy who uses thorns (who I have tagged as Nigel þornberry)

There’s maybe a half-dozen frequent posters who I’m genuinely not sure if they’re masterful trolls, some kind of AI training bots, or just really need to go touch grass (preferably on their way to a therapist’s office.)

There’s one dude whose username just happened to stick out to me after having a random conversation or two with him and seeing him being a generally pretty decent dude around Lemmy, I tagged him “this guy seems cool” at some point, and at some point it occurred to me that he might appreciate knowing that, so I shot him a message, and sure enough he did. I now consider him to be a pretty good friend, which is a new experience for me, I’ve never really been one to have online friends, I (somehow) do pretty well at making friends in meatspace and have never really felt a need to seek out an online friendship.

There’s a handful of people who have said some incredibly dumb shit that I’ve tagged (for example one dude who I tagged “Tankie, down vote and ignore” although the last few times I’ve seen him pop up it seems like he may have mellowed out a bit, so good for him)

Its Tuesday night (or technically very early Wednesday morning) as I write this

For me it’s basically sunday, I was off yesterday and today.

So for the guy who works my opposite shift, its currently Friday. He’ll be getting off in a couple hours and then he’ll enjoy his weekend when he wakes up on Wednesday and Thursday.

You’re quoting from somewhere, but not citing your sources, which doesn’t really add to the conversation either, for all we know you’re just copy and pasting some AI-hallucinated bullshit, and it kind of reads like it might be because that last sentence is a bit of a mess.

Now, sure, you technically can cook crack in a spoon, and I’m also absolutely certain that some people have, maybe even on a regular basis.

But at least around me, most crackheads aren’t usually out cooking their own crack in the field, they’re buying rocks from their dealer. That’s one of the reasons crack got big- higher profit margins for the dealer. Maybe the situation is different in Vienna, I honestly can’t can’t say I’ve ever talked to any Austrian crackheads about their local drug culture. And on the user’s end the draw is that it has a faster, more intense high, and having to make your own crack before you can smoke it kind of takes away from that a bit.

And it can be prepared in a spoon for injection like heroin, but like your quote said, most of the time people prefer to smoke it.

It can also be smoked from a spoon in a pinch if they can’t get their hands on a more suitable crack pipe, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that it was in fact crack, I’d bet that’s what you saw, but that’s a different process than what’s described in whatever you quoted.

It may not have been the catchiest song that you’d catch yourself humming

But I really dug the opening for American Gods

The song is sort of reminiscent of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin, which is of course very fitting

And all the imagery is also very spot-on

The first season, IMO, was probably one of the all-time best seasons of a show I’ve ever seen

But man did it take a hard nose-dive after that for a few different reasons.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper, at the time I got it they already hadn’t been made for about a decade, they weren’t super common to begin with, and I think a lot of them got cash-for-clunkered, so they were a pretty rare sight

Always got a wave when I passed someone else driving one.

And not for nothing, I really liked that car.

I think I heard somewhere that they don’t stand by their warranty as much as they used to. Can’t confirm it myself though.

But probably around 10 years ago I did get to put the warranty to the test and I was impressed with it. I had one of their flannel shirts, and I wore it around a good bit for probably almost a year at the point this story takes place.

One day at work, I noticed that the seam down one side had started coming apart. I conveniently worked really close to one of the brick & mortar stores, so on my lunch break I swung over there wearing the shirt, showed them the seam, and they basically told me to just go grab a new one off the rack and that was it. Took the old shirt off and handed it over and walked out wearing the new one, no receipt, no paperwork, no hassle, it was a pretty great experience.

Still have that shirt a decade later and wear it regularly, it’s obviously picked up a bit of wear over the years, but the seams all look good and the fabric still feels solid all-around.

Would probably be helpful to know what brands of jeans you’ve been using and what ways they’ve failed you.

Personally, I don’t have a physical labor job, but I am a pretty dedicated DIY/homeowner type, so I’m not exactly a stranger to doing hard work either, and I usually get a few years out of my jeans, just buying whatever they have at target or Walmart or whatever, and they sort of go through a pipeline - I start off with decent-looking jeans, after usually a couple years of casual wear they get downgraded to work jeans after they start showing wear in the usual places, and after they start getting really ripped and beaten up they get further downgraded to dirty work jeans for things like painting where there’s a really good chance they’re going to get stuff spilled on them, heavily stained, and I may not even want to try washing them when I’m done.

As far as more dedicated work jeans, I have a pair of Carhartt jeans I break out when I’m doing really heavy duty stuff, which isn’t all that often, but they are obviously heavier duty and cut more for you to be able to move around freely in them.

I’m sure Dickies probably has something pretty comparable to those Carhartts as well.

I haven’t tried out their jeans specifically, but I have a few things from Duluth Trading Co that I’ve been very happy with and for what they are I think they’re pretty affordably priced.

Not jeans exactly, and no first-hand experience with them, but I’ve heard from a few people whose opinions I usually trust on these sorts of matters that Filson Double Tin Cloth pants are probably one of the most durable, hard-wearing pairs of pants you can buy. If you’re working in hot weather and don’t expect to get wet, they’re probably not exactly the ideal, but I’ve generally heard good things about first products overall and I think they make some other pants that are more akin to a regular pair of jeans.

I think there’s a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.

I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t up to doing their lessons himself.

He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn’t exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn’t afford to have a car etc.

So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.

And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn’t keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn’t controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.

I’m not much of a kid-person, so I’m probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.

On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of “bullying,” I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn’t have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn’t like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.

And I don’t think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it’s probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn’t help.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

“You don’t.”

My area isn’t the hottest, but it does usually get up to about 100F for a day or two most years, and in the summer temps are in the 80s or 90s during the day pretty consistently, and it can be humid.

I have a mostly finished basement, I’ll spend a lot of time down there over the summer, it stays pretty consistently cool.

I’m lucky that I work night shift, so it’s easier for me to do stuff in the evenings or early morning before it gets too hot.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. I usually joke that in the summer that means air conditioning.

But if you don’t have a/c, opening your windows and getting some fans going can really go a long way to keeping your house cool.

Limit your time outside, find somewhere to sit down in the shade and take a break if you need to.

Dress appropriately for the weather, lightweight, light colored, breathable clothing, linen is great if you can find it. Maybe consider wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off your face and neck when you go outside.

Drink lots of water, find some cool foods to eat, watermelon, cold soba, ice cream etc.

Yeah, there’s plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that’s what you’re looking for, that’s a tougher nut to crack, I’m sure they’re out there but they’re not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven’t looked too far into that)

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

My wife worked at a higher end kitchen store for a long time, and got to test out a whole lot of different brands of kitchen gadgets and such, and made really good use of her employee discount

In the end, her recommendation is to basically go with Breville for everything but stand mixers (go with KitchenAid) and blenders (go Vitamix)

So we have a Breville hand mixer. This was actually one of the last things she picked up before leaving that job, and it was at my request, she kind of didn’t see the point of it since we already had the stand mixer, and an immersion blender, and honestly just about everything else you could want, but now that we’ve had it I’ve made a convert of her. It gets regular use and abuse and it’s still going strong probably almost a decade later

It’s got a light that shines into the bowl, which doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal but it’s actually really nice to have, it’s got plenty of power but is also probably the quietest mixer I’ve ever used, it comes with the usual beaters, whisks, and dough hooks, and its got a little storage container in clips onto so that the attachments are always there with it and you don’t have to go looking through your drawers for them when you need them.

The silicone on my beaters is starting to look a little worse for wear, but I don’t think that’s unreasonable given how long we’ve had it, and I’m pretty sure I can order new ones from Breville still if I wanted to.

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

Yeah, personally I can probably just about dry shave against the grain with a piece of broken glass and splash on some acetone as aftershave and be none the worse for it, not too much in this world irritates my skin.

I figured it was worth mentioning it because I know it’s a concern for some people, but I’ve never had an issue with it personally with shaving or waxing.

Philly-area millennial.

Among friends and family around my age, I have probably around a dozen or so people or couples who own their homes, one of whom inherited it, and one who bought it from family for cheap

And many more than that who rent, live with their parents (who often but not always own their home) and a couple whose housing situations aren’t quite what you’d call secure but aren’t quite homeless either.

As for myself, I’m kind of caught in paperwork limbo living in a house that’s owned by my mother in law, that she’s agreed to sell to us and we’ve been given carte Blanche to do whatever we want with it, are responsible for repairs and maintenance, but actually getting shit together for a mortgage is being way more of a pain in the ass than it should for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

In my parent’s social circles, the vast majority own homes or have in some way secured some kind of long-term housing for themselves, like one who basically gets their apartment rent free by being some kind of property manager.

The pain really isn’t that bad

And at least for me, the worst parts of it are more on my sort of FUPA area, not so much on my dick and balls themselves, so for the service I get, it’s only like 3 patches around the edges that actually hurt. Might suck more if you’re planning to get more than that done, but I can’t really comment on that myself.

And again. It’s only for an instant with each rip and then it’s over, by the time you’ve flinched it’s already stopped hurting.

Lemmy (and other fediverse services) users are mostly here because we have some strong opinions about mainstream social media, and those opinions are tied closely to politics these days.

If we didn’t, we’d probably be on Reddit, xitter, Facebook, etc. instead.

And if you get a bunch of people with strong opinions about something together, there’s a good chance the conversation is going to go in that direction sooner or later.

And like others have said, everything is politics, basically every aspect of life can be tied to politics in some way.

And there is a lot of political stuff going on all around the world that everyone really should be concerned about and following, and there’s a lot to discuss about it.

And I get it, it can be exhausting. I definitely wish I lived in a world where I didn’t have to pay as much attention to politics as I do.

The best thing you can do is to be active in communities you want to see have more activity. If no one’s posting the kind of “non-political” content you want to see, be the person posting it, if you build it they will come. Be the change you want to see.

In general, all Lemmy servers have the same content as every other one because they’re federated. There are some cases where instances have defederated from each other, and admins have done bans and such that I think may change what content is available to you

Also you’re on .ml, which is a pretty explicitly political instance. I don’t know all the technical details but I’m also under the impression that the mods and admins there are pretty quick to bring their ban-hammer down hard on people who disagree with them, so that could potentially be having some effect of what you’re able to see, though things are certainly looking pretty political from over here on .world too.