(I’m just speculating for fun here)

Based on the sash, this is a woman celebrating a birthday or bachelorette. Due to the pattern on it I’m leaning toward birthday, as bachelorette sashes tend to be solid white.

She’s probably hammered, having been day drinking since 10AM (that’s what those sashes are for; to give lunch goers a clear visual warning sign.) and based on the shadow line and assumed time of year (I’m just assuming it’s not northern California in winter, but it might be) that is probably like 4-5pm, so she’s been drunk for a solid while, probably in the sun.

So very drunk, good mood woman gets an idea that twerking poolside (very possibly to no music or music played off a shitty phone) is the way to keep the party going (a shockingly common sort of happening at those two categories of sash-wearing events). And for that one guy, far far too old to have any shame left about being a creep, she’s absolutely right.

This makes me wonder, though, if those dumb attention seeking sashes exist outside of the us (baseball hat in background seems to indicate US)… I’m sure they must in some form, but I really sort of hope it’s just here that people are so self absorbed as to think a birthday or wedding is a free pass to be a public disaster. (Also there used to be a trend of wearing a sash so strangers would staple money to it, but thankfully that seems to have died…)

That’s about what I was making in Wisconsin to canvas as well.

Problem with that for me is that I’ve been boycotting theaters for so long over their prices and loudness and 45 min of advertisements… that I’m no longer considered a paying customer… so they don’t care what I want. Same with everyone else who has been put off by their decisions in the past.

At this point I expect theaters to flop before they change their model. I’ll continue not to give them money, but it kinda sucks.

That makes me think of bon bon nail polish that was good for maybe two uses, and those tiny itty bitty chapstick tubes with like 3 days worth of chapstick in them. So wasteful.

The University of Wisconsin system of schools is well known for being good for the sciences, while still being state colleges, and thus more affordable for average individuals, particularly residents of the state.

However, in pursuit of profits, some of their academic hiring decisions have been…. Unfortunate. I won’t name the specific school this occurred at as the problem occurs across the board for associate+/-lecturer positions. And it occurs in most states. Education as a whole in the US has been commodified, and thus reduced.

The kind who uses their platform to spread misinformation, in my experience. :)

I mean… my bachelors was largely neglectful tbh… if I didn’t know what I wanted to learn and how to learn it, it would have been nothing more than an extension of k-12.

They will let just any old shitbag teach certain credits… like my natural science 101 class, taught by a guy who bought into “organic is better”, “mindfulness will fix all your problems”, and various other pseudoscientific bullshit… such that my final essay (science is my auti special interest; I couldn’t ignore it…) was dedicated to pointing out each and every one of the pseudoscience claims he made in class which were demonstrably false (with citations). He initially gave me an A on the paper and then thought about how much I was insulting him and downgraded it to a C. That C was so worth getting. Fuck that guy. I learned more disproving his nonsense than I ever would have listening to him about anything…

But I also took a biostatistics course where the professor led by asserting creationism. Dropped that bitch right quick and complained to faculty about it (feel free to believe whatever nonsense you like, but I’m not paying tuition to hear your pet theories about thermodynamics proving creationism). Fortunately that was day two of the class, and still within time to drop. Unfortunately replacing that class fucked up my schedule for the semester big time.

And those are just two of a handful of issues with higher ed, and my school was actually one of the better for science curriculum… I started a masters program and dropped it when I got bad grades on papers for using accurate but simplified language (I’m a science communicator; using esoteric language is not something I do, even if I can easily do so. My life goal is to make science approachable for the masses, not a clusterfuck of specialized terminology that doesn’t even resemble the same term from another field)

I vote absentee, as do most of the people I know, and after 2020, none of us are mailing our ballot back. We are taking them to the in-person voting areas and dropping them off with staff.

In 2020, there were reports of ballots being dumped, and so far there have been reports of drop boxes set on fire and stuff… it’s hard to trust, because of republican stooges seeding chaos, and enough of a pain in the ass to fix if it gets messed up that we aren’t taking chances.

Edit: seeing to seeding

I’ve gotten several things like this, especially in the last week or so. Same with texts. I’ve gotten dozens. Reported them all as junk and blocked them. Idk how many of the unknown calls have been get out the vote; I don’t answer unknown calls, but there has been a dramatic uptick in that number as well, including a number listed as “survey call” every 2 days for the past 3 weeks.

I already submitted my vote on 09OCT… so much for useful public record, I guess.

Living in a swing state fucking sucks around election time, leave me alone, damn. Let’s get rid of the electoral college just so we don’t get fucking hounded for 3 months every 4 years by a bunch of complete strangers who don’t know a damn thing about us. Spread the love. (Yes it would be good to get rid of the EC anyway, but I want it purged for purely selfish reasons)

Alternatively, we do away with non-alcoholic pre-mixed beverages entirely, which are mostly water, replacing them with something like fountain machines or even powder mix. Like a kurig or soda stream but instead of using single-serve containers, it uses a refillable glass tube (or something) of concentrate and meters it out as needed, and uses refillable co2 containers, for example.

Another option is to do on-site, on-demand filling, like what breweries do with glass growlers. You bring a glass or stainless steel gallon or half gallon jug, they do a rinse with sanitizing water, fill it up, and send you on your way. We could even bring back swing top bottles for individual servings (I have like 50 of those and they are amazing for beer and kombucha), and just use local or on-site bottling.

There are lots of options that don’t involve single-use plastics, and also don’t involve tons of extra shipping costs. We just have to incentivize making that switch at the company/producer level, rather than the consumer level. Like reusable bags. If the polluting option isn’t an option, people will adjust.

Aluminum isn’t really a great option either. Modern cans have to be lined with a coating of plastic to avoid corrosion. Sure it’s a super thin coating, but it’s plastic all the same (and can contain some pretty nasty largely unregulated chemicals like PFAS)

I’m here for glass, though, and maybe we’ll find a good replacement for the lining in cans if plastic bottles aren’t allowed.

I did this with my shark(nado) bagless vacuum. :)

Mmmm you gotta do the twist break, where you push sideways on the bottom part to see if you can snap off the entire clip piece, rather than having that shitty nub left.

But if you end up with the shitty nub by accident, you gotta bite that bitch off.

In college I bought myself a 50 pack of those cuz I lose shit a lot, and that clip never lasted more than a few hours on any new pencil…

Even worse imho is that many private residences now have cameras that record the whole street and other homes. No, they aren’t technically allowed to, but they all do. I have a neighbor across from me who just put up a ring doorbell that fully monitors my entire property (small town lot directly across). They now essentially create records of every time I come and go from my own house. And Amazon, and likely whomever else wants it, has full access to that information.

Not cool. These should be flat out banned. I don’t care if you want to have an overhead camera pointed only on your property, but that’s not what these things do at all.

I’ve had this a lot. I’m almost 40, live alone, and never married, but I often get stuff addressed to “Mr and Mrs solarmonkey”… as a bonus, since my dad’s generation there have been zero new men with that last name (only girls from my dad and his brothers).

I love getting junk mail addressed to my mortgage co-signer, though. He has never lived here. Sometimes they address me with his last name, which is pretty funny (it’s my step-dad, and my mom died years ago, so we really don’t have much of a relationship at this point, and definitely don’t share a last name).

I like throwing that stuff directly in the recycling. If you don’t even know who I am that makes my job really easy.

He’s going to do that anyway, whether it’s allowed or not. His plan is to break the country by any means necessary. What actual difference does it make to trumps plans if Biden keeps doing his job until he’s not in that job anymore?

The answer is none whatever.

So the sitting president shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing things they have been doing for years, just because it’s close to an election and someone unrelated might do something else after getting elected?

That’s stupid. Sorry but it is. It’s the same logic that prevented Obama from seating Supreme Court justices. And look how that turned out.

If this was the first ever time it was tried, maybe, but even then, we’d never have anything nice in that case. And we’d never get anything done from August to January in election years, which would also be intensely stupid.

We need to take what we can get, not be all weird about when it happens.

I’ve played other stuff, it all makes me a bit mildly queasy for a few min while I adjust and goes away.

Skyrim was intense violent nausea, and it got worse as I went. Whole different ballpark of motion sickness. I’d love to be able to play it but realistically I’ll probably never be able to get past that.

But it’s also not a game that was made to be VR, where literally everything else I’ve played was, so even with tunnel vision set to max during movement it was just too much texture, too “close”, and too fast.

You should try it if you haven’t, see if it makes you sick :) I’d be curious, if almost nothing else does.

That’s what I said about Skyrim. First person immersive world seemed perfect for VR.

It makes me violently motion sick, though, like to the point where I barely made it through the opening cart ride, and had to stop after 5 min of free movement. :(

Having textures race past, and feeling like you are in or barely above the ground due to the floor texture not having adjustable height to account for depth perception, while “moving” is super uncomfy, imho.

I’m super with you about wanting it, though. I’m desperate for VR to be immersive like that, and not vomit-inducing.

Oh. I’m not familiar with that, but I appreciate the additional context. Thanks :)