Same. I can take tap water fine but my wife hates it. But even so, we both can tell by taste when the filter is toast. We can also tell from the way our bathroom counters get white buildup just by incidental water droplets during handwashing that we have excessively hard water. Not dangerous but not pleasant.

Travis Kelce is proof that being white isn’t enough to get you a pass. White right wing athletes get a pass. They’re on opposite sides of the same issue and rodgers is much more vocal about it, but he’s not the one being told to “shut up and play ball.”

I don’t think Doug invented it, but probably helped popularize it.

Yeah, I like Doug. Killer Tofu is unironically a fucking bop. But now that I’m older, Doug might have had some kind of social disorder or something lol. But he also has a ton of similarities to JD from Scrubs, another show I really liked.

I tried Guardians of the Galaxy on a whim because it was included with ps+ and I fucking loved it. I wasn’t sure what to expect after the Avengers game turned out to be dogshit, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that GotG was basically a more approachable God of War but with 4 big Atreus partners, Gears of War’s active reload mechanic, and the dialogue thing you mentioned. It was the game I didn’t know I wanted.

Beyond: Two Souls. I think the biggest issue was the marketing. They tried to pretend that it could appeal to a wider audience, but I knew what I was actually signing up for based on who made it. If you didn’t like Heavy Rain or Indigo Prophecy (aka Fahrenheit) then you also weren’t gonna like that one. It’s more of an interactive supernatural movie than a game. The gameplay is little more than QTE and wandering, but the story, acting, cinematography, and mocap are all really good or at least uniquely interesting for the medium, especially at the time. I still need to play Detroit too.

A woodworker who actively dislikes the hypocritical and predatory exploitation of lower class people and who is willing to do his part to save us? Are you Jesus?

The real Simpsons joke is affording a big house with a garage, two cars, three kids, pets, and vacations on a single income from a high school education. My wife and I are a DINK couple each with associates degrees in a two bedroom apartment with no pets.

D’oh indeed, Homer. D’oh indeed…

My plant in particular has a roster of only about 30 people, only about 5 of which are what I would call entry level. Right now we’re fully staffed, but every couple of years we get a few people who leave. We’ll have probably two retirements in the next couple of years, and who knows who will say fuck this place and go elsewhere. But this is all for in-house stuff. I got into the industry as a contractor with a few different companies making less money and running harder for a long while, so that made me a much more attractive candidate. But really I just carry myself well and know how to sell myself and appear respectable even though I feel like a 10 year old trapped in a 35 year old body most of the time. Idk what I’m doing half the time, but neither does anybody else in this stupid world lol.

A super easy way to get your foot in the door for the industry is to look into companies that support outages. It can be irregular work that requires travel, but companies always need bodies just to be a general laborer. You might just be carrying shit for “skilled” workers for a while but you get familiar with processes and can find advancement opportunities from there. I started with radiological decontamination and radiation protection for nuclear plant refuel outages. Most of those guys seem to have like an 8th grade education, so it’s pretty easy to stand out in a positive way and receive recognition.

Probably the best thing for my career to really get where I am was when I somehow talked my way into a job with a major company as a water treatment FSR to handle water treatment for a big nuclear plant. I learned a lot through that, and I’m still very much learning every day.

I have been working in power plants for over ten years. Entry level plant operators can make six figures with a high school diploma. At a decent plant, you’ll be balls to the wall busy on 5-10% of your shifts, pretty steady with general routine stuff that’s mostly just confirming that shit is normal 80% of the time, and the remaining 10% is in outages which can vary between busting your ass and waiting around but it’s rough either way because you might be working every day for a few weeks. Every plant I’ve been to does 12 hour shifts with pretty frequent changes between days and nights, which is by far the worst part. You’ll have an easier time getting in and moving up if you are pretty good with STEM stuff, but you’re fine if you passed honors physics in high school. V=IR and PV=nRT will get you really far. Spatial reasoning skills are also really helpful.

I’m at a combined cycle natural gas plant where I started as an outside operator almost 3 years ago at $39.80/hour and am now a ZLD water treatment operator in the same plant at $52/hour; control room operators start at about $60/hour here. I had a really shitty 12 hour shift today so I earned every dime of that wage, but sometimes it’s only like 4-6 hours of work in a 12 hour shift and a bunch of reading or YouTube in between while monitoring everything. Even the tough shifts are kinda good sometimes because I get to work the puzzle part of my brain.

That’s just too much nutmeg.

You’re not wrong, but so many people have disingenuously used “touch grass” in a condescending and flippant way that it actually just feels like trolling. The way people live in 2024, it isn’t such a simple thing for some people to put their devices away, go outside to a park or whatever, and just be mindful of existing in the moment in just the amount of universe within sight. I’m not sure humans were ready to be tuned into this amount of the planet and numbers that are this big. Ape together strong, but maybe just at the community level with basic technology to survive and enjoy life a little bit. We could’ve just fought off predators together, did a little hunting and gathering, maybe start and maintain a community garden, and otherwise just chill out and eat fruit and swim and fuck and make up games to play and shit. We didn’t need to synergize or circle back or ensure 8% growth year over year or commute. We clear time in our schedules to recenter with the nature we abandoned in favor of a system we feel imprisoned by. It’s fucking ridiculous.

But at least we have plumbing and climate control and electricity and Wi-Fi and a comfy bed in our shelters we barely get to spend time in because we spend so much time elsewhere to afford to sleep there.

Explaining a joke makes it less funny. A deep dive like this, however, actually kinda makes it even funnier.

Acid. Lemon juice, lime juice, vinegar, and/or wine. Salt and acid make the existing flavors fucking pop.

For anything cheesy, add a touch of nutmeg. Not enough to identify it, but enough to know that something changed.

Taste as you go.

I make a week of lunches all at once. I have 12 hour shifts so it’s kinda breakfast and lunch that I snack on through the day. I get everything from Aldi so it’s pretty cheap too.

Baby carrots, honeycrisp apple, light string cheese, yogurt, and a sandwich containing lunch meat and cheese and mayo. Recently, I started fridge pickling jalapeños for my sandwiches too, and that was the right call. I have this pretty much every day. I was broke af when I was younger, so eating the same thing every day vs maybe not getting to eat… I learned to really appreciate getting consistent meals even if it’s not something different very often. It’s not for everybody and I understand if this doesn’t sound remotely appealing to you lol.

/thread

Regarding the “no particular game interests you” part… Holy shit does it feel good when a game genuinely interests you. Lately, I’ve been doing chores or errands or having a tough time at work and in the back of my mind I’m like “omg I could be playing Jedi Survivor right now and I’d be having the time of my fucking life, but instead I’m dealing with this fucking bullshit.” I don’t get excited about a game like that very often anymore.

That doesn’t make sense though. The post is that pornhub banned Texas. The object and subject got flipped around if you’re right.

I’m not sure I understand. You don’t think anybody should have the option of visiting pornhub specifically, or any porn site at all? And why?

This community might call me an idiot for this, but nord vpn. I got a long subscription a while back for cheap. I’m in a good enough financial position that I can afford a streaming service or two without issue plus this vpn to hop regions. I value my time more than that amount of money, and I only watch so much tv, so I’m really not feeling any fomo from this strategy, plus I don’t really have concerns about getting into trouble. I’m streaming, not downloading, and using services that I pay for to do so. If it’s not legal to do this, I’m not exactly a power user so I’d be surprised if I were a big enough fish to come after.

Another one for me is PlayStation Plus (extra tier, specifically). I initially started paying for the base tier to be able to play Elden Ring with my friends. Then I saw that for a little more than I was already paying per year, I could get access to a pretty impressive catalog of games. I paid for another year of it when it went on sale like a month or two before they raised the price for it lol. Idk the exact cost now, but I figure as long as I’m trying more than like 3 games in a year then it’s worth it. But even better is that because I’m not buying individual games, I don’t feel pressured to dump 100+ hours into a game I’m not loving, so I can just stop if I lose interest and move on to another game. I played 2/3 of Ghost of Tsushima and just didn’t care after that so I stopped.

Idk, maybe I’m fucking weird, but I feel like I’m getting really good value from doing this. I rarely care about watching or playing something more than once, so I’m okay with paying a fraction of the cost of owning these things just to have temporary access, and then not have clutter leftover when I decide I’m done. I want memories, not stuff.

I have a dumb question: why heat up the vinegar? Does it help with some kind of chemical reaction in the mixing or does heat just help to make the mixture to be more effective so it needs to be used before it cools down?

My apartment has incredibly hard water, so sinks, toilets, and showers always look rough. It just now occurred to me that maybe rain x on the glass after cleaning could be a decent preventative measure unless somebody can tell me why that’s a bad idea?