Asparagus made a lot more sense to me once I saw one go to seed. It branches out and looks more like a normal plant. We just harvest it before it gets to that point. Same with artichokes, they’re just an immature flower bud.

The concept of having interchangeable, standardized parts is actually kind of a new idea from the Industrial Revolution. Before then, everything was custom-made to fit. The example that comes to mind is firearms. All of the muskets and rifles used in the revolutionary war, for example, were hand-made and hand-fitted. The lock from one rifle wouldn’t necessarily fit on another. If your stock broke, you couldn’t just go get a new stock and slap it on - you had to bust out the woodworking tools and make a new one.

My first camera was a Voigtländer Vito 2, don’t know the exact age but it’s from the 1950s. My grandmother gave it to me when I expressed interest in film photography, she said she hadn’t touched it in decades so I might as well have it. As soon as I put a roll through it and got the photos back, I was hooked. Even though most of the pictures were underexposed, I knew I wanted to keep shooting film.

After talking to my uncle about this, he rooted around in his closet and gave me my second camera: a Pentax K1000. Super chunky and heavy compared to the Voigtländer, so I felt more confident taking it with me places without breaking it.

I just picked up a third, a Nikon FE along with some telephoto lenses. I haven’t put a roll through it yet, but I’m excited to try.

At this point I’m so desperate for a woman to want to spend time with me I’d take it

/s but not really

Their secret? They had superior morale and esprit de corps!

I flip off the breaker, just to be safe.

I live in Washington state, most of my electricity is from hydro or nuclear. My bill is usually about $80 a month, but it can go over $100 in the summer if I’m running the AC a lot.

I bought one of these toasters because of this video

According to Shadowrun lore, the next step is the Supreme Court allowing corporations to raise their own private armies.

I don’t know where this meme format came from but I love it

I watch long videos on my TV (45 min - 1 hr) and YouTube has the audacity to shove minute+ long ad reels in my face every 15 minuets, claiming “fewer ads for this long video.” Bullshit. I have learned however that if you go to give feedback on the ad and flag it as inappropriate, it skips all the ads in that reel and sends you right back to the video! I can get past unskippable ads in a few seconds this way.

Says the one who just used “allosexual” offensively

I generally prefer to start series from the very beginning so I don’t miss anything, but I think I’ll go pick up that second book and give the series another try.

After the Dark Tower movie came out, I heard a whole bunch of people on the internet saying that the movie was awful and the books are so much better. I didn’t see the movie, but if the books are so well-liked I thought I’d give them a try.

I tried my best, I really did. But I just couldn’t finish the first book. It was just way too surreal and abstract for me.

There was a period where I regularly got to go inside Boeing’s Everett factory for work (I didn’t work for Boeing though). For those who don’t know, it’s one of the largest buildings in the world, built in the 60s to manufacture 747s. Now they build all kinds of aircraft there.

“Big” is an understatement. Even “cavernous” falls short. It’s easy for your brain to forget you’re in an indoor space until you look up and see a roof over your head. It’s like a miniature city in there. It’s got its own road network, fire department, cafeterias, and I heard it can even have its own weather.

My route to and from the job site every day took me through alleyways and around sites where workers were actively putting airplanes together. I got to watch an entire fuselage be moved from one side of the factory to the other by the overhead cranes. But my favorite part of the whole place were the underground tunnels that you could use to get around. You could still see old civil defense fallout shelter signs in the stairwells, and even though I wasn’t supposed to take pictures in the facility I did anyway:

Man, there’s something about the color balance and lighting that just screams Monty Python sketch to me.

At first I thought it was NCD memery, e.g. “Ukrainian soldiers cobble together a nuke from a car they find lying around” so imagine my surprise when I see it’s a real headline. Even though “hydrogen bomb” is technically correct, it certainly made me do a double take. I wonder if that choice of words was intentional.

That sounds like some Dark Souls/Evangelion shit. “Harvest the blood of the fetus after pulling it from its dead mother”

It’s worse than that. Inches are base 12, ounces and cups are base 16, machinists use thousandths of an inch, and surveyors use tenths of a foot!

One mile is 5280 feet, one foot is 12 inches. One square foot is 144 square inches, one cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches.

1 gallon of water is 8.34 pounds, and 1 cubic foot is 7.48 gallons, so a cubic foot of water weighs 62.38 pounds. If sand is 2.3 times heavier than water, a cubic foot of sand weighs 143.5 pounds.

I am 5 feet 10 inches tall, or 5.83 feet, or 70 inches. I weigh about 220 pounds, or 3520 ounces. If I’m 65% water, I carry about 143 pounds of water, or a little over 16 gallons.

Guh