The term sandy-blonde also came to mind:

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I tend to keep a fair bit of my stuff clipped to my belt loops, not quite as streamlined and elegant as cramming everything in a pocket, but much easier to tell when something is missing (and far less likely to beat up my phone).

Front left pocket: wallet, multitool (Nextool s11)

Front left belt loop: noise cancelling earbuds (Sony WF-1000XM5)

Front right pocket: phone (pixel 9 pro xl)

Front right belt loop: keys

Hip right belt loop: work badge (when applicable)

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I don’t recall seeing this one specifically, but you may enjoy Soren Iverson’s work. He posts a bunch of satirical/ dystopian UI mockups like this.

ASL can count as high as you need to, it gets kind of tedious after about a 999, because of all the place markers that need to be added in (like manual counting, or spelling out a number on a check), but one can sign up to 999 with a single hand. for numbers up to 99, it’s more or less using the chart above. For everything after that you mark the hundreds place with the letter C and then go on the rest of the number (476, would be signed 4 C 76). Beyond that, it’s just a matter of adding on the place value signs for “THOUSAND”, “MILLION”, etc. (which are two handed signs) so, 456,789 would be signed as 4 C THOUSAND 56 7 C 89.

The exception to this would be strings of numbers, like phone or room numbers, where you sign them much like how they’d be spoken. So when directing someone to room 235, you’d just sign 2 35 (the concept of hundreds isn’t really important here, because in most cases, the leading 2 just means the room is on the second floor).

Edit: ASL is very visual so here’s a link (with the caveat that there’s variations in signs between signers/ regions, so online stuff may be different than what folks in your area are using)

Doesn’t help that they’re almost all owned by the same company…

That sounds like a perfectly capable school machine (especially for $250). According to the service manual for that model, it looks like the storage can be upgraded (assuming that you can get your hands on an SSD). There’s no mention of replacing the RAM, so I’d almost bet on that being soldered, but realistically 16gb should be plenty for the use cases you mentioned.

I’m in my late 20’s and while I have a good job and enough cash on hand that I could make a down payment and move out, I’m not sure that I want to… As a US-ian The economy is in pretty rough shape and I’m not sure I want to be tied up in a mortgage when the bubbles start popping. Plus, if I were to uproot myself and move away from my family and friends, I’d almost rather full send it and emigrate to somewhere walkable, where the wrong medical diagnosis isn’t a financial death sentence.

I’m taking this as an excuse to share Ian’s shoelace site (complete with step by step instructions on how that knot works and how to tie it) because it’s one of those corners of the Internet that’s handy to know about. Plus, I feel like most people don’t realize that how a shoe is laced can dramatically change the fit and comfort of said shoe.

It was absolutely Bughouse (with some house rules tacked on)! It’s been years since I’ve played, but I’d never thought to see if the variation had a formal name. Thank you!

I once played a team chess variant where each player could place pieces captured by their partner on their half of the board instead of moving. Made for some of the wackiest play lines since a piece materializing on the board could throw off your whole plan, but super fun from a strategy perspective, since board state could change dramatically between turns.

Woo hoo! Decidedly not boring! I’m usually content to make a 3D printed part that holds load and fits where it’s supposed to, I can’t imagine the amount of time and skill it’d take to knap a quartz blade that large and not shatter the whole thing, let alone have the thing hold up over 5000 years.

Any chance you know what the handle is made of? Naively, the pommel kind of makes me think of a jaw bone, but the more I think above it, the more likely I think I’d be carved ivory, which is a whole other set of crazy skills and limited tooling.

Won’t bore us with it? This is the first I’ve hearing of it and that artifact sounds cool as hell!

Also, gorgeous sketch, really clean line work!

Lego Marvel Superheroes is probably one of my favorite Lego games! It’s not without its faults (it kinda bugs me that free play just sticks you back in with pretty much the same cast of characters), but it’s just so much fun to wander around the over world map causing wanton chaos and being a general menace. Plus, I love that the characters generally voice aced by the same people that voice/ play them in live action or other shows, so when Iron Man talks it sounds like Iron Man.

Seasoning is just oil baked onto cast iron through a process called polymerization. It gives your cookware that classic black patina. Seasoning forms a natural, easy-release cooking surface and helps prevent your pan from rusting.

- Lodge (as I understand it, they’re the gold standard for cast iron cookware)

In the case of non-stick stuff, it’s less that they’re seasoned with PFAS and more that they don’t need seasoning because they have PFAS (at least in theory).

That is adorable and I love it!

I’m drawing from some pretty old memories, but from what I recall, Edgar Allen Poe is a bit overly descriptive like that sometimes, which makes me think the wordiness is part of the writing style for the time. It almost reads like the author is trying to do the “paint a picture” thing, which makes logical sense for the genre, a bit like a literary jump scare: paint a pretty picture, so that the spooky stuff is even more scary by comparison. I think my problem is that I tend to get bored with all the overly flowery writing and my brain wanders off (especially because Shelly likes to reference a bunch of geographic scenery that I don’t really have the personal context to draw up a mental picture for).

That does make me wonder if a version of the book in a more modern writing style would be more palatable.

Thank you! It’s been more than 10 years since, but 10th grade me struggled HARD to get through Frankenstein (it was a summer read for my English class), for pretty much the exact reasons you’ve listed out. The doctor is just such a whiny little bitch, I despised every moment spent with the character and was incredibly relieved when the monster finally put the little shit out of his misery (and by extension put an end to my suffering).

The part of my brain subjected to entirely too many English literature studies gets it: the notion of being so caught up in if something is possible you don’t stop to think about the repercussions is super transcendent of time. Like, I keep thinking about Oppenheimer and the other scientists of the Manhattan project, so I can absolutely see how it would be a horror story from Shelly’s time. At the same time, the rest of my brain can’t get past the doctor being incapable of learning any lessons at all.

Shit post aside, I had a friend with a background in the restaurant industry (did a bunch of time in various restaurants, went through cooking school, that kind of thing), who put on a work sponsored barbeque. When someone asked why the folks helping him got promoted to Chef, my friend explained it as “everyone in the kitchen is addressed as Chef, it doesn’t matter if they’re calling the shots, cooking food, or doing dishes. It’s a show of respect.” Grain of salt and all since cultures vary between restaurants, but it’s stuck with me because it was such a genuine moment of “this dude loves to cook and got a chance to share something he’s super passionate about”.

I imagine it more along the lines of breaking a promise. Law is more or less a social contract, so it’s less that the law no longer functions and more that the person in question is breaking the agreement.

But also yes, one who repeatedly breaks the contract with no consequences, definitely calls into question the value and validity of the contact, and that’s when things really start to, erm… Break.