So, related story...

Back in 2011ish, I discovered SilkRoad. I'd heard about people ordering weed on the internet, and it sounded really convenient. I downloaded Tor, I trawled forums and #chans for onion links, and eventually, I found it. Aside from all of the sketchy shit (hard drugs, stolen credit card info, home vasectomy kits), it almost seemed too good to be true - I could order a whole pound for what I was paying for a couple of ounces.

There was one problem, though: payment. You couldn't use your debit card (obviously), and you couldn't just buy a prepaid visa and use that. No, they handled all payments in this weird new thing that I'd never heard of... Bitcoin. I did a bit of research, and it seemed like it would be kind of a hassle to set up a wallet and find an exchange and actually buy any Bitcoins, and even more of a hassle to sell any extra Bitcoins that I had left over. On top of that, the price kept bouncing around, so enough Bitcoin to buy a fat sack of weed today might buy a much smaller sack tomorrow.

So what did I do?

I gave up and kept buying weed from a dude. If I'd sucked it up and dealt with the hassle to buy weed by the quarter pound instead of the quarter ounce, the crumbs left in my Bitcoin wallet could have bought me a house.

This. The actual tool is dead simple, just a plastic bar with a magnet and a couple of little plastic nubbins to help line it up in the right place.

...It's also only $15 on Amazon, so it should pay for itself pretty quickly

That's why you try to line up the new job before you quit - they can't talk shit about you quitting on short notice if you're still there.

I actually tried to give two weeks at my old job - they didn't deserve it, but I figured I should. The application for my new job even had a checkbox labeled "I am currently employed and will need two weeks notice of my first shift."

Instead, they called me on a monday and asked "can you start next monday?"

...My boss wasn't in that day, and I really wanted a weekend before starting my new job; so on Tuesday, they found out that Friday was my last day.

Holy shit, I learned something from Lemmy Shitpost!

Honestly though, one of these has been draped over a fence in my neighborhood for like a week, and I've been wondering what it was.

Actually though, can we get some malicious compliance? Schools banning the Bible based on rules written by Christian conservatives would be hilarious.

"We have considered several excerpts, and deemed this book unfit for schools. The book opens with everybody naked, and goes on to feature violence on a massive scale, as well as some weird incest, and a man who collected two hundred foreskins. Frankly, we believe that this book should have never been on the shelves here at Li'l Tykes Elementary."

I don't want to be a downer, but... The rats probably aren't high if they're just eating weed. Buckle up, y'all, time for a stoner science lesson:

THC is present in cannabis in two main forms: THCA and Delta-9 THC. Throwing around those delta numbers can seem scary given all of the unregulated Delta-8 in illegal states, but it's really not. THCA breaks down into Delta-9 THC naturally with time and heat, through a process called decarboxylization... Which is great, because THCA isn't psychoactive, while Delta-9 THC is. Because of this, smoking a joint or eating a properly made edible will get you high, but eating an entire ounce is just having a terrible salad.

Yeah, ngl, I'm kinda curious about the strudel now.

Like, if it's good, cool - now I have someone else's old family recipe for strudel, the origins of which I will refuse to elaborate on.

But if it's bad, then it's hilarious that they wrote a fluff piece on the Goebbels family, but included a recipe that would make people hate them again. "This strudel is shit! Fuck this magazine, fuck Goebbels, and fuck this terrible dessert!"

It was more the lack of an explanation that hooked people, rather than just the not pooping - IIRC, we never ended up getting any real explanation for why this guy needed to not poop for a week.

It was honestly pretty great, people came up with everything from "he's smuggling himself internationally in a shipping container" to "he's determined to be the winner in a really weird Mr Beast video" to "he's giving up on society to live with the sloths" before it started to turn into kind of a circle-jerk.

And of course, suggestions for stopping the poop included butt plugs, eating only cheese, butt plugs, a liquid diet, and more butt plugs.

Believe it or not, that's actually what the complimentary branded matchbooks that smoke shops and strip clubs used to give away were meant to be!

They weren't an ad directed at you, though - they were an ad directed at your friends. You'd go hang out somewhere, set your cigarettes and matches down, and people would see the logo.

all those chilly willies

Yeah, I heard the weather was pretty bad this year. Ngl, though, I feel feel like my fragile sense of masculinity would be much more threatened by a bunch of massive flopping songs on a hot day, than it would be by a bunch of tiny chilly willies on a cold day.

...Hold up. Poor/middle class guys with small schlongs drive huge trucks and loud cars. Does this mean that rich guys with tiny tallywhackers go into politics?

"Okay, we managed to meet all of the requested specs for your superheavy cargo aircraft. Did you want to come down to the airfield to see it today?"

"No, no. I'll just swing by the hangar tomorrow."

"Yeah... The hangar... Um, tomorrow's fine, yeah, we'll definitely have it in the hangar for you." (Turns around) "JIMMY, GET THE TORCH, IT NEEDS TO GO INSIDE!"

You mentioned that the house is a century old - I'm assuming it was built as a single dwelling, and subdivided later.

If that's the case, my best guess is that the basement had a problem with flooding during bad weather, so they busted holes in existing drainage pipes to allow water to drain from the basement. The leaky walls were most likely sealed when it was converted to an apartment, but... Well, drains drains are great until they back up - I would be concerned about water coming up through them in particularly bad weather.

Last time I went to a nice restaurant, my wife and I were the only ones dressed nicely.

She wore a nice dress, I wore a shirt & tie; the entire rest of the restaurant was enjoying $75 entrees in designer athlesiure outfits.

So, uh... We have the same thermostat at my job. It's not great. You can't just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says "heat." Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.

Bro

I could not keep Good Friday and Black Friday straight until I was in my teens

But no, it makes perfect sense that the good sounding one is when a guy died, and the bad sounding one is a good time to do Christmas shopping... /s

I never really thought about their succession of consoles, but to me, seeing them listed like that feels surprisingly additive.

Like, the N64 had analog sticks, and the Gameboy was portable... And people liked both of those, so they released the GameCube, which had analog sticks and a handle, so you could take it to your friend's house. They followed up with the DS' touchscreen and the Wii's motion controls, and when people liked those too, they bundled all of that into the Switch: it has analog sticks, a touchscreen, and motion controls; it's a handheld and a very portable plug-in console.

But, as they've done that, they've always pushed the limits of what they could do. As it stands, there's not much that can be added to the Switch, so they're releasing an improved version - like they did with the Gameboys Color, Advance, and SP. Essentially, the limiting factor isn't Nintendo's ability to innovate, but rather the technology available to them.

Give it a few years for other aspects of technology to advance, and I'm sure they'll start pushing the envelope again. They'll probably wait until they can pack an entire console into a VR headset without a bulky battery pack, then release it with something wacky like a charging dock with a built-in projector, or something crazy like that.

You nailed just about everything that I've been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it's definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren't any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

...Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

Gonna come at this from kind of a scholarly angle here... Yes. Yes absolutely.

And just for fun, I'll use the Bible to argue in your favor.

You raise the point that even the New Testament (the half that pivots from "follow these rules" to "don't be a douche") shouldn't be taken literally. Some might argue that that's the only part that should be taken literally, but let's take a look at how Jesus chooses to illustrate that message: by doing miracles and relating parables. He's not regaling crowds with true tales of history, he's telling them made-up stories to convey a point about morals.

Hm... Made-up stories to convey a point about morals...

Stories, perhaps, like someone turning into a pillar of salt because they chose to dwell on the past instead of moving on? Or about the value of perseverance and solidarity in the face of continued adversity? Not giving up hope, even when you've lost everything? How murder is just straight up bad?

Lot's Wife, Moses & the Pharaoh, the entire book of Job, Cain & Abel; all from the Old Testament, and all far less believable than the Good Samaritan... But somehow, those stories are to be taken as truth, while a story about a nice guy existing in Samaria is an allegory for the goodness in all of us? It's all parables, all the way down. The New Testament is just parable-ception - it's a made-up (or at least, very heavily embellished) story about a nice guy who tells stories about nice guys.

They also usually use some weasel words like "up to." That way, if it doesn't last the full 72 hours (which it won't), they can claim that they stated "72 hours MAXIMUM" rather than just "72 hours." It's basically shifts the statement from "lasts three days" to "definitely won't last four days."

It's because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that's really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.