The real thing was that at one point there was so much plastic pollution in certain parts of the environment that some of the endocrine disrupting chemicals in it, like BPA (which mimics estrogen) and certain pthalates, were leaching into to water in large enough concentrations to make noticeable changes in the bodies and sex organs of animals that are extra sensitive to those things, like frogs and other amphibians. Mutations in male frogs where they displayed female traits, etc. It's a big part of the reason that 15 or 20 years ago everyone started switching to metal water bottles, and the plastic ones all advertise that they're BPA-free now. Alex Jones took that and spun it up into some grand conspiracy about the government intentionally putting chemicals in your water to feminize you and make you docile so, I dunno, you won't put up a fight when they come to round you up and put you in FEMA camps or whatever, I guess. At least that's the basic gist as I remember it. I never really paid an enormous amount of attention to Jones, so I might not be 100% on the details.

It's kind of hilarious hearing Jones' story about "sneaking" into Bohemian Grove told from the point of view of the other people who went there with him. It's such a great insight into how absolutely contrived all his content is.

If it makes you feel any better, a lot of the time those posts aren't even made by real people. They're made by bots who are designed to post something completely wrong or wildly contrary for the sole purpose of pissing you off so that you'll engage and add to the post count.

Or sometimes they're more malicious like the shit-disturber bots that BlueSky was (or maybe still is) plagued with that inject what-about-isms and negativity into otherwise healthy and productive conversations just to poison the discourse and inject conservative bullshit into leftist spaces. Not that BlueSky is particularly leftist, but you'd see the bots appear more frequently in threads where people were talking positively about leftist ideas, or where the conversation was otherwise becoming too "woke."

So you might not actually be missing out on anything except arguing with a clanker who only cares about its prompt.

Am I the only one who read "lattice" and "lattices" as "lettuce" and "lettuces?"

Mining Reddit for movie ideas... I guess we can all look forward to a high-budget adaptation of Swamps of Dagobah.

I don't think it's going to make much, if any, difference with synthetic fibers. It won't hurt anything to try it and see what happens, but I'm pretty sure the idea of wearing wet clothes until they dry to get a better fit is a holdover from the days before pre-shrunk jeans were the norm. You used to have to buy jeans in a larger size with the expectation that they would shrink down to your size over the course of several washes. People used to put them on wet and wear them until they dried so that when that shrinkage happened it would conform to their body shape.

If you want your leggings to remain as stretchy as possible for as long as possible probably the best thing would be to hang-dry them rather than putting them in the dryer. The heat from the dryer can cause elastic to wear out prematurely.

I hate that I understand that reference, and I hate you for reminding me of it.

No. That sounds like wage theft. If my boss pulled something like that I'd be on the phone with my state's department of labor so freakin' fast. If you worked the hours they have to pay you for it.

Even if it weren't illegal, it'd be a big flashing neon sign saying, "We will screw you over every chance we get, and you will be nothing but miserable working here."

So the guy who notoriously despises public transit failed to come through on his promise to revolutionize public transit?

Wow.

I mean, who could have seen that coming?

This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, "Why is my internet so slow? What's this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!"

Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn't set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn't even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.

I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, "Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we've added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?" But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.

There's a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that's making me think maybe it's time to ditch Windows for good.

Did the mushroom learn to control a robot, or did the scientists figure out how to connect a robot to a mushroom in such a way as to make the regular processes happening inside the mushroom trigger a set of robot legs? Because the article makes it seem like the mushroom is intelligent and has agency, and was thus far only lacking the proper robot body in order to express that; but the video makes it look like the legs were all pumping in unison, and the resulting movement was more or less coincidental.

I'm not surprised. I've heard stories as far back as 2015 or 2016 about people storming out in the middle of their pastor's sermon because the pastor directly quoting Jesus' sermon on the mount was too "woke."

Mark my words: if conservatives can no longer advance their cause under the guise of Christianity, they won't abandon conservatism. They will abandon Jesus.

If this dude figured out how to lift a full size duty weapon out of a retention holster using nothing but a plastic dino-grabber then he deserves to keep those guns.

At this point I can only assume that Microsoft is actively trying to punish me for using their products.

All these fools trying to add hydrogen to water when they should be focusing on dechlorinating table salt.

Pedro Pascal's sister is a trans woman. He has been publicly very vocal on the subject of trans rights and inclusion. Consequently, a lot of transphobes, chuds, and miscellaneous fascists have been targeting him for a while and trying to smear his reputation any way they can. I don't really pay much attention to celebrity stuff so I don't know to what extent JK Rowling is personally involved in that, but given that she has been a very outspoken anti-trans bigot for some time, I would not be surprised to learn she was egging her followers on to that end.

Student: "Hey, a shortcut! Let me first just walk around the long way so I can measure the length of the other two sides, multiply those lengths by themselves, add them together, and find out how much extra walking I've saved myself by taking the shortcut. Boy, this shortcut sure is saving me a lot of effort. Hooray Pythagoras!"

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime

That's why I poop on company time

It must be amazing to have that much money and influence.

Coincidentally the podcast I'm listening to as I type this is talking about a man sitting on death row who was convicted solely on the testimony of one "bite mark analyst" who was later shown to be an absolute fraud in a field that is already highly dubious at best. The appeals court in his case feels that just because the "expert" was wrong in all his other cases doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong in his. So that's cool.

There's going to be a lot of that. I live in the Southwest, and the number of Trump-voting Latinos is shockingly high. There are a lot of conservative Latinos who straight up consider themselves to be white. Gonna be a real shock for them when it finally sinks in what the rest of their party thinks about that.