2-2-3 rotation, 12 hours shifts, 3PM-3AM

So I’m on 2, off 2, on 3 (so work Monday and Tuesday, off Wednesday and Thursday, the work again Friday, Saturday, and Sunday)

Then the next week it flips, so I only work Wednesday and Thursday and I’m off the rest of the week

I think it’s just about the greatest work schedule in the world, only bummer is that our PTO is based off of 8 hour shifts since most of the other employees work that and they didn’t make any special exemption for us. It mostly pretty much averages out since we work less days overall, but it would be nice to have that work out exactly.

I really don’t want to make excuses for anything this administration does, and I haven’t looked too much into what the justification of this is supposed to be

But hypothetically if you dumped this new food “pyramid” on my desk, without any other context, and I didn’t know it had anything to do with the trump administration, and asked me to make sense of it I feel like I could come up with something like “whole grains, proteins, and produce are the 3 cornerstones of a healthy diet”

And the pyramid is upside down because no one thing should be the main “foundation” of your diet, it should all be balanced

I kind of feel like the trump/rfk cronies came across a half-finished rough sketch of an idea for a new food pyramid loft in the desk drawer of some competent USDA employee they forced out, threw out the notes they found with it, and pushed it through with their own stupid spin because they wanted to do something showy like coming up with a new food pyramid.

Yeah that seems to be the key here, I’m doing a 60 second burn-in time for the bottom layers now, and lowered the lift speed and things are coming out a lot better

I’m still having adhesion issues on about half the plate, but I’m pretty sure I’m just going to need to re-level again to fix that

May still look into a heating solution but as long as they stick to the plate, everything seems to be coming out fine otherwise

Going against the grain here a little, I don’t like required reading in schools.

I really loved reading growing up, always had a book (sometimes more than one) that I was reading, read well above my grade level, chose books that challenged myself, etc.

My high school really pushed reading, lots of classes assigned books for us to read, I think even some of the math classes had novels they were supposed to read. For our homeroom period once a week we had to do mandatory SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) where we had to be reading something, we couldn’t do homework or go see our teachers for help, or anything of the sort, we had to be seated at our desks reading silently. I often was juggling 2 or 3 assigned books along with my other school work, activities, and hobbies, which didn’t really leave me much time for the books that I chose to read for myself.

And the pacing was terrible, we’d often spend weeks on a book, analyzing it to death, doing packets of worksheets, writing reports, doing that accursed “popcorn reading” in class, etc. for books that I could have read in a matter of days if not hours.

I think we spent nearly a month on Of Mice and Men, it’s only around 100 pages, it can be read in an afternoon.

The whole experience really killed my love of reading. I resented a lot of the books I was made to read, and now almost 2 decades later I’ve never quite been able to get back into the same kind of reading habit I used to have.

I’ve made an effort since then to go back and reread some of those assigned books I hated back in school, and the wild thing is that, overall, they were really good books, strong stories, well-written, solid lessons to teach, different points of view to consider, etc. I totally understand why they were assigned reading.

But when I first read them I was just going through the motions, I just wanted to get the damn books out of the way so that I could read what I wanted to read.

And I think the key is to make kids want to seek out those books. Don’t assign them 1984 (for example,) make them want to go out and read 1984 for themselves.

I don’t know what the best way to do that is, but it’s not just telling them to read those books. If anything, it might be telling them not to read them. I can only speak for myself, but I know that personally seeing a display on “banned books” at a book store or library always made me way more interested in those books than any amount of recommendations from friends or reviews online or any other form of marketing.

I’m worried about your ventilation and PPE situation.

It’s vented outside through flexible ducting with an inline fan, I have VOC monitors around my basement, and I wear a p100 organic vapor and acid rated respirator, disposable nitrile gloves, goggles, and a rubber apron

But do go on being a judgemental prick for no reason. I’m not skimping on safety, but if I can save myself a few bucks not buying a boring piece of hardware I don’t really need, I’d prefer to do that.

That’s money that could buy me more resin, paints, disposable gloves, beer, coffee, ice cream, books, movie tickets, or countless other things that I’d rather be spending my money on.

They never went snooping, my mom occasionally would occasionally come into my room to put clothes away or pick stuff up off the floor or whatever but that was pretty much the extent of it.

She did occasionally do the fairly odd parents “I’m respecting your privacy by knocking but asserting my authority as your parent by coming in anyway” thing, where she’d knock but didn’t really wait for a reply before opening the door or just took any sort of “what?” reply she got as an invitation to continue in, but I think that was more of her being on autopilot than any real intention to barge in on me.

I was, by most measures, a pretty good kid and didn’t really have anything to hide anyway. I think my parents knew that so they never really bothered to snoop.

And on top of that, my grandmother was the queen of all snoop, and my mom hated that when she was growing up so she didn’t want to do that to her own kids.

My grandmother was always the type to just come over uninvited, let herself into the house, and just kind of do whatever the hell she wanted, look at whatever mail we had sitting out on the counter (didn’t open it, but if it was already open it I don’t think she was above reading it) move stuff around, etc.

I remember one time when I was still living at home I was the only one home, it was the middle of the day and I worked nights so I was asleep. She let herself in and was doing who knows what downstairs, and she accidentally bumped the power button on my Xbox, and couldn’t figure out how to turn it back off, so she came into my room and woke me up over it.

I don’t think anywhere else is quite as dramatic as Costco but I kind of feel like most places that have rotisserie chickens use them as a loss-leader. At any grocery store around me they cost about the same or less than a raw chicken.

They’re kind of perfect for it. It’s not hard to rub down a chicken with some spice blend and skewer it on a rotisserie, not much else needs to be done there.

And if you’re a grocery store you’re selling chickens anyway. You always have them on-hand, you can rotate out stock that’s getting close to expiring by just throwing it on the rotisserie.

And for someone who just needs a quick dinner, it gets them in the door. Grab the chicken and a couple quick side dishes and you’re in business.

There hasn’t been one around me in a while, but Boston Market’s whole thing is/was pretty much rotisserie chicken, and at least the last time I went to one (probably a decade ago) I remember them running some kind of special that got me like 2 or 3 whole chickens for some ridiculously low price, but of course I also got a few tides with it and I feel like that’s where they made their money.

No it’s at least 2 chemicals- acetic acid and water.

And quite a few others if we’re talking about something besides distilled white vinegar.

chemical free

Literally a chemical.

It’s a common one found in lots of natural foods and such, nothing particularly scary or unusual, but you are presumably buying a purified, concentrated chemical and not just squeezing a lemon into your washing machine as a natural source of that chemical.

If I were not Diogenes, I would also wish to be Diogenes

-Diogenes

Harmony remotes, IMO, were actually pretty good.

But sadly they killed them off just before I got a home theater setup that I’m actually pretty happy with.

I had a small novelty Twitter account that Andrew WK followed at one point.

Without pay? No. But I do fortunately have some pretty generous PTO at my work, and a bit of a weird work schedule that helps me stretch it even firther if I plan my vacations right.

My wife and I manage to get a bigger trip in every couple years. We’re not staying at fancy hotels or anything, but we can go somewhere cool and do some cool stuff, splurge on a couple nice meals, etc.

And usually one or two smaller trips a year, a couple camping trips, or a weekend away or something.

Would like to travel a lot more, but the travel expenses are what prevent it- food, lodging, plane tickets/gas/etc.

Well now there’s one more thing I can’t unsee

My wife has this big painting that hangs above our fireplace. It’s abstract, just some colored squares and rectangles, kind of blotchy.

One of those blotches looks a hell of a lot like a frog though. Almost like a frog hopped onto the canvas while the paint was still wet.

Can you find the frog?

Or “His Dudeness” or “Duder” or “El Duderino” if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

He did eventually sober up, I think he did a little bit of time in jail or prison along the way. As far as I know he is generally doing pretty well now, is married, has a kid.

But he’s still an idiot. I remember seeing I’m parroting some bullshit about Trump being better for the middle class maybe about a year ago.

He did message me a bit after the election saying something about how he felt bad, but I was still pissed off myself and in no mood to hear him out and blocked him. I was within days of deleting my Facebook anyway so I was about to lose contact with him anyway since I’ve never had his phone number.

It wasn’t much, but back in high school I basically worked as sort of a personal savings account for a couple weeks.

There was one dude I wasn’t exactly friends with but we were friendly, never hung out or really talked outside of school, but otherwise were on pretty good terms. We often sat at the same lunch tables, had some mutual friends and such, talked and joked around between classes, etc.

He was also kind of an irresponsible druggie. Nice guy, wasn’t out committing crimes or anything besides drug possession, just made a lot of dumb choices, came to school drunk, high or tripping balls a lot.

I kind of looked the part of a stoner back in high school- long hair, sort of a grungy style, listened to a lot of classic rock and metal, etc. so I was in a lot of the same circles as him, but I didn’t drink or do drugs and it was also pretty well known that I was a reasonably smart, responsible, and honest dude.

So a few weeks out from senior prom, he realizes that he’s going to need some money for whatever his post-prom plans were (I didn’t ask, I figured it was probably better that I didn’t know.) He also knew that he couldn’t be trusted with his own money, he’d blow it on drugs or something else stupid.

So he asks if he can just give me money to hold onto, and I agreed. He’d hand me a few bucks here or there over the next couple weeks, whatever he didn’t use from his lunch money or allowance or whatever, and I just held onto it.

But at the end of it, it added up to a pretty decent bit of money (by “high school kids 20 years ago” standards anyway, it was maybe around $100)

And the day before prom I gave it back to him and he let me keep I think $10 or $20 for my troubles.

Richard Attenborough

Is it actually a dedicated gay nudist beach, or is it a nude beach that the gay community frequents?

There’s a nude beach not too far from me, and it’s pretty well-known that the one end of the beach is the “gay” end. There’s no official demarcation, it’s just a regular public beach where nudity happens to be allowed, and the one end of it is where the gay people tend to congregate, if you’re not already in the loop about the local nudist community, you’d have no real way of knowing that until you found yourself there and maybe noticed a lot of rainbow flags and same-sex couples holding hands or something.

But that end of the beach does also sometimes get a bit raunchy, which isn’t really legal though usually police turn a blind eye to it as long as they stay down that end, it wouldn’t bother me too much personally if I stumbled onto it without knowing, but it probably would a lot of other people, and I’d still generally consider it trashy and inappropriate at best.

If you were actually at some sort of private gay club where public sex is allowed, all good, but I feel like you probably wouldn’t be questioning and trying to justify it if that was the case.