Luckily I don’t have it quite that bad I am just very uncomfortable with it.
Sprained my knee really badly once and the doctor used a giant syringe to drain some fluid after the swelling hadn’t gone down much after a couple weeks. Really didn’t like that, wasn’t even close to passing out, but can’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable.
Similarly I’ve also been on-scene with some pretty nasty injuries, and I work in 911 dispatch, I’m generally not bothered by too much.
I have 3
I cannot juggle. I don’t generally lack in hand-eye coordination (not that I’m overly-gifted with it either, but I’d generally say that I’m at least average,) and I understand the theory of it well enough, I’ve even been able to teach people to juggle successfully, it’s just that I, myself, cannot juggle.
I’m also a reasonably handy, technically-minded person, again not an absolute wizard, but if I crack a gadget open, with a couple Google searches and how-to guides, I can usually understand more or less how things work and how to fix them if they’re broken.
But something about sewing machines breaks my mind. There’s something going on right around the bobbin that just doesn’t make sense to my brain and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it apparently does, because I’ve successfully used a sewing machine and can confirm first-hand that they work.
Lastly, I don’t like needles. It’s not a horrible phobia that sends me running for the hills, but something about needles sleeves me out like nothing else. I can suck it up and get my necessary vaccines and such, but I do kind of have to give myself a little internal pep-talk first. It’s not a fear of pain, I have pretty solid pain tolerance and needles really don’t hurt that much at all, it’s specifically needles that weird me out. If there was an option to get my vaccines where a doctor would shank me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine into the wound, I’d absolutely go for it.
I’m personally very much a fan of both the comic and the movie
The overall plots are largely the same, the comic of course has a little more space to flesh things out.
Which does actually work against it at times, there’s a point where V just kind of goes off on a lecture about anarchy for a couple pages, which is interesting but maybe not the most exciting comic book reading you’ll ever do, and certainly wouldn’t have translated particularly well to the screen, so overall I don’t mind most of the changes they made of
Both the comic and movie are very much a product of their times and places. The comic is very much a reaction to Thatcherism in the UK, the movie more to post-911 Bush-era America.
The movie probably resonates more with me personally, but I’m also a product of that time and place. The comic strikes me as a little more timeless.
Even more appropriately, it’s V for Vendetta
Spoilers, I guess, for a 40 year old comic (the plot in the movie is a bit different)
In the comic, Lewis Prothero (played by Roger Alam in the movie) is one of central figur of the ruling Norsefire party. He is responsible for the “Voice of Fate” radio broadcasts (although the party propaganda is that it is the Fate supercomputer making the broadcasts itself) and was formerly the commander of a concentration camp.
He collects dolls, and is kidnapped by V placed in a mock-up of the camp with his doll collection dressed as prisoners, and tortured by V burning his dolls in front of him.
I believe in the movie you can catch a glimpse of his doll collection in the background of a couple scenes, but that plotline is changed quite a bit.
I know that when police in my area need to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed (and can’t just be disposed of in normal waste streams, or sold or what have you) they normally take it to a local garbage incineration plant.
There was also a steel mill in the area at one point and their furnace was occasionally been put to use for similar purposes (tangential - there was at least one instance I’ve heard of where the US mint used that furnace to dispose of a batch of coins they were testing a new alloy or process or something on)
Generally speaking, recipes can’t be copyrighted (the specific wording of a written recipe might be protected, but the general idea of combining certain ingredients in a specific way can’t)
The names of the flavors, branding, etc. can be (or trademarked, or various other IP terms)
And aspects of the production process might be covered by patents and such.
And of course non-competes and such could complicate things for the actual people involved
And how you acquire those recipes can be a factor, that could rub up against non-disclosure agreements, corporate espionage laws, etc. you may need to be able to say that you came up with it on your own independent of the original recipe or pieced it together from publicly available information.
But in general, if anyone wanted to start up an ice cream company selling exact duplicates of Ben & Jerry’s flavors,they could do that as long as they called them all something different
In no particular order, and not an exhaustive list
Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)
There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues
And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.
Figure that pretty much covers all of my bases.
Even if we ignore the doodle
And that given all we know about about trump and Epstein, we know that the inside joke between them here is about pedophila, or at the very least about them being creepy misogynistic sex pests.
And let’s assume that despite everything we know about them that somehow this is about something inane, like a shared love of football, or model railroading, or going to McDonald’s for hamberders or something.
Can we agree that this is just a really fucking weird and creepy way to write a birthday letter? Someone tells you they’re going to put together a book of letters from friends for someone’s birthday and this is what you spit out? The script of some weird scenario you imagined where the two of you are responding to a voiceover and jerking each other off about your shared hobby?
If I got a letter, card, Facebook post, message, etc. like this from someone I know, I’d ask them if they’re alright because that’s a fucking weird way to send a birthday message.
I feel like 3d printing would probably be slower than just cutting them out by hand with an xacto knife, you can get a pretty good rhythm going and depending on what material you make it out of you can probably cut a few of them out at a time.
Also feels like a bit of a waste to make them out of plastic since it’s something most people would probably only use a couple of times then throw away, and even if you make it out of a recyclable plastic they probably couldn’t be recycled with paint residue (not even gonna touch on the plastic recycling debate right now)
I’d probably try calling around to a couple more print shops and such, maybe some art studios and maker spaces. May also be worth thinking outside the box, the maintenance department of some businesses might have a stencil cutter to stencil things onto their equipment, schools might have them (my mom worked in an elementary school, it wasn’t exactly a stencil maker, but they had a tool for cutting letters out of paper for art projects and such that might work for your purposes)
Short of a dedicated stencil maker (which is pretty pricey) a cricut or similar machine is probably your best bet. They’re not too pricey if you wanted to get one yourself, and don’t know what the arts and crafts scene is like in the EU but I feel like every artsy person in the US went nuts for them a couple years ago and most of the bigger arts and crafts stores around here have a whole aisle dedicated to them (much to my chagrin because they got rid of some other stuff I occasionally need to make room for them) so if you ask around you might be able to find someone who will let you use theirs.
It may also help to rephrase what you’re looking for, especially if you’ve been asking for die-cut templates. You might have better luck asking for stencils, or maybe asking if they have a cricut or vinyl cutter, or maybe even a laser cutter and just providing the file for them to cut out. There’s a chance the employees just aren’t really thinking about what their equipment can do and just know that they don’t have a specific stencil making machine.
A better term for what you’re looking for might be “stencil”
I don’t have any specific recommendations for companies, especially in the EU, I feel like a lot of print shops and sign companies could probably do it for you. If you want to DIY it, you could probably pick up some generic letter stencils from almost any hardware store to trace onto something and cut out yourself. Depending on what material you want it made out of you could probably get anyone with a cricut or similar machine to make one for you if your ok with something like paper or vinyl, or if you for some reason wanted it made out of metal or something else sturdier that a cricut could manage you could try asking around to local machine shops.
I really hate the term gun show loophole
Maybe the situation and laws are different in other parts of the country, but at every gun show I’ve ever been to all of those people with stands set up selling guns are dealers, so to buy a gun through them you have to go through all the legal hoops as if you were buying from a regular gun store.
I suppose there’s a lot of randos wandering around there who own guns who might be convinced to do a private sale, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with them being at a gun show except it’s a convenient networking opportunity. You could just as easily hang around outside of a shooting range trying to find a private seller.
Although if we want a more pessimistic view
If we assume that “eligible voters” is a roughly representative sample of the country in general, well over 51 percent of the country either voted for this (directly by voting for trump, or indirectly by voting 3rd party) or didn’t care enough to even show up and vote.
Because that’s what happened. Something like 3/4 of eligible voters decided that this was an acceptable outcome.
In my opinion, the lyrics tell a pretty straightforward story, no real need for metaphor
Someone releases a bunch of balloons into the sky, they get mistaken for enemy aircraft/missiles, and set off a war.
If you get more out of it with your interpretation, more power to you, but it feels like a bit of an unnecessary stretch though.
I am very bad at remembering to clean my water bottles regularly, I have about 4 nalgene bottles and a CamelBak in fairly regular rotation, they get left in the car, sometimes with water in them, sometimes empty but rarely totally dry, often for days, weeks, or even moths at a time. I don’t drink water that’s been sitting in my bottles for that long, but I’ve never noticed any weird smells, scum, cloudiness, mold, etc when I go to empty them.
And I can’t say I’ve ever had an issue with mold or any other funkiness in any of my bottles.
And I think a lot of it is that I only put water in my bottles, no flavorings or anything else (except maybe occasionally iodine or other water purification products when I’m camping, which of course is just going to kill anything that would start growing in there otherwise)
I also usually (but not always) fill them with purified water to begin with.
To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they’d need to come down one way or another or just die in space.
Yeah, don’t get me wrong I enjoyed his lectures, it’s just very much not going to be everyone’s cup of tea and certainly not something that would have translated well to a movie