Costume Quest

Whale sharks are the peak of fishitude, my friend

“It’s important to have a job that makes a difference, boys. That’s why I manually masturbate caged animals for artificial insemination.” – rando convenience store customer in Clerks, 1994

Now we know where reddit took their profit strategy from

Shit, some of them charge the authors to publish.

I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky since they released the 5.0 content update. It’s made a huge difference in the look and feel of the game with things like modeled weather and oceans, and I’ve recently learned that sentinel attacks stop after you blow up the freighter they warp in.

Summarized a user’s tax return 😬

This assumes that every prisoner has committed a crime and that the police do more to get at the truth than they do to close cases. Looking at history, these are really bad assumptions to make.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but if you think of real world examples, it makes a lot of sense. It’s the entire principle that casinos and blind bag toys operate on: you do the requested action (like placing a bet or buying the blind bag), you get something you didn’t want or expect, and you get a little mad that it didn’t go the way you wanted, so you do the requested action again. When it does end up giving you what you wanted, all the times you did the requested action get reinforced, not just the ones where you got the optimal outcome, like a big, “HAH! I knew I was right, I just needed to keep going until my ship finally came in!”

I don’t know what other psychology concepts have similar reliability, but another really interesting one is “diffusion of responsibility” or bystander effect in which the more people witness something terrible, the easier it is for everyone to stand around doing nothing because they assume someone else is taking charge. It’s why pointing directly at someone and saying, “You, call 911!” helps.

I’m not familiar with quilette, but there was a great Washington Post op-ed that broke down exactly why trying to recycle plastic is a bad idea. Here’s a link to it, no paywall: https://wapo.st/3VRnTNl

1.) Plastic breaks down into micro- and nanoplastic particles and get inhaled or consumed by everybody, and we’re just starting to understand how these bits affect our health (like increased systemic inflammation). Recycling facilities breaking down used plastic release untold amounts of plastic bits into their surrounding environments.

2.) “Recycling” old plastic into usable material requires the addition of a LOT of brand new, never-recycled plastic. It’s not a process where you put in used plastics and get some amount of usable plastic out, recycled plastic is like 30% old plastic and 70% new plastic to hold it all together. This is a process we’ve been trying to optimize for 50 years, and the improvements are negligible.

3.) The recycled plastic we get out of it isn’t safe to use for food and drink. (Have you seen those 20 oz. Coke bottles that say “I’m 100% recycled!”? Don’t drink those.) Nobody’s laying down the law and saying they can’t do that, and it’ll be a long time before anyone overcomes the social inertia and corporate lobbyists to stop that from happening.

Plastics are for landfills. I feel like such a piece of shit every time I throw another piece of plastic in the trash, but it’s the option that’s safest for everybody. (I feel like the French climatologist in Project Hail Mary every time.) Recycling isn’t a goal that will help; we need to adapt and reduce how much plastic we use.

They missed that thing on Matabele ants treating wounds on each other with antibiotics. The ants have done this for so long that they’ve evolved goo pockets to hold their ant-ibiotics https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ant-antibiotics/

I feel like IT could yell at OP for a little bit, but would ultimately have to stare the fact that they allowed non-privileged users to just change the operating system square in the face. Like holy hell, 500 employees and anybody can just be like, “Hey, maybe I’ll make a major OS change today because why not?” What else are they letting happen?!

The cynicism is so valid in examples like this. Haha a few years ago, I would’ve assumed that police didn’t want the “extra” work of having to process the assault; now, there are so many other options available for them to not do work!

My point isn’t that SF police are doing what they’re supposed to, it’s that this problem is systemic. It’s not just the police that are fucking this up, it’s not just fire making comments of pure idiocy about how appropriate it is to test for date rape drugs, it’s a problem that city government, police, fire, and health services are all contributing to when they refuse to test a patient who’s clearly been drugged. They have their tiny bit of hope for deniability (“date rape drugs aren’t commonly used in crimes here” and “what can you do when the test isn’t called for?” kinds of garbage) that every person should recognize as dangerous to all of society.

The city’s goal isn’t safety and justice for all, it’s enough stability to continue operating and growing. Here’s what that might look like:

A fire or police chief is told that city tax revenue (a large source of their station’s funding), goes down when tourists stop visiting. Then, it’s also mentioned that testing for date rape drugs leads to positive results for date rape drugs, and no reasonable person would want to visit a city known for their rates of crimes involving date rape drugs, now, would they? It would be so terrible if there was no money for the station’s most effective community safety programs and equipment upgrades because of declining tourism. If things got bad enough, there might not be enough money to keep the station open without having to rely on public fundraisers like county fair dunk tanks and pancake breakfasts, and doesn’t the city where you built your career deserve better than that?

I think the reason is because they don’t want date rape drugs showing up in their community’s crime and safety stats

Hold on, shifting paradigm

Kinda wish I’d taken some comparative biology when I had the chance

I want a script that fills in other data brokers’ contact information!

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is on Steam sale for $6 standard/$10 with the DLC. It’s a story with the Greek pantheon providing most of the characters that doesn’t take itself seriously–it starts off with Prometheus telling Zeus a story, and Zeus is the world’s worst audience. The movement and combat are satisfying, and it’s a ton of fun so far.

What time zone are y’all in, and what hours do you typically play?