Unbetitelt

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.

So some time last year I got kinda bored so I started watching that netflix series(i forgot its name) that is like queer eye but for surprise weddings for couples that couldn't get married when they planned to etc. And I really liked it, it was cute and the dresses and venues where AMAZING and all

BUT

What really bothered me was

They couldn't find a single couple where the woman would propose! They had two male gay couples, which I really appreciated but maaan I wanted to see one female proposal!

So naturally, I complained to my bf about it.

And what does he say???

"Well I guess we know now who of the two of us is going to propose some day! I'm really looking forward to you doing that!"

And I was like

What. That. No. Wait. Nah. Noo. That's not what I meant. Abort mission.

AND FOR THE WHOLE PAST YEAR, EVERY TIME THE TOPIC MARRIAGE COMES UP HE'LL LOOK AT ME WITH THAT BIG GRIN AND ASK "So, how long do I have to wait till you do it?"

And I have to admit, after getting used to the thought... I started getting really excited about

I’ve found it. 

https://youtu.be/2vHERvHx26A

Naturally, from this moment forth, we hated her. Under this seating assignment, which lasted all year due to block scheduling, I was grouped with the student council secretary, who had never done anything remotely sneaky in her entire life, and the aforementioned football player, who I had known since birth (his) and with whom I had spent most of august having an in-depth discussion of the summer reading (mine) due to disappointments about frankenstein the year before.

At the other end of the classroom was group B-, a pissed off cluster of orchestra students who were about to turn analyzing the american dream into a blood sport and take all of us with them. We’ll get back to them in a moment.

Somewhat importantly, the three of us sat where the teacher’s back was constantly to us. This would have been fine, except for the amount of adolescent resentment simmering in that classroom. Our first semester was short stories, and football season, which lead to Football Player suffering a torn rotator cuff. Somewhat by accident, we discovered that the teacher would not notice him sleeping off his painkillers if Student Council or I pinched his good arm when she finally turned around: He’d bolt upright and mutter something about it being symbolic of the american dream. It’s due to this that the class as a whole worked out that if he was still getting an A+ while on lots of codeine, and group B- had not seen significant increases in their grades, that there wasn’t any actual grading going on.

When our mid-semester project was announced to be an in-depth analysis of a specific character or theme for The Scarlet Letter, and that extra credit would be given for anyone who brought in an appropriately symbolic food, group B- decided to kill two birds with one stone.

They brought in cookies - snickerdoodles with shiny red sugar sprinkles - and explained how they were symbolic of something to do with Dimmesdale… then waited until we bit into them.

The sugar sprinkles were salt, dyed red with food coloring. The symbolism was about deception. They got extra credit, we yelled at them, the cookies were thrown out.

Enter the end of semester project, which was on the Great Gatsby, except people did an in depth creative analysis of a chapter, and my group got the one where Gatsby’s body is discovered, took one look at each other, and decided to go all out.

We met at Student Council Secretary’s house with half a plan, and spent a Saturday afternoon going bananas. We had a game board where each group would play a trivia game about the chapter using a car symbolic of the character they were playing as (several vintage hot wheels were donated to the cause: Football and I had very angry younger brothers, later.) We had an expressionist/Dadaist/give the football player scissors poster depicting the scene of Gatsby’s death, complete with “money growing on trees” because it was faster to chop up rectangles of green construction paper in the paper cutter than to put extra work into it. We had everything… except an appropriately symbolic food.

“We should make them toast to the american dream and the trivia game winner at the end,” said Student Council. “With red koolaid,” said Football, who in addition to having slept through the first half of the semester has an unfortunate sense of humor, “To symbolize the characters’ gullibility as well as Gatsby’s blood.”

I’m not going to take credit or blame for what happened next, except to say that when you’ve known someone since birth, then been separated for the length of middle school due to districting, and then spent the last year and change rediscovering that you’re both fairly bright teenage idiots with no faith in authority while simultaneously making the worst puking noises you can manage when people mistakenly assume you’re dating, you fuel each other’s bad ideas until they become a california wildfire.

Student Council is relatively blameless, and in fact, tried to talk us out of it.

We waited. We presented. We played a trivia game and waxed rhapsodic about impressionism and did a lot of bullshitting about symbolism, and we passed out a stack of red solo cups half full of red koolaid, which NO ONE was to drink until the toast. Who won the race for the american dream? Doesn’t matter. 

“A Toast!” declared Football, “To Achieving the American Dream!” and everyone drank but us.

There was an immediate storm of spitting and yelling from the class, who had drank the kool-aid responsibly, only to discover that it had been made with many, many cups of salt instead of sugar. Group B the second (formerly group B-) was particularly loud, but not louder than our teacher, who had drank her koolaid like a shot, and was gagging enthusiastically into the classroom trashcan. Student Council was ready to die of embarassment, but Football was nothing but thorough when he decided to piss people off.

1) We don’t want to talk to you.

2) We don’t want to pause our music to talk to you.

3) We don’t even talk to each other on the phone — why would we want to talk to you?

But the biggest reason is A TRAIL. If I e-mail you back, you can see what was said in the future. You can’t tell me I forgot to tell you something because it’s right there. You can’t tell me I “never reached out” because we can both SEE it. I don’t have to trust your recollection.

And, in a group inbox, you can see who has been responded to. I got forwarded a voicemail from my supervisor (through e-mail! imagine that!) asking me to call some lady back for clarification. So I did, against my will of course…and she said somebody had called her yesterday.

Who? When? What did y’all talk about? Is follow-up necessary?

Phone calls back and forth only work in a workflow where the standard procedure is to *log* phone calls in a shared system with a brief summary of what was discussed. Otherwise, y’all need to let us e-mail. It’s not just about a generation gap. It’s also about efficiency.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Any feedback can be proffered via e-mail.

EDIT

"ok cool" : this meets my expectations

"yeah ok" : this is weird but I accept it

"ok yeah" : I hadn't thought of it that way but you're right

"ok so" : I am about to tell you something dramatic

"ok..." : if you have a point you better get to it fast

"...ok" : I'm about done with your shit

"ok!" : I am pleased with what we have just agreed upon

"ok?" : I don't get why you're making a big deal out of this

"ok...?" : I want you to get to the point fast, but I think it's going to be interesting or dramatic when you do

"...ok!" : I think we've covered everything we need to discuss

"...ok?" : I don't know what you want from me but I'm willing to find out

"ok wow" : I did not expect to be impressed, but I am

"fuck ok" : This is a problem but I'm not going to freak out

"ok fuck" : This is a problem and I am going to freak out

"damn ok" : I didn't realize this was that important to you but now I get it so you can stop emphasizing the point

"ok, ok" : I already understand what you're saying, you don't need to keep clarifying or repeating yourself

Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies

Their severed heads get around just fine until they regenerate perfectly functioning, parasite-free new bodies, scientists say.

A few years ago, Sayaka Mitoh, a Ph.D. candidate at Nara Women’s University in Japan, was perusing her lab’s vast collection of sea slugs when she stumbled upon a gruesome sight. One of the lab’s captive-raised sea slugs, an Elysia marginata, had somehow been decapitated.

When Ms. Mitoh peered into its tank to get a better look, she noticed something even more shocking: The severed head of the creature was moving around the tank, munching algae as if there was nothing unusual about being a bodiless slug.

Ms. Mitoh also saw signs that the sea slug’s wound was self-inflicted: It was as if the sea slug had dissolved the tissue around its neck and ripped its own head off. Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn’t uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body…

What’s encrypting your internet surfing? An algorithm created by a supercomputer? Well, if the site you’re visiting is encrypted by the cyber security firm Cloudflare, your activity may be protected by a wall of lava lamps.

Cloudflare covers websites for Uber, OKCupid, & FitBit, for instance. The wall of  lamps in the San Francisco headquarters generates a random code. Over 100  lamps, in a variety of colors, and their patterns deter hackers from accessing data.  

As the lava lamps bubble and swirl, a video camera on the ceiling monitors their unpredictable changes and connects the footage to a computer, which converts the randomness into a virtually unhackable code.

Codes created by machines have relatively predictable patterns, so it’s possible for hackers to guess their algorithms, posing a security risk. Lava lamps, add to the equation the sheer randomness of the physical world, making it nearly impossible for hackers to break through.

You might think that this would be kept secret, but it’s not. Simply go in and ask to see the lava lamp display. By allowing people to affect the video footage, human movement, static, and changes in lighting from the windows work together to make the random code even harder to predict.

So, by standing in front of the display, you add an additional variable to the code, making it even harder to hack. Isn’t that interesting?