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okay so I fucking love event planning and decorating and hosting and baking, aka all the elements of a banger birthday party. I am so freaking happy to throw people parties because it means I get to throw a party, then go to a party! yippee!

so my friend's birthday rolled around and I knew she wanted a party because I'd done them for her before, but I wanted to make it extra special because she was turning the big 25. so I did all the regular stuff I am So Excited About: had her roommates let me into her apartment while she was out, put up balloons and homemade garlands and streamers and table decor, made her favorite cake and snack plates and cocktails, ordered catering from a restaurant she loves, got a bunch of our friends to come over to surprise her, wrote her a disgustingly heartfelt card, etc. and then because it was the big quarter century, I was like I gotta do something extra.

now. I do not like clowns. my friend loves clowns. we've gone to the circus together and she's seen me literally close my eyes and hide when the clowns are out in the audience, meanwhile she's screaming and waving at them. so obviously I hired a clown for her birthday. (btw seeing him out of clown costume made me less freaked out because now I knew that the guy under there looks like someone's uncle.)

so she showed up after work totally expecting a party because I'm too paranoid to throw a real surprise party, and obviously loved it. and then I was like btw. there's a clown.

she lost her mind. she was sooo excited. she loved the party and she loved the clown. I was like haha yes I'm getting a good grade in birthday parties and didn't think much of it because frankly I do this a lot, and it's so much fun for me that I don't consider it work. like, I love doing all that for my friends. it's not any kind of sacrifice.

two days later, she texted me that she broke up with her boyfriend.

naturally I was like omg tell me everything I hated that guy let's get coffee. so we did and she told me that for her birthday, her boyfriend of nine months 1) forgot about it and didn't get her anything, 2) got mad at her for not texting him while she was at her party, 3) got mad at her for telling him about the party because it was "passive aggressive", and 4) called her immature and stupid for being excited about a clown at her birthday.

mutuals/followers who are involved in historical research especially the late 18th century in new england:

this is the only object in daniel brown's house in cambridge mass in 1785 that i cannot identify for the life of me.

the context it's in is a room containing beds, clothing, kitchen/cookware, and for some reason "forty-one new scythes".

i'm reading it as either "Slam Bunk" or "Ham Bunk" (leaning toward "Slam" based on the rest of this particular person's handwriting), but nothing comes up when i search either of those terms, even with dates added. it looks like it's worth 1/6 of a penny if i'm understanding the notations of value correctly

@nohriantomatoes It probably did happen with dinosaurs! At least the big carnivores. Birds they might be, but when you look at the ends of their faces, they have sensory pits.

Sensory pits are clusters of nerves- they're part of what we call the ISOs in crocodilians. ISO means "Integumentary Sensory Organs," and they're exceptionally sensitive- a crocodilian's face is more sensitive than a human fingertip. They can sense tiny pressure changes in water (as in "the pressure change from a single drop") even when their hearing is disrupted.

You can see the foramina for the nerve endings really clearly on this alligator skull.

And while they do use these nerves for hunting, they also use them for courtship. It's seen across species, and it's an important part of the process. While we can't entirely reconstruct something so complex as courtship in theropods, we do know that there are several species with the sensory pits that indicate the presence of ISOs. Juravenator had them on its tail, Daspletosaurus had them on its face- so did Neovenator and the other tyrannosaurids.

Kind of obsessed with this woman's freakishly modern jacket from 1904.

The complete lack of shoulder definition gives it the silhouette of an MA-1 bomber jacket, but bombers weren't even a thing yet. The Wright brothers barely achieved powered flight in 1903. The ribbing on the shoulder and the angular cutouts with the hexagonal mesh are so futuristic and cyberpunk, but even art deco wouldn't be a thing for another 15 years. The color is like a dusty NASA flight suit. All together it's giving lone spacefarer crash landing their tiny rustbucket ship on Mars.

> open settings

> search "hardware acceleration" and there should only be one result

> uncheck use recommended performance settings

> uncheck use hardware acceleration

This is what hardware acceleration is:

"Do you just have a graphic for this on hand at all times?"

Of course! My pleasure!!!

Donating bone marrow is really funky because bone marrow is what makes your immune system! Blood is made in The Bones, which feels wrong, but it's true. This includes your white blood cells and all of the other components that help you fight off infection. In individuals with blood cancers, often times their bone marrow IS the problem- it's creating mutated/cancerous blood cells.

So, your bone marrow is broken and producing cells that will kill you. And in response, humanity invented the most metal answer to this ever: nuking your bones until they're marrowless. And then taking someone else's bone marrow and swapping it in.

So basically, I just gave someone an entirely new immune system. Which is fucking awesome.

Answering your other questions beneath the cut so this doesn't get too long on everyone's dashboard!

So Oreos! Truly a 100+ year old institution (although we can argue about whether Hydrox came first/are better but that's not what this is about). Oreo was manufacturing using pretty modern equipment very early on right here in beautiful Manhattan in the old Nabisco factory that is now Chelsea Market. But an unfortunate issue with mass producing millions of very thin, very fragile crisp cookies is breakage. A lot of the wafers (the chocolate part) will crack or crumble before reaching the end of the production line. The machinery can be adjusted to reduce breakage but the nature of the wafer means breakage will never be zero. Sometimes the cookie gets to the sandwiching stage & filled with the creme before it cracks, but more often it breaks before then. That's why you have some bits with creme and some without.

So what does a cookie company do with all the broken pieces? The dough is already cooked at that point so it can't be reused to form more cookies. So Oreo comes up with a plan: develop recipes and alternative uses so they can sell the crushed cookies, too. This happens a lot in manufacturing! Leftover bits are repurposed for other products to reduce waste and cost. Probably the most famous example is animal feed; the husks and rinds and cast-offs from human food production often get processed into animal food.

Sadly this means most commercial Oreo dust is a pre-crushed situation. I grew up working in my family's restaurant and the Oreo pieces would arrive in sealed plastic bag inside a big box. We'd use them for pie crusts and dessert toppings. Being a sneaky lil shit, I'd sometimes dip a soup spoon into the Oreo dust and take one big, chocolatey bite as a snack. No need to crush them by hand.

"The idea that American health insurance companies are using AI to analyze and adjudicate claims for approval or denial sounds terrifying, but one North Carolinian is using AI to fight back.

When Raleigh resident Neal Shah had a claim denied for his wife’s chemotherapy drugs, he thought it was rare, that he was the only one, that it was just bad luck.

Litigating his case on phone calls that lasted for hours changed the husband and father, and he set about creating a sophisticated app that uses artificial intelligence to compare claims denial forms against health insurance contracts, before automatically drafting an appeal letter.

“For a doctor to write this, it’s not rocket science, but it still takes hours,” Shah told ABC News 11, adding that a well-written appeal letter, sent in immediately, can sometimes get denials reversed within days or weeks, but most people either don’t know they can appeal, or don’t know on what grounds they can appeal.

In fact, according to Shah’s research, 850 million claims denials occur every year, and less than 1% are ever appealed.

That’s where Counterforce Health comes in, a startup that’s created a free-to-use app for claims denials.

It’s all the more critical a service now that health insurance companies, already armed with statewide government-protected pseudo monopolies and duopolies, are using AI to deny claims within seconds of them being filed.

“Before, you used to have a reason you would deny it, and you used to have a doctor review or a nurse review it, but once AI rolled out, they could just have AI deny it,” Shah explained.

For Counterforce Health, Shah brought onboard Riyaa Jadhav, a Jill of all trades who has helped grow and expand the undertaking through her experience in both the business world and working alongside patients at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

Together, they’ve built Counterforce to the point where it boasts a 70% success rate in appealing claims.

Thousands have already logged on; many going on to use the service.

“Sometimes when enough people get loud, enough people put pressure, then I think all of a sudden society wakes up, so I really feel like it’s really about to click,” Shah said.

-via Good News Network, August 5, 2025

Here's the link to this organization, by the way. According to their numbers, less than 1% of denials in the US are appealed, but 75% of appeals are approved. This could do so much good.

And another source for validity: