Everything I Love Is Canceled

Ivory lawn and lace teagown, c.1905

Pin-tucked cotton woven w/ serpentine-dot pattern, embroidered lace inserts at waist & short sleeves, Valenciennes lace trim, trained skirt, ivory China silk lining.

"Ohh it's a different sugar than refined sugar" it's the same molecule.

"Ohhh my water filtering apparatus making beauty water and cleaning water and alkaline water" Water is H20. What you're doing is reverse osmosis, and if it's alkaline then there is a substance that's not water in there to make it alkaline. You can't purify water to a pH of 12, because pure water molecules have, by definition of how the pH system works and several phyics rules, a pH of exactly 7.

"Ooohh it has ~different~ sodium atoms." That's called an isotope and sodium isotopes aren't created by magic woowoo, and the magical ability of most isotopes is radioactivity.

"Low toxin" what toxin. Tell me their names. What are they doing. "They are endocrine disruptors" what part of the endocrine system? How? Do you have a source that doesn't try to sell you something?

"Just mix vinegar and baking soda to cleanse all the toxins of your fruits" you just created water molecules and CO2, and some calcium and acetate which don't have much chemical property. That's a science fair vulcano. And doesn't have acidic or alkaline properties to chemically influence anything. Just use tap water at this point. "My wood cutting board soaked in an alkaline solution from baking soda to clear out the toxins leaves a nasty looking soup" yeah because you were dissolving the wood with an alkaline solution. Congratulations.

"There is effective microorganisms in this ceramic bead and it can cleanse your laundry and dishes and prevent mold in your fridge and it works for years" what microorganisms exactly? How did you discover them? What are they eating? Are they resistant to 60 degrees and steam? Do they procreate in the fridge? Are they spreading out on all surfaces to prevent the mold or is it an air filtration system that works without airflow or is it just magic? "Put them in your flowers, they can reverse cavities, put them in your walls" what are they eating in my walls? What kind of microorganisms are they? Did you test the safety of those things in human bodies? Are they native to my biotope? How do they survive in those fucking ceramic beads?

I always assumed they were a scam because ions (an atom with an electron imbalance) really really hate existing and are hard to make.

Lots of ions are ok in water because water is super polar (oxygen hogs all the electrons so every molecule is like a tiny magnet) and therefore they'll soak up all the imbalanced charges.

Go pour salt in water right now. If it dissolves you've created negative chlorine ions! (And an equal number of positive sodium ions)! Good job on being a scientist.

But in air? Nothing polar to stabilise them.

Go pour salt on your table. It stays a solid? Good job. You've proven the atoms in salt prefer being bonded to each other than being free flying ions. You're half way to a chemistry degree.

The only way to force the creation of ions in air is a fuckton of energy. This can be electricity or radiation.

Go attach leads to a 9V battery. Put both into a cup of water. If you see bubbles you've successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen will be on the positive lead because oxygen ions are negative. The hydrogen will be on the negative clip because hydrogen ions are positive. There will also be more bubbles because water has twice as many hydrogen atoms as oxygen atoms. These bubbles won't be ions though, because again, ions hate existing so they recombine into oxygen and hydrogen gas almost instantly. Still. You did technically make negative ions for a split second. Good job.

But most of those negative ion bracelets don't have batteries (which again, only make ions for a split second and require a renewable resource like water to do that with). So they must be a scam right? They're just rocks!

Nope. Remember the other way to make ions? It was radiation! Those bracelets and necklaces you're supposed to wear 24/7 to keep yourself healthy? They're made of mildly radioactive stone.

So they are splitting the air into ions (for a split second. You now know that ions hate existing so they recombine. Although sometimes they'll recombine into ozone (O3) rather than breathable oxygen (O2). Ozone isn't great to breathe in but you also presumably have been near a car so like... It's not a big deal in the scheme of things).

But more importantly!! They're also splitting your body into ions! Which are stabilised by the water in your body (remember the magnet analogy?) and therefore last a lot longer and can get up to more fuckery.

#where people simply do not understand what the creative process entails so they devalue and dismiss it

#striving to be a well rounded person educated on as many things as possible is good actually

So while I was taking this chemistry class I walked into a health food store one day and saw a bottle of "alkaline water"

Well I bought it and brought it into class the next day and asked the teacher if we could PH test it, since we were learning about acids and bases, and she loved the idea of IRL applied science so we took ten minutes to do a quick PH test on the alkaline water

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was: