Adult Living

All those bullets are the same width, so you could fire those without too much issue.

An amorphous black blob thingy that shape-shifts into any hazard related thing.

It turns out that working 40 hours a week is just too much. Full stop, no ifs ands or buts. The tiredness and loss of focus it induces is enough that you're about 25% less productive per hour when you're on a 40-hour work week, and so the extra 10 hours a week cancels out. This effect is a little bit more pronounced for white collar work and a little bit less pronounced for blue collar work, but there's functionally not enough of a difference to care. And people who are working more than that actually become less productive in total.

The thing is that you don't immediately gain the benefits of being fully rested and focused by working less on just one day, or even one week. It can even take months to settle into the pattern of higher productivity per working hour, and that's frankly miraculously quick given that full burnout can take years to recover from. And during that transition you will be less immediately productive. Particularly for people who pride themselves on being hard workers and how much overtime they put in, the notion that working less can get just as much done can feel absurd and even insulting. Because it seems so painfully obvious that you get less done when you do less, and any experiences of being invited to do so feel like they back that up.

But it's true. We are all simply working more than we need to, pointlessly, to no benefit at all. It is an appallingly pointless waste of human life.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.

I had a cop try to claim I’d turned left on red on an unprotected light while texting and that was why I got T-boned.

I had my dad drive me through the intersection where I got hit and took photos of the (very much protected) light, then got them printed.

When the judge asked me to plead I said not guilty and that I’d like to present evidence, if I could come up to the bench. He agreed.

I walked up, set down my photos, put my flip phone on top of them, and said “Your Honor, I’ll plead guilty as soon as the officer can explain how I was texting on this.”

(Note for younger folks, this was 2010. Some flip phones and phone plans supported texting. Mine was not one of them.)

The whole ticket was a lie. I was in fact considered at fault for the wreck–if you’re turning left in Arizona you’re automatically at fault–but the ticket was dismissed because it was a protected light and I had a phone that physically could not text.

Cops lie on tickets. All the time.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

They have 2 cats. Both very raggedy and now elderly former feral boys, both gingers. There is not a single braincell between the pair of them.

Wash (full government name Washburn) thinks all humans are friend shaped. Sherpa (Full name Stop Climbing That Get Down From There What Are You A Sherpa) is terrified of every human on the planet except my parents.

So, whenever I go up and let myself in, I hear the scrabble of claws on the hardwood floor. Wash then runs full speed into my shins demanding attention, and Sherpa ramps off the whatever he was perched on, a wall, another wall, and scrambles up the stairs to hide under the bed upstairs. Note that he has seen me regularly for 9 years now.

My mom texted me the other day to ask 'Did u see both of them'

Me; 'Wash is clinging to my pants and refusing to let me leave and Sherpa was on top of the fridge again somehow. He's upstairs hiding now.'

the other day to ask ‘Did

u see both of them’

So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.

Myne it's an England thing but I've just grabbed the closest things to me and they both have an extensive list of ingredients.

Hand cream

Turkish delight/Chocolate

from label 1:

in the US and EU, this is a generic term meaning "something we put in here to make it smell nice" and there is absolutely NO way of knowing if that is a scent you are allergic to or not. some of these can be a mix of up to 200 distinct components.

from label 2:

i think you can probably see the problem here?

the strangest fandom hobby is plotty fanfiction, the kind that requires research, because engaging in this hobby makes no goddamned sense.

it doesn’t even give anybody masturbation material, which is at least a logical and admirable goal that contributes to the betterment of society, or at least society’s solitary orgasms.