That’s basically what I had in mind. Steam has this as an option for the big picture mode UI and I like it a lot.

Personally, I’d prefer if games and such would use universal face button glyphs on-screen.

I’ve switched back and forth between Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation controllers so much that I really don’t have a mental map of which button is which, and in game I’m usually not looking at my controller to be able to tell.

Which feels like it leaves a lot out of the picture to me.

On an average week, where I don’t go to a party, I’m not on vacation, etc. I’m probably averaging out to less than 2 drinks a week.

When I try to factor in those parties and such, even with some pretty generous estimates, I barely average out to 1 drink a day.

Of course when I do have those parties and such, I probably go above that average for that particular day/week.

And I feel like there could be some pretty significant differences between someone who is actually having a beer or two or three almost every day, and someone like me who drinks little or no alcohol for most of the year, but does get a bit drunk at a party a handful of times a year.

Both might be pretty similar in terms of total average alcohol consumption, but the pattern is obviously pretty different.

And I’m not saying that one or the other is necessarily any more or less harmful, but you never really see the data broken down like that and if they’re not looking into it with that sort of detail, I feel like that’s leaving themselves open to really miss something important.

Yeah, how much OP actually complains about this is kind of a big factor here.

I run up against something similar with a few of my friends. They spend a lot of time complaining that they’re bored and lonely, but no matter how many invites you throw their way, they never seem to make any effort to follow through with any plans. They say they’re interested, but they never let you know when they’re available, or they don’t show up, or they come up with flimsy excuses, etc.

And there are times I really wish I could force some of them to just show up to something so they’d stop complaining.

Having a social life is hard, I get it, we all only have so much time, energy, money, etc. shit comes up, we have other obligations, we all like to just veg out on the couch sometimes

But if you’re not willing to put forth even a little effort to follow through on plans, rearrange some things, inconvenience yourself a little, at some point you kind of lose the right to complain.

And it’s not that you’re not allowed to complain about it once in a while. But at some point, it’s just not fair to the people you’re complaining to if you’re not actually making an effort to do something about it.

I now count myself pretty solidly among the old and uncool. I’ll be honest, the first few times I encountered the words “skibidi toilet” I had assumed it was a nonsense phrase made to make fun of how zoomers talk and not an actual thing they were watching and talking about.

On finding that out, I went to seek it out to hold onto at least a little bit of cultural relevancy with the young folks.

Of course, the original skibidi toilet video left me with the same general “what the fuck did I just watch” reaction that I think literally everyone has.

But I stuck it out for a bit, watched the first few dozen videos (they’re short, it goes quick) and a story started to emerge.

I won’t claim that it was high art or anything, but there was some art to it, I’ve definitely willingly watched and enjoyed much less complex stories.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s dumb, it’s about toilet people. But I watched plenty of dumb shit on new grounds and YouTube and such back in the day. Hell, some of the stuff that made it onto actual TV was pretty damn out-there, my generation had shit like Ren & stimpy, Beavis & Butthead… You know, it might be easier to list shows from the 90s and early 2000s that weren’t fucking weird.

It’s not for me, I’m too old for that shit, but if we had skibidi toilet about 20-25 years ago I’m pretty confident that my weird little ass would have loved the shit out of it.

Not that I really support cops confiscating orbeez guns as a general rule

But I work in 911 dispatch in a different area where orbeez guns aren’t illegal, and they’ve been kind of a problem this year.

I think some of our local delinquents have taken to freezing the balls or modifying their guns to shoot faster or something, because we have had a few injuries and broken windows and such linked to orbeez guns this year.

Even without that, they’re a pretty significant nuisance that have started a lot of fights because no one likes being pelted with orbeez.

And of course there’s the problem that exists with all toy guns where if you paint them black or are running around with them in the dark it can be hard to tell them apart from a real gun which is asking for trouble.

And the countless calls I’ve gotten from neighborhood karens who “don’t think it’s safe” or “that they shouldn’t be doing that here” is getting kind of old.

And not for nothing, orbeez can be really slow to break down in the environment and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re contributing to our microplastics problem.

If there is a way to twist the interpretation of a law to say that orbeez guns are illegal, I’m not at all surprised to hear about cops doing just that. Not that I generally support that, but if you caught me on a bad day after I took a bunch of calls about kids with them, I might be tempted to sign a petition to get them banned.

As someone who has regularly carried a variety of knives and multi tools almost every day of my life, I also can’t say I’m a fan of their knife laws.

That said, as-written, I don’t find them to be quite as bad as a lot of people make them out to be (how the police choose to interpret and enforce those laws is sort of a different matter)

It’s not the sort of knife I normally choose to carry, but all of the reasons I normally carry and use a knife for can be done perfectly safely and effectively with something like a regular Swiss army knife with a 2.5inch non-locking blade which should generally be ok to carry for no particular reason.

It should be noted that I do not carry a knife for any self-defense purposes. I feel very little need to defend myself, and even if I did a knife would be just about my last choice after pretty much any other object in arm’s reach. Even though where I am, I could pretty much walk around town carrying a halberd for self defense if I really wanted to and it would be legal, I actually do tend to choose my EDC knives to be pretty inoffensive-looking free of any unnecessary point/stabby bits and if possible.

And cases that really require more knife than that aren’t exactly part of my usual everyday carry scenario, and the appropriate knives for those occasions should be covered under the lawful justification and reasonable use exemptions (again, how the police actually apply those laws can leave something to be desired, but that’s often a problem here too)

Again, not a fan of their knife laws, but in the grand scheme, I’m not nearly as outraged by them as a lot of people are.

The fifty fifty one movement has been organizing protests usually about monthly and you can find them pretty easily on their site

Next widespread one I see planned is 9/1 for Labor Day.

You are correct, should have double-checked that the two PVAs referred to the same thing.

I think the rest of my comment still pretty much stands though, PVA glue isn’t quite water soluble but the cleanup for it isn’t much more involved and doesn’t involve any exotic solvents or anything

It’s around $40 for a spool, I’m not sure what that works out to per square meter of printed board, and I’m far too lazy to work that out.

It also seems to me like it could be a more efficient use of board space since it could be printed closer to the shape of the traces than you’d probably want to trim a board to by hand so you can save on material a bit that way. A bunch of cut corners and notches cut out of a few boards could add up over a few prints.

I’m just spitballing some thoughts, I don’t do nearly enough circuit designing to have a horse in this race, nor the desire to really work out the economics of it but especially for someone who already owns a 3d printer and maybe is already using PVA filament this seems like something that could fit well into their existing workflows.

It could just be the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I don’t think it’s really a recent thing, I think it’s just hitting a point where the masses are really starting to take notice of it.

I’m pretty sure I remember seeing memes about CCTV cameras and such in the UK about 20 years ago now, and I don’t think it’s an accident that things like 1984 and V for Vendetta were written by British authors and set there.

As an outsider, it’s certainly looked to me like the UK has been kind of a nanny state for a long time, and it’s not a long walk from there to the kind of bullshit we’re seeing more of now.

It’s arguably easier, but I think it depends on your use case.

Etching usually requires a couple chemicals that not everyone has the space to store properly, like if they live in a small apartment and have kids, and even if you go with safer alternatives like vinegar over ferric chloride, after use the etching solution should still be considered poisonous and needs to be handled and disposed of with some care.

Also worth considering is that this method is solder-free, so in addition to not needing to solder anything, it’s easier to recover components, no desoldering needed, just warm it up a bit and pull out the components for reuse.

Just thinking back to different points in my life, I used to live in a small apartment with my wife and a roommate. I wouldn’t have wanted to keep acetone around there, anytime I used it it would have stunk up the whole place. And I didn’t really want to do any soldering there, our ventilation wasn’t great and our smoke detectors were on a hair trigger, and I lived in fear of losing my security deposit from dropping a stray blob of solder burning a hole in the carpet or something. PVA printing is pretty innocuous as far as fumes go, and I wouldn’t have needed much equipment beyond an electric kettle (other than a printer) to play around with this there.

Really though, I see this being most useful for a situation where you want to prototype a few iterations that you’ll want to field test. I wouldn’t want to etch a dozen prototype boards that can’t really be reused and have to desolder to recover all the components, but I could see printing out a dozen prototypes this way and refusing the liquid metal and such.

I’d probably still want my final board to be etched, but this gives you a good way to workshop a bunch of revisions without throwing out a bunch of etched boards.

Also I don’t know how the cost of PVA filament stacks up against copper clad boards, but just kind of guestimating from my limited knowledge of 3d printing, it seems like the cost of boards vs filament is probably about the same or maybe even better. Sure, there’s the startup costs of getting the metal and a printer, but I feel like a lot of the people who would want to do this probably already have a printer or were looking for an excuse to get one anyway, and the metal is reusable.

I skimmed through the paper, and I agree that it looks pretty damn digestible for the average tinkerer to understand and implement themselves if they so choose

But just kind of a quick summary for people who still won’t read the article

You basically 3d print a circuit board out of PVA (which is basically the same material as regular white elmers school glue, so EDIT: that’s not quite right, see below non toxic and water soluble) with hollow channels instead of circuit traces.

Then you fill those hollow tubes with the gallium/indium mix, which has a very low melting point, like “glass of warm water” low.

Insert any components you need and secure them into place with a drop of glue, and BOOM you’ve got a circuit board.

And when you’re done, just dump it in a glass of water. The PVA dissolves and you can fish out the metal to reuse in a different project.

Like you said, the only “specialized” equipment you need is a 3d printer that can handle PVA filament.

Not necessarily something that’s going to be useful for any industrial production applications, but this could be huge for hobbyists and even prototyping for businesses. Most traditional methods for making a PCB call for some kind of nasty chemicals and they’re not really reusable, especially not for the home-gamer, this could make for a nice step-up for the people who don’t want to deal with this and want something a little more polished than a breadboard or a mess of soldered wires

And I’m glad that your heart is in the right place, but your brain absolutely is not. You’re playing at some naive, idealistic version of politics that’s going to prevent us from making the changes we need to to turn the tides against Israel.

Sometimes, unfortunately, you have to hold your nose and vote for a candidate who kind of stinks to make sure we’re not getting something even worse.

What are the other issues you care about?

Because personally I see Israel as a side effect of the other issues I care about.

I don’t think we’re going to make much headway trying to just tackle the Israel problem on its own.

However if we can put a dent in the military industrial complex and reduce global dependence on petroleum, having an “ally” like israel in the middle east starts looking a lot less attractive. Israel can only do so much without the US backing them up unconditionally, and once the government and arms manufacturers stop caring so much about them it becomes easier to turn the tides of public opinion and get the government to reverse course.

As long as there’s money to be made in the middle east, we’re not going to get the people in power to reverse course on Israel. We need to change the world around them so that it no longer makes sense to support them.

Same as it’s been since I got my first smartphone circa 2010

Ringtone is the Trololo song, and my text sound is a murloc from WoW

I haven’t played WoW in about that long, but I think it makes for a damn good notification sound, always gets my attention when I have my ringer on (which isn’t super often, but I often don’t feel my phone vibrating so it’s on at least occasionally)

They also make for a good chuckle from nerds in my age bracket when they hear it.

A little thought on drawing district borders that I’ve had kicking around for a while.

Putting aside all thoughts of gerymandering, let’s start with: What is the point of dividing a state up into congressional districts?

And the answer, of course, is supposed to be to make sure that there is someone in Congress who is looking out for the interests of people in your community.

But what is your “community?”

Sure, it’s the town, or the part of town you live in. But giving each individual town or neighborhood a representative isn’t remotely feasible,

And odds are you probably don’t spend all of your time within that tight little bubble around your home. You probably work, go shopping, and/or spend at least some of your leisure time in places outside of that bubble.

I know in addition to the town I live in, I work in another town about 10 miles away, I shop at stores in about 3 other towns at least once a week, I regularly visit my parents and sister who live in a town about 20 miles away, I go hiking, biking, and kayaking in a few different parks around the area, I have a membership to an independent movie theater in another town I regularly go to, I go to bars and restaurants in a few different towns, and to get to all these places, there’s probably a half dozen or so towns I drive through but rarely have any reason to stop in.

All-told, it’s maybe about 20 towns where I spend probably 90+ percent of my time, those are the areas that are important to me, and ideally if the world revolved around me, that would be one congressional district to make sure that my interests were being represented.

In my case, that’s a pretty neat, compact little district, it more-or-less encompasses the towns along 3 major roads that run roughly parallel to each other, and it also happens to be roughly ⅓ of the county I live in.

And for a lot of people who live here, their home range is probably pretty similar. Like I said, it’s along some major roads, and basically everything you could need or want can be found within those 20 or so towns.

That’s not really enough people to make a congressional district out of (since the number of seats is capped at 435 currently, although when the nation was founded each district only represented about 30,000 people, and if we’d stuck with that ratio it would probably be enough to make about 3 or 4 districts)

I don’t hate how my current district. It probably makes a lot of sense on paper, it’s basically my county with about a third of a neighboring county tacked on.

That other county is somewhat rural and divided up into thirds. One third is with our county, one third is with another neighboring county, and those are probably the most urban/suburban parts of that county, and it kind of makes sense that they’d be lumped in with our largely suburban counties, the last third is the most rural, and it’s lumped in with a few other very rural counties, so that makes sense.

However, I rarely go to that county, if the maps were being drawn specifically for me, it would probably include parts of 2 or 3 other counties before that one. I’d probably even be willing to cede parts of my county to another district in exchange for those parts.

And I think a lot of people here would agree with that. Those other areas I’d include are along major roads and easily reachable from our area, so a lot of people probably shop, work, etc. along those major arteries.

So my ideal district would kind of end up looking like a weird blob with some squiggly branches and nodes along major roads.

And I suspect it would be similar for a lot of people around the country.

So I kind of feel like the ideal way to draw these maps is to just ask people what they feel like their district should be.

Maybe present them with a map of their general area on a computer screen, and have them select towns they visit and drive through regularly until they’ve selected a big enough population to be a district

Then take all of those maps and sort of average them together and see what most people consider to be their community

Do it maybe every 5 or 10 years when people go to vote.

Anecdotally, the highest altitude I’ve ever been at hiking was around 11,000ft, and the group I was hiking with started feeling it a little bit around 9000-10,000 ft.

It wasn’t dramatic, where we really noticed it was after we’d made camp, we had a little downtime and there was a bit of an open area, so we started throwing around a Frisbee, and running around chasing the Frisbee we could feel we were getting winded a bit quicker than we usually would.

Age, fitness, genetics, etc. will of course factor into that, but I suspect that most reasonably healthy people sitting in an airplane probably wouldn’t feel much at 7000ft. Maybe they would if they were jogging up and down the aisle of the plane, but even then it probably wouldn’t be anything too obvious, and if they didn’t know anything about altitude sickness they’d probably chalk it up to being tired from the mental stress of air travel- getting to the airport, making the connection, security, lost baggage, etc.

Yes, but they wouldn’t have access to it in the first place if humans hadn’t existed, since corn is a new world plant, and the aurochs that domestic cattle descended from were from Eurasia.

And corn as we know it today is very much the product of thousands of years of agriculture. The wild teosinte plants that corn descends from didn’t have the big ears of sweet starchy kernels we know as corn today, it looked a lot more like grass that hasn’t been mowed in a long time that’s starting to go to seed, except scaled up a bit. If you look up pictures of “Zea diploperennis” or "Zea perennis that’s more like what natural corn looked like before humans started fucking with it.

And even if wild cows had access to wild corn, which they didn’t, they probably would have been chowing down on the whole plant, so mostly fiber with a bit of starch and sugar from comparatively few and small seeds, instead of just all corn kernels.

Naturally, cows wouldn’t have access to a limitless supply of corn that has been selectively cultivated over the years to have higher sugar and starch content. They don’t tend to have this issue when they’re eating primarily grass and can easily release it on their own by burping.

There would surely be some odd cases here and there of cows getting bloated on a less grain-heavy diet, but not nearly as common