I just recently built a computer, though truth be told it’s basically my wife’s old computer stuffed into a new case, we’ve been holding onto her old components as she’s done upgrades. So it’s basically a roughly 10 year old computer, it has one of the last AMD processors from before the ryzen era, but it was a beefy computer when she built it and it’s still managing to run most of what’s out there on acceptable (for me, I’m not exactly a graphics snob) settings.

Of course it’s not gonna be compatible with windows 11, so I’ve been figuring out what my next move is going to be. Most likely I’ll bite the bullet and build basically a whole new PC and recycle this one into a home server or something, it’s definitely still got a lot of life left in it, but I’d be lying if the idea of just going over to Linux isn’t really tempting

Also on iodine, there was a product out there called “Polar Pure” that I fucking love

Unfortunately, it was basically just a bottle of pure iodine crystals, so they got caught up in some new anti-drug regulations and got shut down because iodine can be used to make meth.

But it was a great product, and if you look around you can still find new old stock. It has an indefinite shelf life (iodine crystals don’t go bad) and one bottle was enough to treat something like 2,000L of water.

You filled the bottle up with water, some of the iodine would dissolve into it, and you’d use a capful or so of that concentrated iodine solution to disinfect your drinking water. It had a special bottle design to keep the iodine crystals trapped inside when you poured the liquid out.

Pure iodine crystals aren’t exactly an easy thing to get your hands on, but if anyone is able to that’s probably a good way to go.

Pretty much exactly what it sounds like, water that comes in blue cans. The manufacturer claims it has a 50 year shelf life or something.

It costs several times what regular bottled water does, and it’s literally just water, not flavored or sparkling or enhanced with any vitamins or electrolytes or anything, just water in a can. It’s kind of a stupid thing to buy, and arguably you’d be better off just filling up some sturdy jugs from your tap and treating it with a couple drops of bleach and dumping it down the drain every so often, but I can also see the convenience of a buy-one-cry-once set-it-and-forget it prep like that.

I go to a nudist resort fairly frequently. Most of it is clothing optional except for the pools, so you see people walking around in various states of undress depending on the weather and what they’re doing (watched a guy weedwacking naked last time I was there, seemed ill-advised IMO)

You pretty quickly stop seeing nudity as being sexy there . It certainly doesn’t help that the average nudist is middle aged or older and often not in the best shape.

This resort also attracts a decent amount of swingers. While the nudists aren’t particularly trying to impress anyone, that’s pretty much the whole reason the swingers are there. So how do you make yourself look sexier than just walking around naked? You wear something. Bathing suits, pasties, big flashy jewelry, crazy hats, see-through dresses, ropes, etc.

And though many of them aren’t much more attractive than the nudists, they turn some heads.

Best is one of two

First was a couple who are more like friends-of-friends. I like them, they’re cool people, but I’ve never really hung out with them except when we’re part of a group of mutual friends, so I was actually a little surprised to get an invite to their wedding.

But anyway, I booked a hotel room with a couple of those mutual friends. Did a little light pre gaming, and hopped on the shuttle bus to the venue. The ceremony was nice and short and it was a nice venue.

Then we head into the area to have dinner, and find our assigned seats, and we’re a little shocked when the bride and groom joined us at the table instead of being off at their own private table somewhere. They said they wanted to sit with their friends, so they did, they were of course off talking to various friends and relatives a lot, but they definitely carved out a nice chunk of the night to eat and sit down and eat and enjoy their wedding. I’ve heard a lot of stories from people getting married where they say they never even had time during their reception to actually eat, that’s always sounded terrible to me and I think they felt the same way. Food was amazing as well, I had just about the biggest slab of prime rib I’ve ever seen and it was cooked to absolute perfection. They even came around offering seconds if anyone wanted them.

A big part of how I knew them was because we were all part of a large group that regularly went to a music festival together, and as you do at a festival, we all tended to get belligerently drunk. Apparently part of the reason I got an invite was because of that, in their words they paid for an open bar and wanted to make sure they got their money’s worth, and they knew the whole music festival crew would be up to the task.

We were all on our best behavior, but we were all definitely pretty hammered when we boarded the bus back to the hotel to continue our party at the hotel bar.

We slept in way too late to grab breakfast at the hotel, so most of us made our way to a nearby diner to grab breakfast.

All in all just a really fun day with good friends, good food, plenty of booze, and a nice casual wedding.

The second contender for best wedding is actually one I officiated. Years ago I got ordained online from the universal life church, and never really did anything with that. I’m not religious, it’s just a fun little thing to be able to say that I’m a minister.

My buddy apparently remembered that. We were in scouts together, he was a couple years younger than me and sort of looked up to me as a mentor and we’ve stayed good friends. So time comes for him to get married and he immediately says he wants me to do the ceremony, and I of course agreed.

This dude has a way of finding really cool stuff, and somewhere in his adventures he finds a cave. It’s open for tourism by appointment and the entrance is through the owners’ basement. He gets to talking to the owner, and apparently it had always been her grandmother’s (who originally owned the house/cave) to have a wedding there, but no one had ever approached them about that. Since he was looking for a wedding venue he jumped at the opportunity. They also charged a ridiculously low price for it (I think they initially said like $50, he gave them like $500 and even that is fucking peanuts to pay for a wedding venue)

The wedding ceremony itself was pretty small, there’s only so many people you can cram into a cave at once, but more people were invited for the reception. I came up with what everyone seems to think was a really good script for the ceremony, even if it was a little hard to read in the dim light of a cave.

The reception was at a brewery, and the food was mostly a buffet of fancy pizzas, all really good, excellent party food. Again, everything was really chill and low-key.

The worst was my brother in laws wedding. He’s a good dude, but if I hadn’t married his sister I don’t think we’d have anything in common with each other.

His (now) wife’s family is fairly well-off and have a really nice vacation house on a lake in upstate New York where they go a lot. So they had the wedding up there.

Even before the wedding, it rubbed me kind of the wrong way that neither my wife nor I were ever asked to be in the wedding party. Not that I had any particular burning desire to be in it, but that just kind of seems like a normal courtesy thing. Until that point I know that I had figured he’d be one of my groomsmen when my wife and I actually have a wedding (COVID threw a monkey wrench into our plans and we ended up doing the courthouse thing, so I think we’re planning to do a big 10 year anniversary in a couple years)

The place is about a 6 hour drive from where most of their friends and family live, and for the rest of them it’s even longer. It’s not convenient to any sort of a major city where you could easily take a flight or a train or something to save yourself some of the driving, and let’s be honest, no one really wants to take time off for a wedding so most people were driving up 6 hours on a Friday, doing wedding shit Saturday, then driving 6 hours home on Sunday. They didn’t seem to understand why some of their further-flung relatives RSVP’d that they weren’t coming.

The hotel they reserved a block of rooms at is what some people might call “charming” or “rustic,” but personally I’m more inclined to call it “a crappy old house where everything creeks, none of the doors seem to close quite right, and the bathroom fixtures haven’t been updated in about 50 years.”

It was also August, and it was an outdoor wedding. Fuck that shit, it’s too damn hot to be outside for a wedding.

And I’m pretty sure the reason we weren’t in the wedding party was because they needed someone to babysit his/my wife’s grandmother. She’s got a pretty bad case of dementia, and was just really lost and confused the whole time she was there. She lives with his/my wife’s mom, but if course she was going to be busy with wedding stuff all day.

My wife drove us up, so I didn’t have my own car there. The entirety of the town we were in was about 3 block long, and mostly touristy shops selling stupid knickknacks I had no interest in. We were in a nice wooded area, and I’m an outdoorsy dude, and I pretty much spent all day looking at the mountains surrounding us thinking how much I’d rather be hiking than wandering around this crappy town.

I also normally work night shift and had turned my schedule upside down for this. I think my wife assumed I was going to sleep in, so when I woke up at a pretty reasonable hour (9-ish) figuring we’d at least be able to grab breakfast together before we got stuck babysitting her grandmother, she was nowhere to be found. She’d gone off to get breakfast with her dad (who was really pretty much the only other person there I knew, and he’s a really cool dude, I was looking forward to spending some time with him, we don’t get to see him very often)

So that left me by myself with no way to really go anywhere, and no one around I wanted to hang out with. A pretty crappy start to my day which put me in kind of a bad mood.

No really good food options in that town either- a crappy pizza place, a bar that’s just like every other mediocre bar in a touristy town, and a little breakfast and sandwich shop that was trying really hard to be cool but had nothing particularly exciting on the menu. Your best option was to drive about 15 minutes to the next town and eat somewhere there.

And of course we still got roped into all of the wedding picture bullshit.

The wedding and reception were nice enough, aside from it being too damn hot, food was ok but forgettable (my brother in law and his wife have just about the most bland palates imaginable, no surprises there) if it had been somewhere closer where I could have just attended the wedding and went home that night I probably would have left with an overall fine impression of the wedding except for feeling a little snubbed about the wedding party.

But it was absolutely not worth 12 hours in the car, the cost of a hotel room, and spending most of the day either by myself or babysitting a senile old lady who had no idea what was going on.

But at least now I don’t have to feel obligated to have him in my wedding party and I can free up that spot for someone I actually like.

It was both best and worst since I’ve only lived in one apartment in my life

It was actually a pretty nice apartment, I might still happily be there if they hadn’t kept jacking up the rent every year.

But I had some complaints

The kitchen was ridiculously tiny, and one of the cabinets couldn’t open all the way because it hit an overhead light fixture. We actually pointed that out when we first viewed the apartment (it had recently had some light renovations and that was obviously an oversight) and to their credit they installed a smaller fixture before we moved it. It still got in the way and the cabinet didn’t open 100% but it opened wide enough to get anything you needed in and out.

The bathroom vent fans definitely shared ductwork with other units, and someone along that vent liked to sing in the shower. We also occasionally heard her yelling at her kids. We didn’t mind that so much, it’s kind of part of living in an apartment that sometimes you’re going to hear what your neighbors are doing, it was usually more funny than anything, but it was a little weird the first time we heard someone singing from our bathroom.

The people above us liked to vacuum at like 10am on a Sunday. Not too unreasonable I suppose, but I worked night shift and it could be a little annoying from time to time when I was trying to sleep

They also had some kind of water leak one time that fucked up our ceilings a bit, and it also leaked right into our circuit breaker causing some electrical issues. No serious damage done though, and again they were quick to repair it.

When we moved out, our roommate discovered that the window in his room was leaky, which had caused some mold and water damage in his room. He never noticed it until then because of how he had some furniture placed along that wall.

There really wasn’t any decent spot to have any sort of a proper dining table, at least not if you also wanted to have a couch and a TV, so we pretty much ate off the coffee table or folding tray tables the whole time we lived there. (The apartment was actually fairly spacious overall, it was just sort of laid out weirdly)

It was a fertility clinic

I’m “lucky” (Also I’m overall very pro-nuclear, don’t let those sarcasm quotes give anyone the wrong impression) that I live in the evacuation zone for a nuclear plant, so my county distributes potassium iodide for residents in this area (for anyone paying enough attention to put their name on the list to have it sent to you or to stop by the office to pick it up) so that’s one thing I don’t really have to put any money or effort into stockpiling.

I’m not particularly concerned about the plant, and I’m not in an area that’s likely to get nuked if WWIII really gets going, though I may need to worry about fallout depending on the wind.

Definitely good advice and we are cycling things.

Our plan is focusing on dry goods that probably would last a couple years (maybe with some loss of nutrients/quality) just sitting in your pantry as long as it’s reasonably clean, dry, and no bug or rodent issues. I can’t say that I’ve ever had things like flour, rice, or beans go bad on me, and I’ve definitely pulled some out of my pantry that have been sitting there for a couple years.

And we’re further hedging our bets vacuum sealing them in mason jars with moisture and oxygen absorber packets.

For anyone doing the same, a paper cupcake/muffin wrapper in the top of the jar allegedly helps keep your vacuum sealer from sucking up any dust from your food. It didn’t seem like that was a major issue when we were doing it without, but I figure it can’t hurt either.

The thing we struggle with is cycling emergency water supplies. We don’t tend to use any sort of bottled water, water quality from our tap is actually pretty good (if a bit hard) and we put it through a filter anyway, so we never really think about cycling out whatever jugs or bottles we try to stockpile. I may have to bite the bullet and order a couple cases of that stupid blue can water or something.

I have a slight tendency towards paranoia and over-preparedness, it’s something I know about myself and keep in check, I don’t want to be the weirdo living in a bunker full of spam and guns. I keep it to a reasonable level of preparedness, a little extra food, a battery backup for my sump pump, some tools, blankets, water, etc. in the trunk of my car, etc. I’m seldom caught unprepared for anything that might come up, but I’m not actively stockpiling for the end of the world.

My wife tends to fly by the seat of her pants a bit more. I remember when I ran out to buy the backup battery for the sump pump before a big storm she asked if I really thought we’d need it. We ended up losing power for 16 hours, and while that battery didn’t last the whole time, it at least bought us a few extra hours of not having to bail out the sump pump with buckets to keep our basement from flooding.

So I definitely took notice when a couple months ago she started wanting to buy some rice and beans and such in bulk to vacuum seal so we’d have a bit of a stockpile on-hand if things started getting rough. If she’s starting to get worried like that, it usually means things are already pretty damn bad.

So I’ve been kicking my usual casual emergency preps up a notch, still holding myself back from becoming a full-on bunker weirdo, but fuck if that’s not starting to look kind of attractive.

I remember seeing a comment somewhere wishing they would reboot Xena, but lamenting that they would probably make it “too woke” if they did

I don’t think there’s much they could do to make Xena more “woke” if they tried.

Most of the time their argument is that they want me to have something physical to open/unwrap, so bank transfers aren’t going to be any more attractive to them.

Read, watch TV/movies/YouTube, play video games, take the dog for a walk, work on one of my many hobbies that I’ve been neglecting, see if any of my friends wants to do something, take a nap, listen to music,

And if I get really bored, there’s probably something I’m supposed to be cleaning or some other chore that needs attention

ICE said that after Noviello was found unresponsive, medical staff “immediately” performed CPR and used an electronic defibrillator to try and revive him, before calling 911.

This could be something lost in translation, which does happen a lot with news articles

But that specific phrasing, that they performed CPR and used a defibrillator before calling 911 rubs me the wrong way

Basically the moment you determine CPR or a defibrillator might possibly be needed, someone should be calling 911 unless you are already in a hospital.

Bringing someone back with CPR is basically a statistical anomaly, most of the time all it does is buy you a bit of extra time to get them to a hospital.

And defibrillators, especially automatic ones, are only effective for certain abnormal heart rhythms (AEDs only do ventricular fibrilation, manual defibrillators can handle a couple more things, but contrary to what movies may have you think, you’re not going to “restart” anyone’s heart who’s flatlining with a defibrillator, it’s more like turning the heart off and hoping it restarts itself and stops doing what it was doing before, more of a reboot than a jumpstart)

I don’t know what kind of medical staff and equipment they have on-hand at an ICE detention center, but I somehow doubt they have a well-enough-equipped medical center that they’re prepared to handle a cardiac arrest 100% in-house with no need to send them out to a hospital.

“home” by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic zeroes

it’s gotta be just about the most banal, saccharine, faux-folksy bullshit I’ve ever heard.

And it certainly doesn’t help that when it came out I was living at home still and my sister played it to death.

The very short version is

After the Iranian Hostage Crisis, the US placed an arms embargo on Iran so they legally couldn’t sell arms to Iran

Reagan wanted to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, however Congress had prevented him from directly funding them so they had to find some way of doing that off the books.

So since Iran wanted to buy weapons, they sold them some weapons so they could turn around and use that money to fund the Contras and circumvent Congress.

They also tried to justify it because they were hoping Iran would influence Hezbollah to release hostages they had taken in Lebanon (which kind of worked, the hostages were released, but Hezbollah pretty much immediately took more hostages, so not really)

This glosses over a lot of details of course.

I’m a fat, on-and-off smoker. Once in a while I get it in my head I’m gonna exercise and I start running or something. It usually doesn’t last very long, running sucks.

But the one time it almost stuck was when I decided to do it as sort of a new years resolution when we were getting hit by some crazy polar vortex weather with temperatures hovering just barely above 0°F (about -17°C)

It was great, no matter how hard I tried to run I couldn’t work up a sweat.

That cold, dry air is kind of rough on your lungs though, so I tied a bandana around my face so I could breathe some warmer, moister air.

The bandana got soaked with condensation from my breath, and since it was so cold it pretty much froze solid the second I took it off at the end of my run. Then the condensation in my beard and mustache froze into icicles.

So the best runs of my life were done breathing through 2 layers of wet fabric. Anyone who claims that they can’t breathe through a mask is either full of shit or probably needs to be on a ventilator.

I work in 911 dispatch

During COVID we had to ask all of our callers some extra questions if they were going to be in contact with any of our units

Something along the lines of “has anyone there had or been in contact with anyone who has had flu-like symptoms recently?”

And if they did we added a note to the call indicating that.

One night I got a call from one of our off-duty officers calling in an accident he witnessed.

I get all the usual information and start asking our COVID questions

And he gets really indignant about it “why are you asking me this?” “This is stupid.” Etc.

Like dude, you’re one of our officers. We’ve been advising you about potential COVID exposures on your own calls, where do you think we were getting that information? This shit is for your benefit, not ours, I can’t catch COVID from someone over the phone (the disease vectors sitting the consoles adjacent to me could be another story)

And that’s pretty typical of how cops act towards us, the people they rely on to give them information they need to do their jobs, send them backup when needed, etc. blows my mind that so many of my co-workers are absolute bootlickers.

On the bottom looks like a mix of lettuce and arugula, wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using a prepackaged spring mix or similar

On top is the furikake you already know, and green onions/scallions

So I did not read the article because of a paywall I’m too lazy to circumvent right now

But from OP’s summary, the main technology they’re talking about is concrete reinforced with steel or other fibers.

And that’s definitely more advanced than “pyramid age”

But it’s also pretty much a direct descendant of mud brick reinforced with straw which humanity has been using since well before the pyramids. Same basic concept, different materials.

So yes and no.