I helped a former girlfriend move out of her apartment years ago. I brought along a tub of spackling paste to fill the nail holes she’d left in the wall (it was even the kind that goes on pink and then dries white, which is pretty handy). She was mind=blown as she’d never seen anything like it before. I asked her how she filled nail holes and she said she used chewing gum and white-out.

Fractals all the way down

Somewhat counterintuitively: orange romanesco.

I don’t really like broccoli unless roasted.

Yeah, same here. I pretty much hate any vegetable that’s been steamed into mush – aka how my parents always cooked them. Roasting is the shit for almost anything, otherwise I’d rather just eat my vegetables raw. I’ve recently been making a raw broccoli salad with scallions, bacon bits and cole slaw dressing and it’s fantastic.

It’s tasty, too – and I fucking hate regular broccoli and cauliflower.

There’s an orange variant of this which tastes the same but is even cooler-looking.

“It is aardvark makin’ you look this bad.”

It’s nice to see academia adapting (somewhat) to the work environment, even if it took a few decades.

For me, developing applications was a joy … but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.

Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it’s never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.

I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses’ heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.

folks had to keep eating like the Luftwaffe was still blitzing London

To be more precise, they had to keep eating like the Kriegsmarine’s U-bootwaffe was still sinking the ships with the food.

And open all the windows sometimes!

^ This … it lets all the pot smoke out, too.

I’m a school bus driver and I obey speed limits religiously (and somehow I’m almost alone in this among my coworkers despite the fact that our buses all have GPS monitors installed and our boss can see exactly how fast we’re going at all times). Almost every day I have people behind me blasting their horns at me for this. Like, just imagine getting road rage at a fucking school bus driver.

My favorite thing is when they tailgate me, apparently oblivious to the fact that I can’t see them at all when they do this, not even in my mirrors.

i was about to say exactly that

*I

I was tricked into all my cats by girlfriends. The cats lasted way longer than the girlfriends. Better mousers, too.

There’s a family a couple of blocks from me that could be called this although I don’t think it’s intentional on their part. They operate more or less a free range cat colony and the cats keep getting run over because it’s a busy neighborhood with narrow streets and cars parked all along them. I drive very slowly here (there are also lots of kids around) but most people don’t.

Do you live in Media, PA by any chance? This sounds like the exact description of a woman that runs through my neighborhood and has to be in her 70s at least. It’s not even running, it’s more of this asymmetrical skip-hopping motion. I’ve never seen anyone or anything look less healthy.

I have yet to meet “gorilla-looking dude who yells at his step-son and his lawnmower in public” who lives across the street, or even made eye contact with him. And no, this is not some variant of racism on my part – gorilla-looking dude is white but looks much more like a gorilla than any black dude I’ve ever seen.

I own a house built in 1942 and it’s insane how good-quality the 2x4s are – perfectly straight and true and no knots on them anywhere. They’re so good that I’ve reused them for railings on my stairs. And this house was built as very cheap temporary worker housing during the war! I find it hilarious how much better the construction quality is on my house than on these million-dollar cardboard mcmansions they’re building these days.

I don’t think this is true. There was a transitional period around the 1940s where 2x4s were 1.75" x 3.75", and that wasn’t because wood shrunk half as much as it does today.