i play exclusively on the steam deck and am happy with the performance

i have totally run into stuff that silently truncates the password i give it. It’s always something like online banking that you would hope has robust enough security standards to hash that shit, too… The one in particular i’m thinking of silently truncated the password in the reset-password form, but not for the log-in form. Took me forever to figure out wtf was going on there.

i do this all the time. when i get close to finishing the game, i HAVE to go do all the side quests i neglected to finish along the way. Then i get burned out and beforei do the final boss… But my SO has similar video game tastes as me, so i end up just watching him do the final boss on his save hahaha

For real. I’m over here having a mid-life crisis since I was 27.

i’m a big fan of “hectomillionaires” (the term, not the system that allows hectomillionaires to exist to the detriment of us all, of course)

unlike that window…

or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new “jumbo size” that’s as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the “standard” size.

While i do think life exists elsewhere in the universe, I think the chances of extraterrestrial biological entities coming to our planet is exceedingly unlikely. Space is just too big, and there isn’t any hard evidence that faster-than-light travel is even possible.

Although, the universe isn’t just big – it’s old. There could be some ancient civilization from an ancient planet that became uninhabitable long ago. If they were technologically advanced enough to escape their solar system before things went tits-up AND were able to live multiple generations fully in space AND they just so happened to set out in our direction, I guess it’s possible that they found us. Even then, i would expect any UFOs or whatever would merely be probes, not the actual biological entities themselves.

I remember the vacuum having a seizure and swallowing his cord… Also, the entire junkyard scene can fuck right off

He wasn’t even done giving the deposition that he literally volunteered to give…

I agree that it’s nonsense, and thanks for pointing out that I can look up European nutrition facts – i’m gonna start doing that. I wish we’d do the per 100g thing, but we don’t which makes it easier for companies to game the system. My point was that nutrition facts don’t always tell the whole story, especially if your country’s regulatory bodies have been lobbied into submission by the companies they are supposed to be regulating, so finding out if your tea has added sugars may not be as simple as looking on the box.

Tic Tacs say 0g sugar in the nutrition facts, even though they’re mostly sugar. They can do this because they aren’t required to report quantities of sugar below 0.5g, but the serving size is 1 tic tac or, conveniently, 0.49g.

I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!

That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills… Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn’t there like it is in landfills since there’s so much poop to eat, haha.

Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we’re at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

I’m actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I’m a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug – so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it’s much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.

I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).

I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.

best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.

also, pepper spray, don’t forget that. i’d wager the artificial saliva they used in the safety studies didn’t have the same viscosity as pepper-spray-mucus-and-tears.

And signed into law by then-governor Reagan, no less!

Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks (“banded iron formation”).

Great Oxidation Event