I’m pretty ok at knapping flint and I’m not a terrible hunter. I’m also usually in poor health.

So I’d probably die as a baby.

But not simultaneously.

You’ve got to route it through the deflector dish.

Someone watched too much GI Joe. Cobra had their branding everywhere.

Folks in observation and analytics are gonna be real mad when they realize you’re giving away their secrets.

Also USA. My teachers ran the gamut from not letting anyone to treating us like adults. My school was VERY white with only a handful of black kids across all of high school. One of the teachers was well known for never letting the black kids go until one of them went and peed in his trash can to prove a point.

The ones who treated us like adults got treated with the most respect. Weird how that works.

Weird how all these companies are universally hated but insist people don’t switch because they’re awesome.

Didn’t Comcast change their consumer name to Xfinity because they were so universally hated? CenturyLink comes in at the top of a lot of the “most hated” lists as well. They own what used to be Level 3 who, shockingly, were also pretty much hated by everyone who had to use them.

The prevailing wisdom for dealing with trolls in the past has been report, block, and move on. You never know if someone is going to thrive on that kind of conflict and a whole lot of motherfuckers love it.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong because honestly I don’t know. I’m just sad they’re running off people contributing to their community and mad that they’re sexually harassing people.

White Amanitas are lethal, never touch those, but with Muscaria you could have some fun.

These are my favorites because of their common name. Destroying Angel.

Fun fact: the survival rate without treatment is about half, but that goes up to ~90% if you get treated quickly. However, it can still destroy your liver. The toxin is thermostable so cooking doesn’t break it down. It is excreted in urine so a lot of the treatment consists of pumping you full of fluids and making you pee a lot. There is no actual antidote to the toxin.

After the first three he doesn’t write them as pastiches of other authors and I think they get better.

If you enjoyed this fun fact, start reading The Laundry Files by Charles Stross. Once you get to book 4 come back here and thank me. Tongue eating isopods from beyond the stars play a role there, and appear briefly later in one of his New Management books, although I don’t have the page handy so I’m not sure which one.

Their nastier cousins make an appearance later in the Laundry Files, but I’ll leave what they do a mystery.

If you like making fun of quiverfull ministries, programming, Eldritch horrors, British humor (humour?), spy thrillers, agitated engineers, vampires that don’t exist, bloodthirsty elves, and a thinly veiled story about anthropomorphic climate change then this is the series for you.

I’m very very slightly younger than him and aged the same way. My beard grew in better as I got older and I got a better haircut, but other than a few grey hairs in the beard, a couple of extra pounds, and a slightly changed hairline I’m really similar to the kid in the picture from my boot camp graduation. I expect that to change pretty hard in the next couple of years when all my drinking and hedonism finally catches up to me.

I won’t say why but I feel personally attacked by this duck. Well done!

I had an iodine deficiency! I wasn’t eating dairy or eggs, I was cooking my own food from scratch, and I was using sea salt instead of iodized salt. In addition, I like drinking alcohol which makes it harder to absorb iodine. Felt like shit. Couldn’t muster the energy to give the slightest shit about anything.

Got blood work done and found out. So I started taking a supplement every other day for it specifically because I’m just not getting it in my diet. I’m feeling pretty great now.

I don’t think supplements are generally the answer, but having a work up done and learning some shit about yourself can be pretty eye opening and point you at what you need to do to fix your diet. It’s a good first step, but not a magic bullet.

Fluoride in water can help if you’re not taught proper care and feeding of teeth, but you are right. The fluoride in toothpaste is what should be doing the heavy lifting.

I feel you. I grew up on well water (no fluoride), have a genetic predisposition for terribly crooked teeth, and wasn’t taught basic oral hygiene until I was legally an adult.

I’ve had several extractions but every time it has been either an abscess or an impacted tooth, so just the relief from that pain was almost like a drug itself. About half my teeth are fake at this point and the ones that are left are in pretty good shape because they weren’t too far gone when I actually learned how to properly take care of them.

Astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.

A few times. Usually, like many others, I let the rep know that it’s not their fault but I’m angry and try to escalate to someone who has the authority to assist. Three times I went over the line. I’m going to leave out a lot of details on the ISP ones because one would be far too long and the other could potentially out some of the parties involved. It helped in every case, and I genuinely feel bad about one because I could have gotten someone fired.

Once an HP rep stonewalled me for hours and I baited him into saying something fucked up on a recorded line. I hung up, called back, repeated what the rep said, informed them that it was recorded, and asked for a supervisor. I got one immediately and got my problem solved. I’m not proud of the way I handled it but I was young and not thinking about how my actions might affect others.

Another time was a national ISP. Every single time I called all the supervisors were in a meeting (yeah, right). My service worked almost 2 out of every 3 days and I wasn’t getting nearly the speeds I was paying for. I got on with a rep who told me about yet another supervisor meeting. So I said I’ll hold. I told him that I had vacation time and no Internet so I had nothing else to do but fuck up his call time statistics and tell dirty jokes. In those days at that call center they weren’t allowed to hang up unless you were straight up abusive. He blinked before I did because he was supposed to have already gotten off work and I was in the middle of telling bad limericks. So I got a supervisor and they actually got me fixed up the next day.

The last time was a different (local this time) ISP. I had requested specific times for repair because I was working nights and had been without Internet for weeks. I was told that was no problem. But they repeatedly showed up in the middle of the day (supposedly, I never heard from them so they weren’t ringing the doorbell but every time I called they claimed to have come out and no one was home) and telling me it’s my fault for being asleep and never letting me talk to anyone except for the receptionist. So I called one morning insisting I needed to talk to someone else because it had been weeks and she wouldn’t put me through so I let out a string of curse words and the supervisor interrupted me telling me not to talk to their employees like that. I told her about all the trouble I’ve had and that since she was there and had the receptionist lie to me about her being busy that I didn’t give the slightest shit what she thought. I told her that I was coming off nights and unless she wanted me up there every day I had off explaining to anyone in a suit walking in exactly how I was treated and that she was having her employees lie for her she’d have someone out that evening who would ring the doorbell and fix my shit.

It turned out that the issue was with their connection at the box on the outside of my apartment building so they should have been able to fix it without my input at all. No one bothered to fucking check. I seriously don’t think anyone came out but I can’t prove that.

That’s why my vans are falling apart. I’m going to give them a shot, thanks!