Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.

I think you underestimate how many Americans just want a cup of Joe with cream and sugar. A whole lot of us are out there drinking gas station/convenience store coffee or brewing a cup or pot every day of store brand pre-ground.

And the ongoing joke about people getting frustrated with just wanting a “large coffee” and being confused by starbucks calling it a “venti” and spouting off about how they don’t want any fru-fru mocha-chino late bullshit even though no one asked.

I think the bigger issue is that of how Americans get around and how available real estate is.

Japan has a lot more people who can/will walk, take the train, etc. that’s a lot more opportunities for them to walk by a vending machine.

Americans tend to get around in our cars, so if you want to sell them a coffee, snacks, hot meal, etc. they need to be able to park somewhere.

And vending machine food isn’t exactly a huge draw, people probably aren’t going to go to your parking lot with a row of vending machines just to grab something to eat, so you kind of need something else to draw them in, some bathrooms, gas pumps, or at least convenient parking to other stuff they need to get to, so you might as well stick a gas station there, and since you’re going to need a cashier you might as well move that vending inside and you can get more and more variety of merchandise on shelves that you can cram into some vending machines so it might as well just be a convenience store.

Sounds like you’re describing a maglite

Maglites are perfectly fine flashlights for most people, maybe a little heavy but sometimes that’s kind of the point (a lot of cops and security guards and such took to carrying them when their agencies started prohibiting nightsticks and batons, especially the bigger 4 or 6 cell models) for a long time they were basically the default flashlight, you had maglites, you had the big spotlight looking things that took a 6v battery, you had cheap plastic flashlights, and you had various small penlights and such (which were often mini maglites) and that was like 90% of what you’d ever encounter.

There’s a good chance if you go rooting around in your dad or grandfather’s car trunk, garage, basement, workshop, toolbox, etc. you’ll find a maglite or 3 kicking around somewhere. I know I keep one in my car for emergencies and I’ll probably inherit a half dozen more from my parents someday.

They still make them, pretty sure they switched over to LEDs (one of their selling points used to be they had a spare bulb stored in the tail cap) and I’m sure they’re still perfectly reliable and rugged, you can probably still find them at most of the places you’d think to go buy a flashlight, and a standard 2 D cell maglite still costs in the neighborhood of $20-$30.

But there are a bunch of flashlight nerds out there these days, who want really specific form factors, battery types, features, led color temperatures, etc. and they’d probably pooh-pooh the humble maglite.

I get it to an extent, I have flashlights I like better, but I’m not about to nerd out about them, and if you someone sent me out with instructions to buy them a flashlight with no other requirements listed, I’d probably buy a maglite and feel pretty confident that it’s going to be an acceptable flashlight.

Anvil firing

You get 2 anvils, stack them on top of each other, the bottom one upside down, pack some gunpowder between them, light it, run, and the top one shoots off into the air and eventually comes back down.

I’m sure it’s a blast (literally) but I’m not trying to looney tunes myself.

I think “cave diving” is generally understood to refer to the underwater variety.

If you’re referring to general cave exploration, that would generally be called “spelunking”

Historically hell has often been depicted as a rather cold place, away from the warmth of god’s love or what have you.

Anecdotally, 20 or so years ago, that’s what I remember being taught in CCD class when my parents were still making me go.

Dante’s Inferno (c. 1321) for example, depicts the 9th and deepest circle of hell as a large frozen lake. And many of the damned he encountered throughout the different circles are at least somewhat sympathetic, especially at the first level of where the inhabitants are by and large good people who just to not be Christians. (And to be clear, Dante often found himself at odds with the church, so his works don’t necessarily reflect official doctrine and were absolutely written to reflect his own agenda, that said a lot of our modern ideas about hell owe a lot to Dante’s depiction, and any actual mention of hell in the Bible is scarce to non-existent depending on how you interpret certain passages, so his version is just as valid as any other in my opinion)

Same goes for a lot of generic-sounding “A” business names- Acme, Apex, Ajax, A+, American-whatever, etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, it drives me nuts how many people lose consciousness for various reasons, and then when they come to they say they’re fine and don’t need to be checked out.

There’s maybe some very narrow exceptions for people with known conditions that they’re already managing with the help of a doctor and they know exactly what’s causing it.

But in general, if you’re losing consciousness that’s a bad sign and you need to see a doctor about that ASAP

I flip flop back and forth, I’m not totally sure if there’s a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.

My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.

Small addendum, there’s 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid

But there’s a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States

Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.

I’m a big believer in leave no trace in the outdoors. To the best of your ability, everything should be as you found it when you leave the woods.

Wild horses have been extinct in north America for many thousands of years, in my local area as far as fossil and archeological records can show any native horses that might have existed here were long gone before the first native Americans set foot here. They are not a part of the ecosystem.

I don’t care if it’s biodegradable, I wouldn’t leave apple cores and banana peels behind either.

The environment in my local parks isn’t so delicate that a few entitled rich assholes leaving behind horse shit probably isn’t going to make a significant impact, but there are other places where it absolutely could, throwing off the chemical composition of the soil, contaminating ground water, causing algal blooms, introducing non-native parasites, bacteria, and pathogens, etc. and you should be following best practices across the board. Treat every inch of the outdoors as if it were potentially vulnerable and don’t try to bend the rules just because you think you can get away with it.

And it’s just an eyesore and detracts from the natural beauty.

The horse people fire back about how they can’t carry a shovel with them, or how they may not be able to safely get on or off the horse. This is the shit horses were bred for- to carry people and stuff, I can find you an avalanche shovel and a small folding step stools that will break down plenty small and light enough to fit in a backpack or lash to the saddle with some rope to pull the stool up after you get on, and it’s all gonna weigh a lot less than the armor, and rifles, bedrooms, etc. that people used to ride horses with for a lot longer and harder than the couple house you’re spending plodding along the trail. If you can afford to go horseback riding you can afford the hundred bucks or so for a shovel and a step stool. If that’s not enough for you to get on and off your horse safely on the trail, maybe you should take that as a sign that you shouldn’t be riding a horse there, stick to a dude ranch where some big strong cowboy will help you get on and off of the horsey.

My mom would not be able to wear a hat during the summer obviously heat would stay in and she would get too hot.

I think you’re starting from a faulty assumption here.

In general, it’s often wise to wear a hat in the summer and can help you feel cooler providing a little bit of portable shade, and helps keep the sun out of your eyes and off your face/neck/ears/shoulders.

It’s just about finding the right hat, something lightweight, breathable, and preferably lighter in color (to reflect the sun’s rays instead of absorbing them) and maybe with a wider brim.

Straw hats are a fairly traditional option, something like a panama hat (actually made from palms, also made in Ecuador and not panama BTW) is a classic option, but this is 2024 so there’s lots of moisture wicking synthetic material options out there as well. For other natural materials, linen is also a good choice, certain types and weaves of cotton can be pretty light and breathable, and honestly even some lighter weight wool hats aren’t too bad.

Take a look at people who work or spend a lot of time outdoors in warmer climates, you’ll see a lot of people wearing hats or cultures where people traditionally wore a lot of hats even if they’ve fallen out of style. Baseball caps, visors, cowboy hats, fedoras, pith helmets, beater hats, various types of headscarves, big floppy sun hats, bucket hats, asian conical hats, sombreros, etc.

I wear hats pretty much year-round. The hats I like in the summer are different from my winter hats, but it’s pretty rare that I go out without some kind of hat, and when I forget to grab one on my way out the door, I feel less comfortable for it.

I’m just curious what your interpretation of yellow laces is. I’m not a punk but am vaguely aware of lace codes, and every list I see online has yellow as anti-racist, but I know it varied a bit from place to place.

The house behind my parents has had a string of terrible tenants. Loud assholes, people who let their dogs run loose, people with unruly kids, etc.

Otherwise a pretty decent neighborhood.

There was a younger dude living there for a while, kept kind of weird hours, but my parents never thought much of that, figured he was going to school, working night shift somewhere, etc. Mostly kept to himself, never bothered my parents in any way, always dressed professionally, etc.

He was probably the best neighbor my parents ever had in that house.

Then one day cops raided the place, turns out he’d been dealing a lot of drugs out of there and had a punch bowl full of cocaine sitting out on the kitchen counter.

Some of the other neighbors apparently had noticed some pretty sketchy characters coming and going from the house, they must have entered from the front door though, because my parents never really noticed anyone.

My parents would still take the drug dealer over pretty much anyone else that’s lived there.

Couldn’t tell you how many I had as a little kid, but I’ve probably gone through about 2-3 a year since I was about 16

One time I treated myself to a pair of Oakley’s i found an an REI garage sale, thinking maybe more expensive sunglasses would hold up better or I’d keep better track of them.

They got dropped and stepped on within about a week

That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.

But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you’re likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)

For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don’t like Elmer’s wood glue. I don’t know why, I don’t remember it ever letting me down.

Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.

We have 2 major incidents

First one:

Dude A lends Dude B some money, relatively small amount, pretty sure it was less than $50. Dude B decides he’s not going to pay it back, so like mature, reasonable teenagers they decide they’re going to go to the park after school to fight about it.

Dude A is not a big guy, he asks Dude C who is a giant of a human being to come along just to make sure he doesn’t get killed, sort of a referee to pull dude B off of him if things get out of hand, not expecting him to step in or lend a hand or anything.

Dude B apparently has a different idea about how this is going to go down, and has a few friends come along with him with screwdrivers and baseball bats and other such improvised weapons.

Dude C sees this as they’re about to walk off the school property to fight, and does his job, takes these weapons, throws them in his bag, throws his jacket over the protruding bat, and they’re about to continue on their way.

The school, however, got word of this fight about to go down, and a bunch of cops show up.

Dude A lucks the fuck out and a passing senior he kind of knew pulls him into her car and assures the police that he wasn’t involved in this clusterfuck. None of the other kids give him up and he gets off scott-free and cops never figured out who the last unnamed party to this was.

The rest of them are all taken in, questioned, and receive their various punishments. Dude C gets the worst of it since he’s the guy who’s now holding all the weapons. He goes and spends a year or so at an alternative school, and is allowed to come back partially on the condition that he joins the football team. Our senior year we proceeded to win 0 football games, so fat lot of good having a giant on the team did.

Apparently dude C had misled his friends about how much money this was over, when informed by the cops that it was over like $40 he flew into a small rage, threw some things around, then calmly sat down and said “I have been misinformed”

Rumors of course start swirling and the truth gets very lost to the point I heard a version of the story where Dude C attacked the cops with a samurai sword and tried to flee on a motorcycle.

I’m pretty confident that this is a pretty accurate version of events though, a couple of the involved parties have all told me pretty much the exact same story, and it’s relatively unspectacular compared to some of the embellished versions I’ve heard. It’s also pretty much in line with what I know of their personalities.

For the most part, these kids weren’t dangerous, I don’t think any of them really had any other significant problems for the rest of their school career, and I’d describe most of them as nerds and generally decent people, some of them have some mental/emotional baggage, and couple that with some hormones and being stupid teenagers the stars just kind of aligned in the wrong way, and for the most part none of them held any significant grudges against each other and could probably have been considered friends to some extent afterwards.

Second incident:

I’m home sick one day, my mom worked at a school in our district, my sister was in school this day.

The phone rings, it’s an automated message from the district. Something about the district being made aware of a threat to the high school, but that everything is under control, there’s no danger, etc. not a lot of details.

Call my mom, she doesn’t have much more info than I do, she’s, not particularly worried, but of course a lot of parents panic and go to pick up their kids. She texts my sister to see if she wants to be picked up, she declines, she’s having a good time, it’s her and like 3 other people left in her class, they’re chilling and watching movies and such, there’s a news crew and some cop cars outside of the school.

Having nothing better to do, I’m going through all the news I can to figure out what’s up.

Eventually, it took a few days for all of the details to emerge, what we managed to piece together was

There was a kid who was planning a shooting, tried to recruit another kid who turned him in. Cops raided his house, found a bunch of airsoft guns, flea market swords, a half-built pipe bomb, and one gun (that his parents bought him) with no ammo.

This kid had been pulled out of school and was being homeschooled because of bullying. I didn’t know him, he was a few years younger than me, but from what I understand from people who knew him he was mostly bullied because he was an unlikeable racist asshole. The short bit of attention the media gave it tried to make it out like he was bullied for being fat (and let’s make no mistake, this dude was fat he may have been almost as wide as he was tall) but from the stories I’ve heard of him from before this happened, if any kid ever deserved bullying it was him for being such a major asshole.

I wouldn’t really mention his fatness, except that at some point during the trial and such, his mom (herself a very large lady) got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food, which was just icing on the proverbial cake.

The kid who turned him then went and broke into his house a little while later and tried to steal his Xbox or something.

Like many people, I came here about a year ago as part of the reddit exodus.

I didn’t, but I gave some serious thought to creating a couple of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit that didn’t have an equivalent here.

I don’t have any desire at all to be in charge of, run, or moderate a community. My general plan was to just kind of sit on it until someone who did have that interest and didn’t seem like an asshole would come along and then foist it off onto them.

The reasoning I had was basically to make sure that some power-tripping asshole wouldn’t come along and scoop up those communities and turn them shitty, and I guess also give my fellow migrants a place to pick up where we left off on Reddit.

I didn’t because it would mean that I’d be stuck moderating those communities until someone else came along, and I had no interest in doing that, I also wasn’t totally sure if I was gonna stay with Lemmy long-term, and if those communities didn’t pick up steam and I left, that’d be kind of a dick move if anyone came along later and actually wanted those communities and they’d have to jump through hoops with the admins to get control of them.

I suspect a lot of those empty communities were started by similarly minded folks who ended up not sticking it out, or didn’t have what it took to build them into active communities.