megaforte84.bsky.social
Housewife (she/her) and unpublished amateur writer. Grew up a Southern Baptist in GA, currently an Episcopalian in MA after several stops along the way.
1,265 posts
673 followers
439 following
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Boston 25 news alert mentioned EVs on fire without bothering to mention they were driverless taxis, and the Waymos were definitely NOT where my brain went first.
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(Sometime I would *love* for us to process as a society how many people we've lost before Better Write That Down I'm A Senior Citizen realization because of a gap between last employment and Medicare hitting at 65. Or facing Medicaid system limitations between last employment and 65, in this case.)
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And some of those have AI results too.
I realized DDG had switched from the start of the top result to AI summary first result when it gave me the wrong RCL liturgical year. Start of the top result should *always* be right because explaining how the three year cycle works is basically boilerplate.
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I remain glad I had that innocence destroyed via an online 'and this specific piece of hell-logic exists' discussion instead of when some people tried to use it seriously in relation to an actual case in my hometown later.
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Feels like the kind of thing that happens when someone thinks the lesson of the past is LA Must Be Subdued First Because They Fight instead of Leave California Alone Or LA Will Give The Other Cities Ideas.
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Started last night because of your post, so I'm telling them you invited me.
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That and the hush puppies from the local BBQ joint have been our top 'yep, definitely two Georgia kids a long way from where we grew up' moments.
Runner-up goes to the KFC who didn't know what I meant by 'slaw' when ordering in-person. I know there is more than one 'slaw', but you ONLY sell ONE.
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Also conferences.
Boston got damn lucky, first that the Biogen corporate conference did not cascade into a wider outbreak and second that it put enough fear into people that there was already a taper in in-person activities and transit ridership before it started to really pass through Logan.
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And there were places that reopened and had complete disruption via kids being bounced between in-person and 'we don't have enough adults to supervise OR enough kids are out we need to clean the building' distance learning with no chance to coherently lesson plan the way 100% distance allowed for.
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That is a sweet *dessert* cornbread and tastes like an offense unto baking if you bite into it expecting the other kind.
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Me and the other reason beside guideline change why they just stuck me on a combo control med with bronchodilator.
My record for 'I probably need Albuterol but I don't want to be a bother and do I really need it, I can just be quieter, thinking about it counts as management' is about a month.
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We also should standardize testing for hormone levels far earlier for baseline. Because "normal" isn't the same for everyone.
The last 15 of 30 years everyone denied I had asthma, it was bc I tested ONE SEASON as normal according to the women's chart. Medicated, I'm pretty good on the men's chart.
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Not renaming even small boats is one of the ones most likely to be known by people who never set foot on anything that floats larger than The Minnow from Gilligan's Island.
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Food with a mandated minimum cooking temperature to kill bacteria stored over food that can potentially be served straight from the refrigerator is an outbreak waiting to happen.
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My entire second grade class had a wax resist fad going on for months complete with trying to figure out which of the standard Crayola 16 crayon box went best under which of the standard Crayola 8 marker box.
Intro to color play, for cheap! Under $10 at out of sale season drugstore prices even now!
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So much playing with compasses, from the earliest time anyone would trust me with them.
Before all this AI slop started, 'I started playing with the minimum supplies I needed for school assignments, MWAHAHA they couldn't stop me Because Grades' was a reasonably universal recognized intro to art.
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I will admit I bought a cribbage board as part of the early tariff panic, but I meant it as 'yay an infinitely reusable gin rummy counter'.
I remember the bridge column when I was growing up. Still have never seen anything that defined terms enough for me to have a clue what it was talking about.
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The scoring is multilayered.
It's not just a card game with a board, it's a card game with a board that marks what your score was at the end of the last hand so if anyone wants to challenge your addition skills mid-scoring *rolling back and beginning the current count over is an option*.
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One recurrent issue in the US is how many jurisdictions *require* setting cash bail.
So on the one hand you have minor misdemeanor charges result in long jail stays because the accused is broke.
On the other, you have murderers with multiple eyewitnesses out bc of friends with deep pockets.
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I was in a car accident as a passenger and had what I said on-site so mangled in the report that I might have had the choice of False Statement, Perjury, or taking the 5th if there had been charges.
Still sort of wondering how a judge would have taken an eyewitness victim needing to take the 5th.
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Gila monster, specifically.
You can find out interesting things about how the body works by researching how things that make it break down do that.
Same thing with certain venomous snakes and anticoagulant research.
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Also how much of a staple crop they are in the USA, and I'm not talking about soy being used as filler.
There's a reason 'Brit who thinks the US judgment of beans on toast is about eating beans discovers it's actually that the US eats multiple varieties of beans so many other ways' is a thing.
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The "skipping breakfast" kind doesn't get sales so they're the other one.
And there's a sample menu in the ad for each age range that of course leaves out any supplementation the ad buyer is selling, so see enough of them and 'a human could survive on that AND build muscle doing it' creeps in.
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Single metro area example: Boston wastewater is about as low as it's ever been, and definitely as low as it's been since the 2023 holiday season spike was happening. Copies per mL stays copies per mL.
www.mwra.com/biobot/biobo...
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Also the more times the kid hears the story, the more they are going to process any depth present. You don't get to read There Is A Moral To This Story books once and think the message got in even if the kid is the right age to understand it.
Chikka Chikka: not just an alternate alphabet song.
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The mindset (and money) behind reform for reform's sake as a goal also means disruption of the kids being taught.
We had one big change when I was in k5, where we switched from tracked to untracked but same general philosophy. How do you manage when the basic approach changes multiple times in k5?
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We did IBM's Writing To Read as a supplement when I was in early elementary and from what I'm hearing I don't think you could get a mixed program like that through now.
A day a week of cycling to language games in place of direct instruction? (Upwords, we taught ourselves about false rhymes at 6.)
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And then they age out.
I remember listening to it a few years ago. What REALLY struck me were programs where the kids who knew a word were marked wrong but guessing a wrong-length related word got full points for obediently guessing. Graded down for making the leap before the pictures went away.
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Scrivener For Windows once spontaneously uninstalled itself on me and I never thought that meant it had the capacity to want to join the choir invisible. Don't see why the reverse would be true.
(If the reverse *was* true, failed uninstalls are not exactly new and some people are getting PhDs.)
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Also, as a woman whose entire maternal family has some form of orthorexia or another (the men too), the entire keto-adjacent 'carbs are just calories that could have been protein to make muscles with' sphere makes my instinctive hackles raise whenever I bump into it via video ads.
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The intermittent fasting ads.
I don't care how many people say 'oh everybody does intermittent fasting because they sleep', I've read the food recs in those YouTube still ads that have been posted for the past five years and a woman eating that would have friends calling an anorexia intervention.
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Thing that has bit me in the past: if that automatic versioning backup happens on program close, hit the manual backup command every once in a while if you're doing the 'hibernate or sleep the computer, keep the program open' thing. Scrivener users, I can confirm this means you.
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It's the 'know what you're doing' of educated restoration versus 'I have never read the building code' DIY.
Neighbor passed away during the flipping heyday. Son tried his hand at it... and was very unhappy the first inspector demanded the GAS WATER HEATER be free of its new tiny utility closet.
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This being the problem with anything non-randomized that humans can instinctively memorize: muscle memory for the fastest path approaching the cursor tracing of the tool-assisted version.
If we can do it for video games, you bet we can do it for anything we need to sign off of on shared computers.
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There's also the issue that 'you need to arrest at least X people for Y' inevitably leads to situations like these DUI arrests if the disincentives to do Y actually work.
Congratulations, the outreach about unsafe driving worked! You are now arresting people on the slightest justification or else.
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And who would be the sort to trot out *secular* data for what to do to carry that out and to convince others it's important to do that, which is the REAL dividing line between 'citizen in a democracy using a religion to inform politics' and wanting that religion to take over government decisions.
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That's what I've heard too.
It's made things interesting because here in the US the product market is still 'if you're old enough to carry your own rescue inhaler, you don't need room for a spacer' but I'm under doctor's office orders to use one with control meds & Albuterol because of the change.
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Or the other favorite of this pandemic, "disparities in who has jobs that require close contact with other people and have low access to sick time off".
Add in employer biases over who is malingering and who can judge that they are too sick to be back yet and stir for race-based skew.
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It was like everything changed overnight. The only bigger shift here was 'enough people have the vaccine, no more masking required on transport'. All because Trump and others with loud voices misrepresented a few generation-killer funeral superspreader tragedies.
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I still remember the number of white people who would not get that the racial disparity swap was due to spread at *funerals* (related elderly who took no other risks) so it didn't say as much as they thought it did about race-linked risks.
My family processed it and started hiding funeral dates.
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Also may be technically impossible for some of them to get off the list if it was compiled based on laws in the jurisdiction.
A sheriff in western MA can coordinate with ICE to the greatest extent possible disregarding the law & still probably be on that list because of state-level sanctuary laws.
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Depending on how deep they want to go, 'policy of not running immigration enforcement checks on people who report crimes' could be enough. Which I would imagine has become about as standard as 'we will ignore if you are visibly on something this once if you report an overdose or alcohol poisoning'.
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If you are ever in Boston and have the time, see if the Boston Public Library tour still goes up to the third floor.
When I took it, it was 20% 'you may recognize this room from the movies', 5% the war memorial lions on the stairwell, and 75% Sargent murals everywhere.
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I saw the thumbnail and immediately remembered the one time I was in Colorado on vacation, when Mom yelled at me to leave the prairie dogs alone.
For glancing at them. Through a fence. From across the parking lot. Through the unopenable restaurant window.
Bc you do not want what they can carry.
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I'm still mad I missed Four Seasons (in the ER).
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And the plan when he misremembers one of them as a standard FOX News broadcast and not only references it in public but acts like everyone else had access to it is?
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Only for hypothermia. K2 is especially not fond of that option, but the others don't particularly like it either.
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I'm 100% convinced a copy of diagnosis paperwork needs to be handed over at 18 at the latest.
I knew I had ADHD. Found out at 32 that included being diagnosed with a memory problem that was framed as personal irresponsibility when assignments at the door didn't encode enough to write down later.