Sometimes I think about that time I took my jacket to a seamstress to ask if she could replace the zipper, and she said in a somewhat cold tone that it would cost the same as getting a new one.

I said "Deal. When do you think you can have it done?"

And she just kind of lit up. When I came back to pick up the jacket she had also mended all the little tears.

I moved away shortly afterwards and have not returned since but I feel like a little tiny bit of magic may have happened at that moment.

html is pronounced "hot tamale"

If you think voting is not worth your time then take some time to wonder why fascist dictators try so hard to make it impossible

a lazy person is full of laze, and the thing that puts the laze in lazy people is a lazer, which means that the lazy are also the lazee

a massage service that's just a bunch of cats making cookies on your back

I was radicalized as a kid when I was playing a stupid online game called adventure quest and I went on a quest for this legendary sword called the blade of awe and the game let me go through the entire ordeal, fighting tough-ass monsters that I had to use my rare potions to defeat, and right at the point where I finally got the fucking sword the game told me I had to become a member for the low low price of 20 bucks a month in order to use it

Have you been hit and/or struck by a smooth criminal?

You may be entitled to compensation.

I don't love everything about object oriented programming but inheritance is pretty damn sweet.

For Q3 we're looking at a strategic pivot towards burning the system down to the ground

3. There are many ways to enforce this scarcity, modern dollar bills are printed in controlled amounts and made to be difficult to counterfeit. This is what's called a "fiat" currency.

4. All the current currencies in the world are fiat currencies. We trust in our dollars/euros/yens/dalasis because we trust our governments to remain responsible in how they print them.

(1/N) This isn't advocacy for crypto, it's advocacy for understanding things. Okay so:

1. A "currency" is a system of tokens that have in themselves no intrinsic value but are accepted as having value by communal agreement.

2. The backbone of this agreement is trust in the scarcity of these tokens. If someone handed you a slip of paper as payment and you had no proof that they didn't just print it five minutes ago, you wouldn't trust it.

Popular wisdom in hand tool woodworking internet circles is that you can't sharpen a saw with hardened teeth so you have to throw it away when it's dull.

This is in contrast to old saws which were not hardened and though this means they dull faster, they can be re-sharpened with files until there's no saw left.

But you could take a hardened saw that's gone dull, disassemble it, plop the sawplate in the oven and temper it down to a file-sharpenable hardness, then sharpen it like an old saw.

One time when I was a kid I forgot my neopets password and my babysitter helped me get it back via email and she read the recovery email with me since I couldn't read so well yet and told me that my password was "bionicle"

It just remembered that, and I'm realizing that these guys used to store their users' passwords unhashed, which is pretty irresponsible

PSA: WD-40 is *not* a lubricant, it's a penetrant.

A penetrant is for helping stuck parts get unstuck. Something like an old bolt that is rusted over and won't turn.

A lubricant is for reducing friction and wear between two sliding surfaces. Something like the plates and pins of a bike chain, or the hinges of a door.

A penetrant is generally a lubricant thinned down with a solvent so it can flow into tight spots. If it smells like a solvent, it's probably not meant for long-term lubrication.

One key point with public transit is that if you own a car and are already losing money to depreciation, insurance and licensing, it's almost always cheaper to use that car than pay public transit.

What this means is that a public transit network must be comprehensive enough to allow a significant user base to actually go car free, or it will never stay afloat without being a financial black hole.

For all the young men out there getting daily exposure to those awful, awful AI porn ads I say this:

Real girls are not boring. When one of them lets you touch her boobs it's a fucking life-changing experience.

To my fellow Canadians, I have an important message regarding the imminent elections: go out and vote.

I know many of us are worried or disheartened or feel disenfranchised because none of the parties represent our ideals, but your vote still matters, even if it's the choice between the lesser of two evils.

No matter how bad things seem, you know as well as I do that they could *always* be worse. And they *will* get worse if we don't take whatever grip we can on our collective destiny.

I never understood why so many men associate with imagery of predatory animals.

My idealized version of my own masculinity is best represented by a tree. Patient. Immensely endurant. Self-sufficient. Unbothered by trivial, ephemereal affairs. Innately kind to the world around it.

I don't want to be a lion or a wolf or a shark, I want to be an ancient oak whose branches have sheltered countless birds and squirrels.