A scuff on your bag, a dent in your mug – and suddenly it feels like time for a new one
"The results suggested that people who strongly preferred flawless items had more elaborate ideas about what their ideal product was and were sensitive to even small deviations from those ideas. Their standards also kept rising. Seeing something better than what they owned could raise the bar further for them."
You know those stupid android merge games that exist to show you adverts and harvest your data? I presume there are people out there just making them for fun not to harvest your data and show you adverts, and if those people exist they're on here. Has anyone made one or can recommend one?
My friend just handed me a book and said "I just finished this, it's about climate change and the end of the world and has one of the worst sex scenes I've ever read in, you'll love it."
There's a poll going round the Fedi at the moment about whether you would be able to use an AED/defibrillator on a woman having a heart attack and a lot of people are commenting they'd let the trained person who brought it use it. In the UK at least you don't need to wait for ambulance staff to bring it, they're in lots of public locations like stations, shopping centres and churches. In an emergency if you're on the phone to the ambulance service they will tell you where the nearest one is, but if you want to familiarise yourself with the locations of nearby ones just to be prepared you can see them here: https://www.defibfinder.uk/
Does anyone know how to delete your saved cards from Stripe as a customer, not a business account?
I'm pretty sure you're a bit late to save her by this point folks
My inner troll is telling me to add my own bit of tape saying "stop wasting autoclave tape" but I'm resisting
My lab seems to have invented analogue discussion boards through the medium of autoclave tape.
Angry French students take to the streets. British students don’t – and I think I know why | Kitty Sayers
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/10/angry-french-students-protests-british-dont-why
I'm currently reading a fantasy book where a chimera, a magical creature created in some immoral magecraft experiment by a distant ancestor of the protagonist, lives in the walls and abandoned rooms of the castle. He's been there so long no one can remember a time when he wasn't there. He has an immense store of arcane knowledge but his concerns and goals are his own and inscrutable, so he appears and disappears according to his own whims and imparts knowledge only when it would be interesting to him to do so, or to stop the heroes doing something that will harm them.
Anyway I've just realised this guy is basically a fantasy lab tech.
Me: "Hello new students! Welcome to our lab! Please don't pour molten agar down the sink!"
New students: *nod, smile, immediately scurry off to pour molten agar down the sink*
Every. Sodding. September.
Also it's really cool that my brother has managed to raise a child who spontaneously asks when she doesn't understand something instead of worrying she'll look stupid. Long may that continue too
I was chatting with my brother and he used the phrase "emotional baggage", and my twelve year old niece asked what it meant. And as we tried to explain ("it's the emotional things you carry around like heavy luggage" "it's like when someone treats you badly so you expect everyone else to treat you badly even though they're completely different people") it struck me that the concept just wasn't meaning anything to her, and I really hope that continues for as long as possible. I'm not sure at what age it kicks in, maybe late teens.
Do you ever stop and think about how we spend so much of our lives doing housework and life admin and email and trying to live up to our parents' standards and impress our bosses and worrying about our weight and meanwhile we live on a planet where the sky just does this and we're not going to be here forever. And it's not doing this for us, sunsets are just as beautiful whether we're good people or bad people and whether we have good credit scores or clean kitchens.
Still no dashboard. Come on, come on *chews furniture*
"I'm not as much of a nerd as most people on here" I think to myself, as I wait impatiently for access to the dashboard that will allow me to monitor our real time household energy use after getting a smart meter installed this morning.
#Meta bans ads for Virginia Woolf play in Spain because they relate to #feminism
The theatre was told that “any mention of civil rights, feminism or social reform [topics that are central to Woolf’s work] are usually classified as ‘social topics’ by our automatic system” and are filtered out.
To resolve the situation, Meta recommended removing “key words” so that the text doesn’t appear to encourage activism.
RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/117307094446405114
Surely the challenge with cats is training them not to do this?
