You’re quoting from somewhere, but not citing your sources, which doesn’t really add to the conversation either, for all we know you’re just copy and pasting some AI-hallucinated bullshit, and it kind of reads like it might be because that last sentence is a bit of a mess.

Now, sure, you technically can cook crack in a spoon, and I’m also absolutely certain that some people have, maybe even on a regular basis.

But at least around me, most crackheads aren’t usually out cooking their own crack in the field, they’re buying rocks from their dealer. That’s one of the reasons crack got big- higher profit margins for the dealer. Maybe the situation is different in Vienna, I honestly can’t can’t say I’ve ever talked to any Austrian crackheads about their local drug culture. And on the user’s end the draw is that it has a faster, more intense high, and having to make your own crack before you can smoke it kind of takes away from that a bit.

And it can be prepared in a spoon for injection like heroin, but like your quote said, most of the time people prefer to smoke it.

It can also be smoked from a spoon in a pinch if they can’t get their hands on a more suitable crack pipe, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that it was in fact crack, I’d bet that’s what you saw, but that’s a different process than what’s described in whatever you quoted.

Even in English, something about Idina Menzel’s singing voice in frozen (though not her other singing in general) has always struck me as a little grating, something about it just kind of hits some of the same parts of my brain that a sped-up “chipmunk” voice does.

Somewhere on the internet I once found a version of Let it Go where they pitched it down a very tiny bit, it might even have only been by a semitone, and I thought that it was a massive improvement over the original.

“Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

After years of hating it, I’ve basically boiled my criticism down to the fact that it’s

Banal, saccharine, faux-folksy bullshit.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written that exact string of words dozens of times over the years whenever this topic comes up. But I’ll expand on it a bit.

It drags on for a little over 5 minutes, it’s too damn long for having no real substance

Half of the lyrics are just cutesy-sounding words with no real significance

There’s a weird spoken word bit in the middle telling a story that just kind of doesn’t go anywhere basically just “remember that time you fell out a window and I drove you to the hospital? That’s when I fell in love with you”

Why? Are you attracted to women who are bleeding all over your car? Do you get turned on by gravity? Did she say something funny? Did she at least look cute? There’s just no fucking payoff.

There’s not really even anything particularly interesting musically interesting going on there.

And what’s with the fake southern drawl? You’re from L.A. my dude. That’s Los Angeles, not Louisiana. And by the way “Edward Sharpe,” you forgot to even use that bullshit “alter-ego” name in this song, you’re not even keeping your own made-up lore straight, just drop the fucking act.

I’m pretty sure if I asked the crappiest LLM out there to write a “bullshit folksy love song for basic white teenage girls” it would spit out something better.

And for some reason the radio stations around me played this song to absolute death, not to mention my sister practically listening to it on repeat. It’s burned into my head and I absolutely fucking hate it.

To me it kind of harkens back to my childhood in the 90s and early 2000s, which I have a hunch may be a bit before your time and is also roughly contemporaneous with when Drake and Josh premiered.

These were the days before everyone had a cell phone and almost no one had a smartphone except for a handful of weirdos with blackberries, and most movie theaters worked on first-come-first-serve, seat-yourself seating.

So if you and a few friends wanted to see a movie and wanted to sit together, you’d want to get there early to get in line together to get good seats.

And to some extent, you had to just pick some time to meet up beforehand, it was harder to coordinate rides on the fly because you couldn’t just text someone for a ride and get an instant reply or get an Uber/Lyft to pick you up. If you were relying on public transit or the only ride you could get had other stuff to do, you might have to get there a bit early and kill some time while you wait for your friends to show up, or hang around a bit after the movie because your mom wasn’t coming to pick you up until X time.

So I remember there usually being a few tables and some arcade games and such in the lobby and you’d often see people hanging out there. I know at least one theater near me actually had a few people who would go there specifically to hang out because there were a couple arcade games that they liked (I remember DDR and Time Crisis being pretty big draws, and we didn’t have a lot of dedicated arcades around at the time)

As far as food, that was a bit of a rarity besides the normal snack counter fare, and even then we all complained about how overpriced it was, but if you were there with some time to kill and hungry, you might find yourself sitting at a table chowing down on a concession stand hot dog or some nachos.

Now around me, these days we do have some theaters with actual food menus, and you might have some seating at a bar where you could, at least in theory, go to have a meal without seeing a movie, not that many people actually do that. That’s relatively new though, that kind of thing would have blown our minds back in the day, even having a bar was basically unheard of, not that I was old enough to get a drink then anyway.

And there was just a bit more of a teenage hangout culture back then. We just kind of found places to occupy that wouldn’t kick us out. We’d just kind of go to the mall and walk around and hang out for a while, sometimes not even really going into any stores and subsisting on food court bourbon chicken. If a movie theater lobby was willing to tolerate our presence, I’m sure at least some of us would have found ourselves hanging out there.

As for as how many screens, big multiplex cinemas have been pretty much the norm around me for most of my life, but even today smaller places with one or just a small handful of auditoriums are still out there, I see them in big cities where space is limited, in rural areas where there’s just not enough of a market to sustain a bigger theater, and in the suburbs where they tend to be more independent arthouse type places.

Personally my first memories of going to the movies are from a theater inside of a smaller local mall, I was young when it closed, so my memory of the layout is fuzzy, but I still remember quite clearly where in the mall it was and I can’t imagine that it had more than 2 screens just based on how big the mall is and I’d struggle to tell you how they fit them in.

And of course, it’s a TV show and not one that’s totally grounded in reality. The point of it isn’t to portray an actual, viable movie theater business. It’s to advance the plot. Teenagers like to go to movie theaters, teenagers also work at movie theaters, they only have the budget to to build so many different sets for their show, and these shows are being written by adults who are looking back at their childhoods of yesteryear through rose-tinted glasses, so if mash that all together with a little Hollywood magic and suspension of disbelief and you end up with The Premier- somewhere that feels just plausible and familiar enough to their audience to advance the plot.

I admit that I barely skimmed the article so I don’t know if/how they controlled for this

But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside

Get hit in the head by a baseball you didn’t see coming or trip over a rock you didn’t see a handful of times and you might decide that the “outdoors” thing isn’t really for you.

Or of course a mix of both factors, kids who are already predisposed to short-sightedness go outside less, so the other factors at play make their eyes even worse and so they go outside even less and…

It may not have been the catchiest song that you’d catch yourself humming

But I really dug the opening for American Gods

The song is sort of reminiscent of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin, which is of course very fitting

And all the imagery is also very spot-on

The first season, IMO, was probably one of the all-time best seasons of a show I’ve ever seen

But man did it take a hard nose-dive after that for a few different reasons.

It increases the range of options for sure, but it also dilutes how seriously people take it.

Back around when the gluten free thing started taking off, I worked at a local pizza shop, and we started carrying a gluten-free personal pizza.

The crust came frozen, wrapped in plastic on a disposable aluminum pan so it wouldn’t come in contact with the oven, and there was at least some effort to make sure they were using a different bucket of cheese and sauce and such to minimize cross contamination

But the truth is, I’m pretty sure just the air in that pizza shop probably had measurable levels of gluten, flour got everywhere because we had guys tossing around pizza dough covered in high gluten flour. If someone had a really serious gluten intolerance they probably shouldn’t have trusted anything in our store except bottled drinks, and I worried a bit about someone getting lulled into a false sense of safety because we advertised a gluten free pizza.

We can probably make a pretty good guess, but we don’t know everything

Let’s say 10,000 years ago, some giant asteroid passed close enough to earth that its gravity nudged the earth a couple centimeters out of its previous orbit

Maybe since then, that asteroid has continued on its merry way and left the solar system or crashed into Jupiter, or broke apart, or is just out still orbiting the sun somewhere in a place we haven’t detected it, or we have detected it but just haven’t done all the calculations to figure out where that particular space rock was 10k years ago to know that it probably nudged the earth a tiny bit.

Now we transport you back in time and account for all the other movement of the earth, but not that little nudge.

So you’re appearing a few centimeters off from where you should. If you’re lucky, you still end up with solid ground under your feet, or maybe you end up a couple centimeters in the air and you fall on your ass once you blink into existence in the past.

Or maybe you end up with your foot trying to occupy the same space as a rock because you’re a couple centimeters lower than you should be. How does that even play out? Does your foot and the rock explode? Does your foot get stuck inside of the rock? Do they merge into one horrible mess of rock and flesh?

And even if we account for all of the earth’s movements through space, what was at the exact point on earth you’re currently existing in some arbitrary amount of time ago?

Tectonic plates have been drifting around, you gotta account for that, the spot on the north american plate that I’m standing on right wasn’t in the same spot relative to the rest of the earth.

And even accounting for that, which I don’t think we can really do super accurately, there’s erosion and a million other random environmental factors to consider, go back far enough, and the space I’m in right now might have been inside of a mountain or a glacier or something. There might have been a tree growing right where I’m standing. It might have been in the middle of a wildfire or a flash flood, or there might have been a dinosaur standing right where I am now.

I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.

It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve never heard of it or it’s writer, and odds are you’d probably hate it if you did ever read it.

I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.

And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15

I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.

Took a few months before the price dropped down again.

I remember one time being over a friend’s house, he had some board game they just dug out of the back of a closet somewhere and we were thinking about playing it. Can’t remember which game it was, I want to say it may have been Diplomacy, but I’m not 100% on that.

We open it up, looked like all the pieces were there, and we started reading through what we thought was the rulebook, it was a fairly beefy book.

Then we realized that what we had wasn’t in fact the rulebook, but some sort of secondary book that referenced the full rulebook, which it called “intimidating”

On reading that, we decided that this game was just too much trouble for how much effort we were willing to put in that day.

I don’t know if these are or aren’t nerve controlled, I suspect it’s going by the muscle movement you described

But let’s assume they are in fact controlled by nerves

Most of the movement of your fingers actually comes from muscles in your forearm pulling on tendons that go into your fingers.

So assuming you wanted to hook a prosthetic up to the same nerves and such you’d have used for your real fingers, you’d still probably end up flexing your forearm muscles because that’s where those nerves go

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper, at the time I got it they already hadn’t been made for about a decade, they weren’t super common to begin with, and I think a lot of them got cash-for-clunkered, so they were a pretty rare sight

Always got a wave when I passed someone else driving one.

And not for nothing, I really liked that car.

I feel like you might have some confusion about grip tape here

This is tape you’d wrap around the handle of something like a baseball bat or hockey stick because it is in fact grippy

The tape you’re talking about, that’s used by grips and other film crews and stagehands and such I’ve always heard called “gaffer tape”

I think I heard somewhere that they don’t stand by their warranty as much as they used to. Can’t confirm it myself though.

But probably around 10 years ago I did get to put the warranty to the test and I was impressed with it. I had one of their flannel shirts, and I wore it around a good bit for probably almost a year at the point this story takes place.

One day at work, I noticed that the seam down one side had started coming apart. I conveniently worked really close to one of the brick & mortar stores, so on my lunch break I swung over there wearing the shirt, showed them the seam, and they basically told me to just go grab a new one off the rack and that was it. Took the old shirt off and handed it over and walked out wearing the new one, no receipt, no paperwork, no hassle, it was a pretty great experience.

Still have that shirt a decade later and wear it regularly, it’s obviously picked up a bit of wear over the years, but the seams all look good and the fabric still feels solid all-around.

Would probably be helpful to know what brands of jeans you’ve been using and what ways they’ve failed you.

Personally, I don’t have a physical labor job, but I am a pretty dedicated DIY/homeowner type, so I’m not exactly a stranger to doing hard work either, and I usually get a few years out of my jeans, just buying whatever they have at target or Walmart or whatever, and they sort of go through a pipeline - I start off with decent-looking jeans, after usually a couple years of casual wear they get downgraded to work jeans after they start showing wear in the usual places, and after they start getting really ripped and beaten up they get further downgraded to dirty work jeans for things like painting where there’s a really good chance they’re going to get stuff spilled on them, heavily stained, and I may not even want to try washing them when I’m done.

As far as more dedicated work jeans, I have a pair of Carhartt jeans I break out when I’m doing really heavy duty stuff, which isn’t all that often, but they are obviously heavier duty and cut more for you to be able to move around freely in them.

I’m sure Dickies probably has something pretty comparable to those Carhartts as well.

I haven’t tried out their jeans specifically, but I have a few things from Duluth Trading Co that I’ve been very happy with and for what they are I think they’re pretty affordably priced.

Not jeans exactly, and no first-hand experience with them, but I’ve heard from a few people whose opinions I usually trust on these sorts of matters that Filson Double Tin Cloth pants are probably one of the most durable, hard-wearing pairs of pants you can buy. If you’re working in hot weather and don’t expect to get wet, they’re probably not exactly the ideal, but I’ve generally heard good things about first products overall and I think they make some other pants that are more akin to a regular pair of jeans.

I’ve heard a lot of hot air balloon pilots carry a bottle of wine or something with them to help smooth things over with property owners who are unhappy about them landing on their property.

So did you get anything good?

I have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies, most people who are serious about camping and hiking and such are also pretty good about leaving no trace.

But there’s also a lot of people out there who aren’t serious about it, they just think it would be fun to go out in the woods and have a party or whatever and they leave a lot of litter, start fires in inappropriate places, etc.

And at least around me, that’s generally a pretty safe thing for them to do. Theres no really no large predators left for them to be concerned about.

And I sometimes think “maybe if we just reintroduced wolves, that might be enough to dissuade some of these assholes from making a mess in the great outdoors”

Those of us who spend a lot of time outside know there’s usually not too much to worry about as long as you’re taking some basic precautions, but almost every time I talk to a non-outdoorsy person, it seems like they’re always afraid of getting attacked by wolves or bears.

I think there’s a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.

I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t up to doing their lessons himself.

He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn’t exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn’t afford to have a car etc.

So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.

And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn’t keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn’t controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.

I’m not much of a kid-person, so I’m probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.

On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of “bullying,” I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn’t have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn’t like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.

And I don’t think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it’s probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn’t help.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

No idea what brought this post onto my feed, Lemmy’s algorithms get a bit fucky sometimes and I wasn’t exactly looking at the age of the post or expecting it to be 7 months old.

But you’re welcome. Thank you for being a sarcastic asshole to someone trying to answer your question. Hope you have the day you deserve, bud.