If you reverse the polarity of lots of things, you get a fire starter.

I suppose I’m afraid that having a dog myself would be like a magnet for other dogs while on walks that I might be uncomfortable with or that my being nervous could make a normal meet and greet go poorly.

Yes. Also, your dog will pick up on your nervousness and either get nervous themselves or become defensive, neither of which are ideal and could make for a bad situation if you’re ever at a park or out for a walk. Dogs are little copycats when it comes to mirroring their owner’s anxieties and behaviors, and even if you deal with your anxiety, the dog may have adopted it in the mean time and you’d have to work to repair that damage.

Basically, you’re smart to be asking these questions before taking on the responsibility of adoption. I’d recommend waiting until you’ve worked out your issues before potentially passing them on to your four-legged friend.

You mean the one from the obvious troll account that was obvious?

I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

Excellent catch!

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

Don’t feel bad. I was able to distinguish by ear between a T.38 fax handshake and a V.34+ modem handshake which definitely reveals my oldness 😆

So many things wrong with that though:

1. That’s a fax machine handshake not a data modem.
2. That’s a LOT of data to be hissing over dial-up in a highly compressed GSM voice channel
3. She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers
4. The background noise would have had that handshake repeating over and over

The most nostalgic chiptune generator you’ll ever hear.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

I don’t want to repeat what others have already said as that’s all pretty accurate. As a rule of thumb, just look at the site sidebar for various instances and just avoid any that base themselves around any form of identity politics. Sadly, that’s a lot of them, but life is better without those kinds of attitudes in your face all the time.

I don’t have an EV yet, but I already refuse (prefuse? pre-refuse?) to use an app to charge my car which pretty much locks me out of most fast chargers.

I’ve been WFH since COVID and only drive a few times a week. When I do get an EV hopefully in the next 1-3 years, it’s probably going to basically trickle-charge from a modest PV setup. If it takes 3 days to fully charge, so be it; it’d just be sitting there anyway. Though I’ll probably wire in a 220v level 2 charger (or whatever they’re classified as) on the rare occasion I need a faster charge.

Just got around to this one and finished it last night. Thanks for the recommendation. Was definitely different and fun. Kind of a “breather episode” compared to the high stakes of the rest of the ones I’ve been reading.

Yeah, I may have to settle for woodworking. I could set that up in my basement safely enough but definitely can’t be welding or have other fire hazards.

Only limitation with woodworking in insufficient ventilation if I want to paint or varnish or something.

Metalworking. It’s not so much beyond my ability so much as it’s out of my price range to get into it. I just don’t have any of the necessary tools nor an appropriate workspace, and I’d basically have to build a workshop and start from the literal ground up.

Heh, I just watched “The Search” the other day which is actually what inspired this meme. The thought did cross my mind that “Seska” could be T’Rul wearing a Cardassian mask wearing a Bajoran mask.

They kind of do, or at least used to.

If memory serves, they would take higher-end chips that didn’t pass QA for that product line, disable some cores or whatever, and sell it as a lower-end chip.

I’ve always observed them to be the largely the same thing but on different ends of the ideological spectrum (libertarians holding a more right-wing stance to anarchism’s left-wing stances). Otherwise, they’re both essentially petulant toddlers stamping their feet and saying “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me”.

LOL, yes.

She did, but the Seska episodes were the only Kazon episodes that I enjoyed from the early seasons of Voyager.