didnt dump any in the tank bcs no idea if it could break something

Yeah, that’s a good point. Hmm… This sounds like a good weekend project.

It’s flashy, does just enough to look impressive, and a lot of people throw money at it. Just like them.

20 minutes later and a loooot of vinegar essence

I’ve got a toilet that takes forever to fill up and live in hard water country. Did you just dump distilled vinegar in the tank and let it sit?

I’m guessing it really flies over the neighbor’s tree, unrolling perfectly and leaving enough on the other side to throw it back across.

My first thought was, why didn’t she just paint a finger? Something small in case she was wrong. But then I remembered how I was in pretty much every lab at that age.

Not as cool as the original story, but I was working with a big carboy of dilute HCL in a CHEM 101 lab. The previous person that used the carboy had managed to spill dilute HCL all over the stopper. I was not aware of this.

The protocol was to grasp the stopper between middle and ring finger, pull it out, then pick the carboy up with both hands and pour into the beaker. That way, the only thing the business end of the stopper ever touches is the inside of the carboy.

I’d just started pouring when I felt the skin between the two fingers start to itch. It was obnoxious, but I had a heavy piece of glassware in my hands trying to measure out a precise amount. So I ignored it until it started to burn. By that point I almost had enough in my beaker so I topped it up. Then I lowered the carboy and replaced the stopper.

Then I ran over to the sink, turned it on full blast, and washed the acid off my hand. I had a red, tender patch there for days. After that, I always wiped the stopper off with a paper towel before I pulled it out.

I was unprepared for how red he gets by the end. Also, why do his eyes look like a smaller man looking out of a human-shaped periscope?

Word salad is your friend. The bigger the context of the prompt, the more it has to thrash. So if you ask it for a longform essay about elephants in the blue diamond-shaped trifold organza station wagon and the quality of fudge it can expectorate in the style of an old timey sea captain who just dropped his iPhone over the starboard bow, it has to pull in more data. And then tell it that whatever it did was awful and nonsensical and it should redo it.

Alternately, ask for a list of one thousand random numbers, with no repetition, between one and a million. Whatever it does, tell it it’s wrong and duplicated numbers and/or gave you too few. Repeat.

observemax

We’ve been here before, with *core. And we have learned none of its lessons.

Also, I want a Dot’s pretzels shirt.

If the christian god exists and the reward for serving him is eternal life in his presence, I will gladly accept the alternative.

Introducing tech debt.

A bag of locally roasted coffee is $12 and lasts me two weeks. It used to be $9, before the orange shithead but let’s ignore that. A pot of coffee takes about as long as it takes for water to boil. I’m clearly not the target demographic, but still. Nine fucking dollars for a cup?

Let’s go Phillies?

Yeah they really shouldn’t have done the cross section.

Yeah, exactly. I get how the Mandela effect works psychologically, I just don’t love that a lot of them end with “corporation says no.”

Maybe instead of freaking out about the Mandela Effect, we should be freaking out with our willingness to just believe corporations at their word. Because that’s who seems to have the final word in all of these things, especially in situations where you can’t go back and check original artifacts. I’m guessing there’s still some old Berenstain Bears books at garage sales and vintage Pikachu merch is everywhere, but who’s holding onto 40 year-old underwear or peanut butter jars?

Here’s a recent example: Dairy Queen introduced a new Blizzard about ten years ago. It started with a solid chocolate core with ice cream around it. They called it the Fudge Tunnel Blizzard. It was there, on the drivethrough sign, and my friends and I had a field day with it. The branding lasted for a few weeks and then it completely disappeared.

I can’t find branding anywhere on the internet. I know it was there, my friends saw it was there. Nobody took a picture and it vanished. I can’t find it on google. It’s gone. Well, there’s some mention of them adding a “tunnel of fudge” to the Royal Blizzard in 2017, but there’s zero surviving marketing material for the original concept which definitely did not have a golden spoon. I know this because I ordered it. Repeatedly. To make the people behind the intercom say it back to me.

It makes sense that they’d want to scrub everything that ever mentioned eating a Fudge Tunnel at Dairy Queen. For the other stuff… who knows? Marketing departments churn, stuff gets lost, short-run logos get left out of the brand evolution. Yeah, some of this is Mandela effect but can we stop treating corporations as the ultimate authority?

Either that or it really has to go to the bathroom now.

“Look at that fucking river out there. Thinks its so cool. Just moving pop cans and fish shit past the window. Stupid fucking river.”

Reading Shakespeare is torture. That is why we make actors do it for us.

I’ve gambled twice in my life. The first time was sitting in a gas station casino because my buddy’s car overheated on the pass. Put $20 into a keno machine, lost about half of it, realized I could have gotten several beers instead. Got annoyed with myself and cashed out.

The second time was in Vegas. Same buddy gave me a massive hit on a vape pen and dragged me over to a blackjack table. He dumped some chips in front of me things happened, the table was a lot of fun to look at, the dealer cleared her throat in a really annoyed way because I was grooving on the pattern on the back of the cards instead of playing. I handed the chips back to my buddy and told the entire casino I was too high for this shit.

I guess I don’t have the gene. I’ve got an addictive personality in general and that’s been fun to deal with, but I’m glad it doesn’t extend to gambling.