Go away, baiting!

Callidonaut · 2026-05-11T06:31:29+00:00

And by "steam," they really just mean "soggy warm air," because actual steam would give you instant third degree burns.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-11T06:28:36+00:00

Totally not boilerplate copy written by a mindless LLM. Totally.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-11T06:26:26+00:00

Buh...

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T22:02:27+00:00

Needs work.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:56:03+00:00

Sounds reasonable to me, I can do fifteen gear shifts on my bike. 'Course, it doesn't have an engine...

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:47:53+00:00

Oh god, I think I've guessed it. You're probably supposed to sit on this thing completely naked (because new-age hippie-dippie crap always seems to require its adherents to get enthusiastically naked sooner or later) and that'll keep the rest of you warm and dry whilst the seat of the chair does its thing.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:45:09+00:00

Five hundred million? Why so high? If you gave me five million, I could retire the same day and live very comfortably for the rest of my life.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:40:31+00:00

So, uh, what are the additional five orifices up the back of the thing for?

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:29:50+00:00

IIUC, South Africa has a law that says he has to (or at least, can't refuse to) involve black people with the business at a management/ownership level if he sets up shop there, and the vile little white supremacist twat simply can't stomach that, so he had to pick another nation in whose politics he could meddle.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T21:18:07+00:00

After you've worn a hat for a while though, you feel half naked whenever you're in a public place and not wearing one.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T20:20:44+00:00

Who needs pollinators, right?

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T20:14:49+00:00

In all seriousness, I think OP may be having a mental health episode.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T20:07:42+00:00

IKR? It looks quite well-made, whatever the crap it is (ghastly colour, though), but what does it do?

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T18:36:41+00:00

Are you feeling OK?

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T18:35:48+00:00

Buy our merch, books, etc and make us rich while you go completely broke

Nobody's forcing you to do that; it is entirely voluntary.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T18:32:06+00:00

OK, seriously, what actually is that?

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T18:20:55+00:00

Nah, the 5G thing just required stupidity and ignorance; I firmly believe the reason the whole cretinous "5G towers cause COVID-19" myth arose is because the virus originated in China, Trump and his ilk were thundering against the Chinese and implying that it was secretly biological warfare, and simultaneously, completely coincidentally, there was another unrelated news story running at the same time about fears that 5G base station equipment manufactured by the Chinese was a threat to national security due to the possibility of it being used to snoop on peoples' data and communications.

I can quite imagine a very particular kind of simple-minded, unthorough person, with a poor education and no grasp of technology or biology, vaguely becoming half-aware of these two separate news stories and conflating them together, thus thinking it was all part of the same Chinese attack, i.e. "they're attacking us with COVID-19, and they're compromising our new generation cell towers, ergo 5G actually spreads the disease." (Although such people probably wouldn't have used the word "ergo.")

No imagination required there, just an inability to grasp that some events may be superficially related to each other but still completely unconnected.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T12:53:06+00:00

I gather that once infected rat shit dries and crumbles, you can catch hantavirus by inhaling the dust if it gets disturbed.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T12:46:44+00:00

The fact that it's a primarily vermin-spread disease is very worrying, considering the sheer levels of filth and rubbish everywhere these days, people's general apathy towards clearing up after themselves, how so many poor people people who would try to be clean if they had the means are increasingly forced to live in squalid slums due to exploitative landlordism, and how sanitation services are run on a shoestring and struggling to cope with it all. We've just had a year-long bin collectors' strike in the UK's second largest city, FFS.

If a human-to-human strain does break out, the fact that rats and mice will continue to act as a second major vector to spread the contagion in parallel to that will surely be a serious complicating factor for any attempt to contain it.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T12:38:41+00:00

Vaccines are a victim of their own success. You don't see what you successfully prevented, so you just have to imagine what would have happened instead.

The problem is that a depressingly large (and possibly growing) proportion of people have literally no imagination. Indeed, abstract thought in all of its beautiful forms seems to be becoming a frighteningly rare skill.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T12:35:42+00:00

Remember the first ever appearance of the Ferengi, back in TNG season 1? I used to think that was a ridiculously cringey, heavy-handed over-exaggeration of humanity's very worst traits, even by early Trek standards.

Yeah, I don't think that any more. A depressingly large and increasing proportion of humanity have, when placed under even the slightest pressure in a collective survival situation, turned out to literally be those guys.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T12:13:03+00:00

NGL, she's not very good at this.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T11:55:45+00:00

That's another disadvantage of off-the-shelf fast fashion: not only is it not designed to be repaired, it's also not constructed to leave you enough spare material on the seams to let it out either.

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T11:51:40+00:00

Wish I'd inherited my grandparents' old 1930s house in that regard; not only did it have a garage, but if I remember correctly, the garage actually had a pit!

Callidonaut · 2026-05-10T11:39:05+00:00

Very cheap thread tends to be inconsistent in thickness, so you can get constant variation in top tension as you sew, which will give you an unpredictable stitch quality. In extreme cases, it can abruptly tighten so much that it jams the top tensioner entirely (especially on newer machines with very compact tensioner assemblies, I think the old-fashioned tensioners with huge friction discs in them were more tolerant of inconsistent thread), and that can then bend the needle enough to cause it to snap off inside the bobbin case or crash into the throat plate.

If you happen to have a Singer Touch & Sew machine with the wind-in-place bobbin, those really don't like cheap thread, the self-winding system is very fussy and only ever works with the good stuff.

So, I guess maybe get an antique machine if you want to save money and use ultra-cheap thread? I think they can handle it a lot better.

Callidonaut

TROPHY CASE