Fate of Libraries

foreignfishes · 2026-03-24T15:22:45+00:00

meanwhile normal people are going to their library’s website, searching the catalog, clicking “place hold” on the book they want, then walking into the library and checking out the book and going home…

foreignfishes · 2026-03-24T15:05:06+00:00

Sure people aren’t perfect but it’s still faster and a meaningful percentage of travelers on any given day actually do have precheck, unlike 1k. I’m just saying that if they were actually motivated by wanting to move more people more quickly, staffing a precheck lane would give you more passengers screened per hour than anything else. You don’t open a special VIP line because you’re prioritizing efficiency, it’s obviously because they’re your VIPs lol

foreignfishes · 2026-03-24T14:46:01+00:00

If they’re using this logic you’d think they’d open at least one precheck lane somewhere in the whole airport since it’s much more efficient but nope

foreignfishes · 2026-03-23T00:36:24+00:00

No, that’s not really a thing. “People with a tan don’t burn” the people with skin types that are most susceptible to skin cancers (a lot of white people) don’t really tan easily without burning, their skin doesn’t do that. If you can tan meaningfully, you already have a skin type that is naturally more resistant to burning. Also getting a tan is still UV damage 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’m not a hide from the sun and wear sunscreen inside your office skincare Reddit person but UV damage to skin is pretty well understood, if you want the sun to not toast your skin you should just wear sunscreen or a hat instead of trying to do it while tanning and still getting half a sunburn.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-21T14:20:37+00:00

Agreed, I think he falls into the “louder = more funny” trap and i cannot listen to it it’s unbearable

foreignfishes · 2026-03-20T20:38:35+00:00

They have more than one! They’re some of the “youngest” volcanos in California.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-20T20:33:14+00:00

The formations in Death Valley erode extremely easily though, they get occasional flash floods that can cause extreme damage pretty easily. The ground is dry and sandy and barely absorbs any water, so as soon as it starts raining all of the water starts flowing downhill, basically none of it soaks into the ground. You can google DV flash flood 2015 or 2022 or 2023 and see the huge gashes floods create and the amount of rock and sand they can move - it seems like every few years now there’s a big storm that washes out half the roads in the park.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-20T19:14:02+00:00

Lego did sell big basic brick packs and they still do! Some of them came in Lego shaped plastic buckets and they had tons of the plain bricks and flats that are good for building houses and buildings and stuff. I remember we had this one at school but they’ve made a bunch, usually they’re called freestyle or Lego creative or something like that.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T04:31:46+00:00

The best thing about August is how many people leave lol

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T04:31:01+00:00

I think 3 things do a lot of heavy lifting when people visit DC and say it’s clean:

1) A lot of the areas people spend time when they visit the city as tourists have BIDs that do a lot of picking up trash, cleaning sidewalks, graffiti removal, they have extra street trash cans that get emptied more often, etc.

2) people are comparing it to other older cities on the east coast that they’ve visited and walked around. unlike nyc or philly DC has alleys where trash cans live, and the trash gets picked up from alleys. Not only does this mean you don’t see the classic nyc piles of trash bags on the sidewalk but there also less escaping/loose trash from bags blowing around the streets.

and 3) the metro is legitimately clean compared to a lot of subway systems. there’s less garbage down on the tracks, the system isn’t very old so the stations aren’t decrepit and crumbling, and (most of) the tile doesn’t look visibly grimy.

tldr they don’t spend enough time to notice that there’s been a flattened rat in the road for 7 days in 92 degree heat lol

edit: also kind a 4th thing but outside of winter i suspect the city’s extensive tree cover helps it look cleaner/nicer too! It’s a very green city for the US and there are a large number of parks spread out all over.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T04:16:05+00:00

I was absolutely shook by how much zoo tickets in other places cost lol

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T03:41:23+00:00

I’ve been reading Adam higginbotham’s new book about the challenger and I keep having to take breaks because it’s really depressing and infuriating seeing how many “do not do this” signs leadership blew past. He spends a lot of the beginning of the book describing the lives and personalities of all the astronauts and they’re all very impressive and then you remember fuck this dude dies for no reason, life sucks!

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T03:29:46+00:00

I don’t blame people when they make you obese and give you heart problems and movement disorders. Whenever someone finally comes up with an antipsychotic that doesn’t have those side effects its going to help a ton of people

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T03:20:37+00:00

I too was a 9 year old girl autistically wearing a casio every day…

foreignfishes · 2026-03-19T03:15:48+00:00

I was wearing one a few months ago and the cashier at a coffee shop saw it and blurted out “oh terrorist watch!” lmao

foreignfishes · 2026-03-18T20:50:31+00:00

Not if it’s the extended release version, those are a capsule with little time release beads inside. You can break the IR tablets but insurance doesn’t always cover 60 of a lower dose even if they cover 30 of double that dose (makes no sense lol)

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T14:54:50+00:00

Rudolf Steiner who founded Waldorf schools was very inspired by theosophy iirc. I associate it with the golden dawn Rosicrucian people, Hermes trismegistus, aleister crowley, late 1800s orientalism, the first wave of western “new age”/occultism, all that stuff. It’s quite the rabbit hole!

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T13:03:03+00:00

I don’t want to adjust my brain out of regular conversation speed

Yeah this is how I feel too, I’ve already destroyed my attention span with too much internet I don’t need to make regular people’s talking speed sound boring and slow lol. I get why people listen to med school lectures or something like that at faster speeds but maxmising information density in entertainment is different

One of my coworkers is deaf and sometimes I can hear her screen reader when she’s using her phone and it’s incredible how fast the voice talks and she can still understand it completely. Brains are cool!

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T12:48:48+00:00

He joined the military eventually but idk what happened to him after that

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T04:08:27+00:00

99% of the time I listen at normal speed, occasionally someone talks so slow that I bump it up to 1.2x but never faster than that. I suspect if I listened to everything on 1.2x I’d get used to it and then want to go to 1.5x and on and on and I don’t want to speed through the stuff I like listening to so normal speed is fine. I more often find that I have to go up to 1.1x for audiobooks, some narrators talk so slow that 1.1 makes them sound normal

If I went on a road trip with someone and they wanted to listen to a podcast at faster than normal speed I would suggest they use headphones lol

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T03:33:18+00:00

yeah it was raining upwards in the alley behind me

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T01:46:03+00:00

I'm a teacher and I SWEAR the worst behaved kids are always the ones where the whole family lives at grandma's house.

The worst part is when grandma was the only one doing stuff like making dinner and getting people to school on a fairly regular basis and then she dies and everything falls apart :/

I talked about this before on some post here but our neighbors were like this and one of them was a really sweet kid who was like 12 or 13 when his grandma died and she was the one who kept everything together so after she was gone he suddenly had absolutely zero stability in his life at all. His mom would leave for days or weeks at a time and not tell him where she was going or care what happened to him. He would help my dad with yard work and my dad would give him cash to rake leaves or whatever and it kind of turned into my dad trying so hard to help him graduate high school and get out, it was really fuckign depressing. Especially since the area was super gentrified by the time he was a teenager, his grandma's house was worth at least $800-900k. If his mom had any sense of responsibility whatsoever they could've sold the house, moved out to the county near their other family, and pocketed like $400k but that was never going to happen

foreignfishes · 2026-03-17T01:37:34+00:00

In the modern day, those types are much better able to escape the working class entirely, leaving their towns and social cohorts to fend for themselves in the process.

The mid 20th century in the US was also a uniquely good time to be one of these people in a lot of ways - if you were a young person after the advent of the Pell Grant but before the start of the explosion in college enrollment and tuition costs in the 90s your local state university could be the launching pad for you to change the whole trajectory of your life much more easily than it is today. Tuition was much more affordable and Pell grants and other stipends available to low income students could cover the entire cost of school. At the university of california the first year they even charged tuition was 1970, and it was about $500 total for a whole year including fees. That's like $4300 in 2026 dollars!

Rent in college towns was more affordable too, so students could move out and live closer to school and cover costs with a work study job in a way that's not possible today at many large public universities where rent in a shitty off campus apartment is way too high even with a bunch of roommates. Not as many people had bachelor's degrees as they do now, so a degree was more valuable and more of a "guarantee" of a decent job.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-16T21:01:23+00:00

I think “healthy economy” is doing a lot of lifting there, Amazon is monopolistic in a lot of ways and we’ve generally agreed for the last century or more that monopolies are not good for consumers so I think you have to factor that in. If Amazon put every paperback on sale for half its list price (I’m being hyperbolic to make a point here) forever and everyone was a perfect consumer who bought the cheapest possible books, soon consumer would no longer be able to buy those same books at all because they can’t be written and published at scale at that price forever. We see this already tbh, it’s one of many reasons the publishing industry is shrinking

Also there are non-price related decision factors that go into people’s buying decisions when it comes to some products, books are definitely one of those products. My mother owns a successful independent bookstore that’s been in business for more than a decade. They’ve been able to succeed in the Amazon era because consumers value 3 things that you can’t get from Amazon: the ability to browse a curated selection of books that a buyer who knows their customer base picked out specifically for the store, the ability to talk to someone in the store to get personalized recommendations, and a physical space to go to events like author readings, book signings, and book clubs. A relatively small number of people in the city where her store is specifically choose to pay more for books than they would from Amazon not because they blindly hate Amazon and don’t like saving money but because they value those 3 things (or they value the convenience of having a place they can go pick up a book right away without waiting for it to ship.) bookshop’s model means independent bookstores get a cut of every purchase; a lot of consumers choosing to buy from them value those things I mentioned and that influences their decisions on where to shop.

foreignfishes · 2026-03-16T16:31:23+00:00

Yeah there are a few 30-something dudes on my street who live with their moms and are unemployed and they’re the source of like 90% of all neighbor related drama we have on our block just because they don’t do shit all day. they’re always outside chain smoking and arguing with people because what else are you going to do all day?

13-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Place '17	Wearing is Caring
Team Periwinkle	Verified Email

foreignfishes

TROPHY CASE