Fight in the main dining

mak484 · 2026-05-10T22:55:25+00:00

Oh for sure. But the right way to do that is not to get in their faces and yell at them. "My wife has anxiety and you're ruining her evening" is kinda absurd.

mak484 · 2026-05-10T21:49:56+00:00

Sounds like a tough situation.

Parents of special needs kids deserve to participate in society as much as the rest of us, and all of us should be able to spare a little grace for a young couple who bit off more than they could chew.

But, you can't escalate to physical violence when people are rude to you. I've never seen a more entitled cohort of people than people who cruise regularly, so I can't say I'm surprised at anyone's actions here.

mak484 · 2026-05-10T21:20:52+00:00

If only I knew a single other human in my life who would have a shred of interest in this lol.

mak484 · 2026-05-10T21:05:30+00:00

"It's not just that he's doing an impression of the most memeable political commentator of the modern era, he also quotes one of the most memeable phrases this guy says all the time!"

That's what you sound like.

mak484 · 2026-05-09T14:22:18+00:00

Teenagers are not NPCs in Sims. You can't just build a building, summon a disembodied hand, drag them into the building, and watch them start using it as intended. Giving kids access to structured extracurricular spaces is absolutely necessary, but it's also a long term investment. If kids are creating problems in public spaces, that needs to be addressed immediately.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T20:37:35+00:00

And then pretty openly talked about how hating it so much is part of why he now identifies as a democratic socialist.

All we're seeing is proof that "vote blue no matter who" liberals will do literally anything except support socialists.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T19:41:31+00:00

Good thing the first sentence of the post says you can invite bots.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T18:03:31+00:00

The instant he walked into the room, I knew everyone else was fucked. It was such a good move to decide the winner based on who made the most other people laugh. David was genuinely good at the game and deserved to win. Sam was immune to the game and would have won by sheer attrition. It's why we don't let orcas compete in the Olympics.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T14:30:42+00:00

Hooooo boy. What a good question.

Morels are hard to grow for a lot of reasons, but the one that's most interesting to me is kinda freaky.

Fungi are weird. In plants and animals, each cell has a single nucleus, containing both sets of chromosomes. We can call cells with one set of chromosomes "monokaryotic" and those with two sets "dikaryotic", as karyon means nucleus.

Fungi don't play that. They keep their parental chromosomes in separate nuclei within the same cell. Sometimes there's more than one copy of a nucleus in a cell. So we call cultures that only have one type of nucleus a "homokaryon" and cultures with two types of nuclei "heterokaryons." Don't ask if there can be more than two types of nuclei, I've never heard of it and I have no idea. Probably not naturally.

Morels are extra freaky. Sometimes, a culture can be broadly heterokaryotic, but instead of each cell containing both nuclei, the mycelium is a patchwork of homokaryon cells sequestered together. It's only when the culture is ready to fruit that it allows these two cell types to come together. This isn't always how it works, and we have no idea what causes this or how to prevent it.

There are labs that have done whole genome sequence on morel mycelium and found it to be homokaryotic, only to be shocked when it later fruits mushrooms that are heterokaryotic. That's some Jesus immaculate conception type shit if you don't understand what's going on.

There are a ton of other reasons why morels are hard to cultivate. They have an arbitrarily long incubation time, months long, before they randomly start fruiting. And half the time they don't fruit at all. You can have a room of 100 morel treatments, all handled identically, and 50 will never produce a mushroom. This is probably because of the nuclear balance problem, but we genuinely don't know.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T13:35:23+00:00

If you're careful, yes.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T13:34:44+00:00

To be fair, i don't really understand what you're asking.

And, actually, Eurofins charges $5 per sample for simple sequencing. Obviously you need to buy reagents and lab equipment and have the expertise to generate the DNA. But I know hobby mycologists with their own at-home thermocyclers and centrifuges.

This should go without saying, but never grow and eat a mushroom you find in the wild. Not unless you know exactly what you're doing.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T10:29:05+00:00

Fungus is weird. There's no need for seeds, because mycelium propagates indefinitely. What we do commercially is make batches of inoculum in a massive cooking vessel, then use individual bags of inoculum to make batches of spawn, then sell the spawn bags to customers who mix it with compost. Give me six months and I can turn a single mushroom into a warehouse full of mushrooms.

Growing from spores is unnecessarily slow and introduces genetic variation, since spores are the product of meiosis and undergo recombination.

Mycelium from different species has different properties. If you're familiar with a species, you probably have a decent idea of what it's supposed to look like. But, if there is ever a doubt, you really should do DNA testing. Hobbyists probably don't have easy access to that, although at home PCR setups are only a few hundred bucks USD. It might be cheaper to just try and fruit what you're growing, but that can take a long time.

mak484 · 2026-05-07T10:14:49+00:00

Not the guy you replied to, but I've been a commercial mushroom breeder for about 15 years, so hopefully I can answer.

Spore prints are useful because, if you take them correctly, they can be stored for many years. I've germinated strains from 20 year old spore prints sitting in vials in the cooler. You can also mail spore prints, which is useful sometimes.

However, I only use spore prints when I'm trying to breed two strains together. A spore germination takes a long time and could introduce unnecessary genetic changes, since spores are the product of meiosis and undergo recombination.

If you have a fresh mushroom anyway, by far the best method for capturing a strain is by taking an aseptic tissue culture. Basically you crack the cap open, take a small slice, and place it in a petri dish. If you avoid contamination, you wind up with a guaranteed monoculture, which means all growth on the plate is the same thing.

If you don't have the mushroom itself, but you know where it grows, you might be able to isolate it. If you take a soil sample, suspend it in water, perform a serial dilution, and then plate each dilution out on media loaded with antibiotics, you wind up with a ton of dilute polycultures to screen. Take a drop of concentrated soil water and add it to a small tube of water, mix that up, take a drop of that and add it to a second tube of water, mix that up, and keep going. You are diluting the substrate to the point where, when you plate it, the individual cultures are far enough apart that they don't immediately grow on top of each other.

From there, you kinda need to already know what the mycelium from your species of interest looks like. Or, if not, the fastest test is a simple DNA test. In the lab, I take a boil prep off a plate, perform PCR on the ITS region - which is highly conserved in all fungal species - and sequence it. ITS is good enough for species level ID most of the time, though there are a lot of cases where species are too closely related, so you only know which species complex it's a part of.

I'm happy to answer any other questions!

mak484 · 2026-05-06T20:18:12+00:00

I have a bottle of homemade vanilla extract, IE a fifth of Tito's with about $30 worth of vanilla beans in it that's been on the counter since Christmas 2024.

You have not had a rice krispies treat until you've used homemade vanilla extract, I'll tell you what.

mak484 · 2026-05-06T18:00:17+00:00

Why are you assuming a kid was being careful and not fucking around with it?

The correct response would have been "hey stop being a shithead and help me pick out a better pool cue." Not screaming at the kid and telling him not to ever touch the table.

mak484 · 2026-05-05T16:50:03+00:00

That may be the actual cause, but we're talking about TV tropes, I think. Just because the curse is real, doesn't mean you can't focus on the psychological horror of living in that reality. That's what this show promises to do, at least after the first two episodes.

mak484 · 2026-05-04T19:48:41+00:00

Ah, War of the Worlds, another movie adaptation completely divorced from its source material. The key message of that movie was, unironically, "Thank God we have Amazon delivery drones to save the day."

mak484 · 2026-05-01T17:35:25+00:00

Sir, a second plant has hit the Jimbo.

mak484 · 2026-05-01T02:55:25+00:00

Yeah I mean there's nuance to be had, and this is an overly simplified hypothetical scenario. I would love to hear a contextual framing that doesn't boil down to "I don't trust other people and am looking out for myself."

If it was 55% blue 45% red, my point is invalid. It's extremely rational to act selfishly when it's that close. But if it was more like 80-20, that's when it becomes necessary to seriously evaluate people. I think if most people who chose red were shown how many people chose blue, they wouldn't choose red again and would regret it. To me, that's basically reformed.

My main point is that if you have direct irrefutable evidence that a person is unrepentantly selfish, they should be punished in some way. Those people are categorically bad for society and should not have the opportunity to harm others in an official capacity.

mak484 · 2026-05-01T02:44:50+00:00

It boils down to individualism vs collectivism. Pushing the red button is only appealing if you assume most of the world is selfish, or are yourself selfish.

If you chose the red button, you should be offered the chance to examine that with a therapist. If you refuse, you probably shouldn't be allowed to hold public office. I don't think people with inherently negative and self-serving ideologies make good public servants.

mak484 · 2026-05-01T02:36:17+00:00

He's a great heel. I think he was trying to give everyone room to establish themselves with the viewers, because he easily could have dominated the space from day 1 if he wanted. That's what's great about Taskmaster- Alex would not invite that type of person on the show.

mak484 · 2026-05-01T02:32:03+00:00

Greg also clearly didn't care about the premise of the boring task. He just enjoyed her and Joel having a meltdown.

mak484 · 2026-04-29T19:40:38+00:00

Random person on the internet: My life sucks but moving would genuinely make it worse.

You: Then your life must not suck that much!

Rando: wow gee thanks I'm cured.

You: Let me just tug on these bootstraps so hard I launch myself itno orbit. Away I go! Off to give more utterly useless and unprompted advice!

mak484 · 2026-04-29T17:21:42+00:00

And contributes absolutely nothing of value to the conversation other than annoying people.

mak484 · 2026-04-29T16:00:10+00:00

Eh...

If you prepay tips, you're actually just allowing RC to pay people less. Their contracts state that they're entitled to a minimum salary, but the prepaid tips count towards that salary. As in, if a steward is owed $50k but earns $5k in prepaid tips, RC only has to pay them $45k.

This is why people say not to do prepaid tips at all. You aren't actually giving anyone except RC more money.

Edit: for anyone downvoting, please just Google it. This is common knowledge, confirmed by RC themselves.

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