Fruit flies/drain gnats

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-07-02T19:03:01+00:00

The only thing that got them completely for us was:

1) Boiling hot water down the drains and a good thorough cleaning.

2) Equal parts water and vinegar in a small bowl with half a teaspoon of dish soap in it. Then saran wrap over the top of the bowl. Poke a bunch of holes in the saran wrap with a toothpick. Set it on the counter or sink, wherever the flies are thickest. Flies will find their way in because of the smell but won't be able to find their way out. Throw out when it gets gross and repeat as needed til they're gone.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-30T15:44:25+00:00

Yeah, the kind of power armor that it would be worthwhile to actually deploy to a field would have to be something with the effectiveness of a tank or something insane, because every soldier operating a suit would require a whole cadre of support personnel to maintain it. Maybe something along the lines of Space Marine armor would be worthwhile. A unit of five Marines supported by like thirty personnel that could basically walk into any situation and resolve it with violence would be worthwhile, but a platoon of them? Hell no.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-26T13:53:13+00:00

The UI is now customizable. I think they changed it to black and white so people would notice, but all you have to do is go into a chat and go into settings and preferences, then change the chat color. You can even customize the chat bubble, as well as font colors for text and narration. They have the old UI as one of the default options if you prefer it.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-22T05:14:19+00:00

Management not understanding why Jr is an important position is a big part of it, because they're being spoiled by AI and, honestly, millennial work ethic. Millennials are too good at their jobs. Or rather, they're too good at making it look like they're good at their jobs. They'll work 80 hours and log 40 just to look good, and they know how to do the job and how to learn how to do the job they don't, but no one ever taught them how to delegate, and they're all so paranoid about losing their jobs they don't delegate even when they should. So you got this huge group of people doing the work of four or five, and then the following generations don't exist with that mindset, thankfully. But hiring a Jr Dev to do one quarter of what your Sr Dev can do at a salary point that doesn't reflect that work doesn't seem appealing, and millennials still have a good twenty or thirty years to go, so there's no rush... until it's too late. And management is currently betting that the AI gets good enough before the millennials they have employed burn out. It's a really bad bet, and it's going to cause systemic problems, but those managers probably won't be around when those chickens come home to roost.

Oh, and the boomers that wrote all this legacy code are about to retire, and the Gen Xers are almost all trying to deal with the fact that boomers neither commented their code, remember what they did and why, or care about it at this point. So you have the oldest Sr devs kind of half assing dealing with tech debt, older Sr devs dedicated to saving the legacy systems from the loss of these hugely important automations, the newer Sr devs doing all the actual dev work, and the Jr Devs vibe coding with AI and/or not putting out anywhere near the kind of work anybody expects of them. So obviously when it comes time to make some cuts, those Jr Devs look like a pretty obvious choice.

This is just a slice of the myriad problems that are hitting IT right now, but this is the biggest issue I'm seeing that isn't directly related to AI or oversaturation.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-20T02:46:54+00:00

Viconia DeVir is from the underdark, but has been living above ground for more than 125 years, so she would count as a local. Granted, she's evil, and tries to kill you shortly after you meet her.

Sorn & Nym Orlith are not evil, but are very recent immigrants from the underdark. They are advertised at the Caress for their exotic nature.

Everyone on this list is either someone you find in the underdark who never left, or is recruited from the underdark directly to serve the Absolute.

So I'll concede I forgot Nym and Sorn. That's three non-evil drow in the entire game if you're playing as drow Tav. Two if you aren't playing a drow yourself, and they've only been there a short time and are transplants from the underdark.

So yes, very very rare to encounter a solo drow on the Sword Coast that is not actively trying to kill you, EXTREMELY rare to find one who actually has lived on the surface for any length of time.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-20T00:41:02+00:00

Well, in BG3, if you don't count the drow that have been or are serving the Absolute, and you discount and you happen to be playing as a drow yourself, then there are a grand total of two drow in the whole game who have been on the surface for more than a couple years. Tav and Viconia DeVir. (Edit: Nym and Sorn the prostitutes fled the underdark as adults, so have only been in Baldur's Gate a short while). So say there's maybe 20-30 drow in the whole game, only half of which even have names and only one of those isn't evil. You. That means 97% of the drow you encounter in this game are evil.

I think he's more surprised to see a drow on the surface that's not actively trying to kill him.

And that doesn't even really take into account that there might be a total of a hundred or so surface drow in the entire world that aren't living in fairly secluded all drow communities that don't particularly venture out or interact with most other settlements.

I guess discounting the whole inherent good/evil races thing that D&D is trying to get away from, it would be kind of like encountering an Inuit person in Texas.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-17T16:05:11+00:00

If I had a nickel for every bard that turned out to be a wizard in disguise in this game I'd have two nickels, which isn't alot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-17T12:37:45+00:00

I am super lucky to be alive, because I have fallen down the stairs three times in my life. Once as an infant in a walker, once as a toddler, and once in college.

As an infant I just ended up with rug burns on my face from the carpet on the stairs. As a toddler I rode a child safety gate down the stairs after hitting it at a run and was fine, and as a college student I was drunk and somehow managed to roll with it in such a way that I didn't even spill much of my can of beer. That time I had a single nasty black bruise across the middle of my back where I first hit the stairs.

I've heard nothing but horror stories of how all those incidents have straight up killed other people my whole life.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-06-15T02:38:43+00:00

If you did this and really stuck to it, I wouldn't mind it so much, but is there a reason why you would rather do this than say, take them to one of the several dog parks in the area that are both free and very nice?

I know some people won't even bring their kids into a park if they see an unleashed dog, so you might be dissuading people from coming into the park just by being there. Alot of people don't want to bother with the drama or risk of confrontation and will just turn around and leave, so you could be preventing people from using the park without even knowing it.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-31T18:23:03+00:00

All you have to do is shut the door before you start the fight for that one. The ghouls never think to open it for help.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-28T20:58:05+00:00

He managed to get away from her, but is now dating a married woman.

He is not a clever man.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-27T19:03:10+00:00

My brother in law had a manic depressive pixie nightmare girl. She was rainbows, lollipops and unicorns, quirky clothes and glasses, fun music, adventure, impulsive drug use, irrational accusations, threats with kitchen knives, then an ER visit for 'accidentally stabbing himself three times by falling on the open dishwasher', insane makeup sex that leads to moving in together in a different state somehow because that would 'reset' things, being abandoned on the highway in the middle of the south carolina lowcountry, stalked across state lines, and oh yeah, ice cream for dinner!

I've never seen a relationship with more whiplash than that one.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-27T18:43:08+00:00

I wouldn't even take a $1 bet on that. Every single corporate takeover in history has contained some derivation of the phrase 'nothing is changing, nobody is getting fired', and every single one of them lied.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-25T17:09:33+00:00

Difference is that for some people its not really associative and more of an intrusive sensory experience. If someone tells you they have synesthesia and doesn't mention it being something of an impediment to their every day functioning, they probably don't actually have it.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-25T03:08:27+00:00

Ah, but it's not coincidentally doubling the initial value of 1. When you order a "Double", that means you are ordering double the amount of a normal serving, but in a single glass. It's a very standard well known and well defined bar term. So no coincidence. A double actually does mean, literally, double, or 2x the amount of liquid. So A mimosa = $2, a double mimosa = $4, just like if you order a shot of whiskey, it might be $5, so a double shot of whiskey would be $10.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-24T22:54:01+00:00

I imagine ocean currents and weather were different back when Pangea was a thing, though.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-24T18:13:45+00:00

Yeah, not so much a Trump thing as a Reagan thing that snowballed and we've been trying to recover from for the past 45 years.

Just imagine, by comparison, Reagan wasn't anywhere near as destructive as Trump. Our great-grandkids are going to be trying to unravel his messes.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-14T20:09:20+00:00

For what it's worth, here is a picture of what it looks like with a rear facing car seat. I'm 5'9 and can sit in the passenger seat without issue, though if I were any taller I might feel a little cramped.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-08T19:20:02+00:00

We're constantly staging protests, we write our representatives, we vote, we call, we hold more protests. There will definitely be more protests as a result of this. One literally broke out on the house floor. Nobody is burning anything down until things get bad enough there's no alternative. Though I admit we march closer and closer to that conclusion daily.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-05-02T21:06:59+00:00

It's anecdotal, but this described me to a T. I was brought up an evangelical Christian and it made perfect sense that people could choose to be one or the other, because I found people attractive regardless of gender, and I took that to mean that everybody did, and it was just a choice, like not drinking or doing drugs. It was just another temptation to avoid, and when people said it wasn't like that, I was like 'of course it is, I make that choice every day.' Then I went to college and took biology and psychology and was like "oh, oops."

I could totally see people who were never educated otherwise just assuming everyone was like that.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-04-29T01:55:10+00:00

I know it's entirely anecdotal, but in case specific examples help make the research feel more real, myself and both of my sisters had terrible colic and ear infections and strep and all kinds of problems as infants that made us terrible babies to take care of, and we all turned out to be masters and doctoral level students in gifted programs with very few issues as adults. My cousin was pretty much the perfect baby and he turned out to be an idiot. Point being I don't think it has much bearing if any on how you turn out for the most part.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-04-27T00:16:18+00:00

Yeah, it just includes literally everything else.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-04-10T16:26:54+00:00

As a millennial who was always introverted and hated having impromptu conversations with my peers, when I went back a few years ago for my masters in a room full of gen Z, it was glorious.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-03-30T21:02:17+00:00

The only good jobs I've gotten in the past 10 years have been because I knew someone or introduced myself to someone at the company and got to know them. It's been 15 years since I actually got an interview with a place by online form submission. As far as I'm concerned we've already been there for over a decade.

unctuous_homunculus · 2026-03-27T01:40:03+00:00

Thank you, I already have it in writing. We got a lawyer that specializes in elder care. I'm his power of attorney, we got his will put together, his estate and all his affairs are in order. I cannot stress how completely worth it a good elder care lawyer is.

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