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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
671
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Since it won't happen the other way around, how do I get people to approach ME in public?

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  • Probably the best thing I ever did to get random people to talk to me was growing a big curly handlebar moustache, now complimented with a long bushy beard.

    My fashion choices also tend to make me stand out a bit- brightly colored Hawaiian shirts in the warmer months (I have one with pictures of the dog breed I have on it, that gets a lot of people approaching me,) occasionally a kilt (people love to ask about the kilt) interesting sunglasses, hats (used to wear a bowler occasionally, I'm less of a fan of it these days, panama hat in the summer, etc.)

    Clothing and style choices are a little tricky. There's kind of a fine line between wearing something interesting that makes people want to talk to you and coming across as a fedora-wearing neckbeard who's trying too hard. Those choices have to look good on you, you have to like them and give off a bit of confidence while wearing them, and it has to be something that will catch the attention of the kind of person you want to attract.

    And most importantly, you need to be able to carry a conversation from there. That's the hard part.

    Having some story or a joke at the ready is a pretty good crutch to kind of get yourself over that last part. For example my go-to when people come up to me to compliment my beard/moustache is to joke that "I grew it myself" which is usually good for a chuckle, and then the ice is broken, and you can kind of try to steer the conversation from there.

    I've had a lot of fun conversations with strangers and made a few friends along the way. I never personally had much luck turning that into a romantic relationship, but that was also never something I actively pursued much in general, I just kind of let things go from there and through friends who I met that way I eventually met my wife.

  • What's your favorite fake band name?

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  • The Shanty Swing Band

    One drunken night in a tiki bar, a bunch of my friends cooked up this idea for a band that was entirely too crazy to ever work, especially with our musical and organizational skills.

    The idea was for it to be sort of a folk-metal/jazz fusion thing that played sea shanties.

    I feel like it's also worth mentioning that this idea came about well before COVID when sea shanties had a little moment.

    I think by the time we all sobered up the next day we realized it wasn't going to work, but we sure as hell left the bar that night thinking we were onto something.

    Part of the concept also involved a "gun player" who would fire off some blanks from a flintlock pistol, sort of like a budget-friendly 1812 overture because something something pirates.

    Regardless of the actual feasibility of this project, I still really dig the name.

  • Why don’t Americans radiate foods?

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  • There's a small (and best of all free) museum in Philly called the Science History Institute.

    Until a couple years ago, it went by the Chemical Heritage Foundation

    Which I personally thought was a much cooler name.

    Officially the name change was to reflect that their focus includes more than just chemistry,

    But I have a sneaking suspicion that a big part of the reason for the change was that the old name just kind of creeped people out, and I'll admit it had a bit of a mad scientist ring to it.

    Anyway, cool little museum for anyone who finds themselves in Philly, do recommend.

  • I could earn that badge

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  • Ketchup has kind of an interesting history

    The term ketchup/catsup (or various other spellings) first appeared in about the 1600s, but tomato ketchup didn't really catch on until about 200-300 years later. Before then it was used to refer to a variety of different sauces/condiments. Mushroom ketchup was a fairly popular one, some were based on fish sauces (you could maybe make an argument that Worcestershire sauce is a type of ketchup) etc.

    The general consensus is that it was sort of the result Europeans attempting to recreate various Asian sauces without really knowing what was in them or having access to the right ingredients (for example trying to make something like soy sauce without soy beans)

  • The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business

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  • Honestly, in that case it's not even an inventory thing, just plan on ordering a couple days earlier and go for the longer slower shipping method so it ends up arriving on the same day. You don't have to warehouse it any longer than if you ordered it later with faster shipping, and you save a decent chunk of cash.

  • I avoid approaching women in public because I believe it's inappropriate. My parents say that it's a necessary skill. Who is right?

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  • I think there's a lot of nuance that both sides of this are missing. There's a lot of middle ground between not talking to women out in the world at all, and going up to random girls and saying "nice shoes, wanna fuck?

    You absolutely can approach people, strike up a conversation, maybe even hit it off and spin it into a friendship or romantic relationship.

    I'm far from the guy to tell someone how to do that and try to pick apart the it's and outs of what makes some things ok and others not, but it is something that absolutely can be done.

  • Chips aren’t improving like they used to, and it’s killing game console price cuts

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  • I just built a PC after not having a computer for about 5+ years.

    Built it for games, did not feel like I was missing out on anything in particular except games by not having a computer. There's a lot of things I'd rather use a computer for but these days most of what I used to do on a computer can be done just fine from a phone or tablet.

    During those 5 or so years, I maybe needed to use a computer about a dozen times, and if my wife didn't have a computer I could have just swung by a library for a bit to take care of it.

  • The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes | CNN Business

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  • I used to be the shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, it fell to me to arrange all of our freight pickups, which was annoying because I didn't really have direct access to any information about pricing, deadlines, etc. so I was constantly going back to the office to show someone quotes to see whether the rates and transit times were acceptable.

    Most of our freight was LTL stuff (less than truckload, a couple pallets, not enough to fill a truck by itself) but a few times every month or two we'd get full truckload sized orders.

    When it came to them, often "intermodal" shipping had much better rates. Intermodal meaning at least 2 different forms of transportation were going to be used. Truck, train, boat, cargo plane, etc.

    As a US-based company with mostly US-based customers, that usually meant rail for us.

    However, almost none of our shipments went intermodal because it was too slow for our customers.

    It wasn't usually a drastic difference, we're talking maybe 1-3 extra days in most cases. Over the Road (OTR) there weren't many places in the US that we couldn't get freight to from our location in 5 days or less, and those 5 day locations were mostly real middle-of-nowhere customers on the other side of the country.

    It always blew my mind that we didn't or couldn't push our customers to just place orders 2 or 3 days earlier to save some pretty significant money on shipping.

    I don't claim to know much about the industry, i was just some kid who needed a job and ended up the shipping guy because I knew how to use a computer and spoke English. But we a textile company that made things like work clothes (chef coats, scrubs, industrial work wear, etc) and restaurant table linens, and we sold mostly to bigger wholesalers, business service companies, etc. who would resell it or provide it to their customers as part some sort of contracted laundry service or something, so not really something I'd think of as being particularly time-sensitive or wildly unpredictable that they couldn't anticipate their bigger orders a couple days ahead of time

    Guess it probably says something about how much we all love instant gratification.

  • Removed

    3 1/4 vintage floppy cameras.

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  • I remember my 4th grade teacher having one of these and showing it off around 2000, it may have been the first digital camera I ever saw.

    Blew my mind back then.

    He was one of my favorite teachers, really into science, loved gadgets. He was an older guy who retired a few years later and I heard he wasn't in the best of health, no idea if he's still around, but I hope he at least lived long enough to appreciate how far digital cameras have come since then.

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    TIL The movie Jaws bas based on the summer of shark attacks on Jersey Shore, U.S.A.

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  • When they try to leave they just tend to not get very far because they never learned how to pump their own gas.

  • What's the craziest thing that ever happened at your workplace?

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  • I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we're counting incidents that we've handled as dispatchers, or if we're only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.

    For the former, I'm going to just leave it at- we've handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we've probably had something similar happen. I'm not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.

    Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren't taking it too seriously, he's a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.

    Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we're at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It's not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.

    Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he's going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he's logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.

    Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s'mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s'more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they've ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a "no s'mores" rule.

    There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn't have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There's been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.

  • In how many languages can you count to 10?

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  • English, French, Spanish, Esperanto

    As a bonus: binary, hexadecimal, octal (really most bases but I can only go past that up to hexatrigesimal without looking up the symbols) Roman numerals, tally marks

  • If you could create an additional day of the week, what would you name it and why?

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  • I work a weird sche, 2 on, 2 off, 3 on and then the next week it flips. So every other week working friday-sunday, or I'm off those days.

    An the one hand I support this because 3 day weekends are fucking great and everyone should have them

    On the other hand, I have a feeling that would change my schedule to 2-2-4, and while 4 day weekends are even better than 3 days, I'd probably be stuck working 4 days in a row on my working weekends

  • Parents of daughter who died of measles meets with RFK Jr. to blame everyone but themselves.

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  • By and large, Mennonites do skew pretty crazy and conservative in a lot of ways, but I think it's worth pointing out that there can be a tremendous amount of variation from one church/community to another, there's not much in the way of a larger overarching organization, a lot of policies, beliefs, interpretations and such are sorted out at the local level.

    Some Mennonite churches are practically indistinguishable from the Amish, but there are some around that are very liberal. I live in an area with a pretty large Mennonite population, and the churches kind of run the entire gamut from horse and buggies to some of the most modern and liberal churches I've ever heard of.

    They do, like I said, tend to skew more towards the conservative end of things, but there is a lot of variation there.

  • Senator vows to go to El Salvador if Trump administration doesn’t return Maryland man

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  • That's where my mind went to, a member of Congress taking on themselves to fly to South America to investigate some weird shit going down there involving Americans maybe isn't the best move.

  • What are the most comfortable women's shoes for hospital staff who stand a lot?

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  • Don't know about autoclavability, but I've known a few retail workers and people with other jobs that have you on your feet all day who swear by danskos

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  • Finer bits of wood, like sawdust, or pencil shavings from sharpening, catch fire much more readily than a solid chunk of wood like a whole pencil.

    Given the right environment, finer sawdust can even be explosive.

    A lot of campers and other outdoorsy types are probably familiar with using "feather sticks" to start a fire, where you take a stick and cut a bunch of fine curls into it, almost like you're whittling down the stick but leaving the shavings attached.

    The whole stick wouldn't readily catch fire, but those finer curls attached to it will light pretty easily and spread to the rest of the stick.

    And while I've seen some pretty impressive feather sticks made by people with a steady hand and sharp knife, most of the time those feathers aren't quite as fine as most pencil shavings.

  • What old movie ending made you cry?

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  • Old Yeller

    If that movie doesn't get you to shed a tear, you're not human.

    I'm a pretty hard-boiled tough guy by most standards, and I'm getting a little misty just thinking about it.

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  • I have a friend who likes his because he can have it halfway open or clip it to his shirt pocket to use it as a hands free work light.

    Depending on what kind of clothes you wear they can also carry better in your packet. (Assuming clamshell folding and not a folding tablet)

  • BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

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  • I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

    If you're touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it's reasonable to expect that it's going to cover at least most of the globe.

    It also doesn't really seem like it's intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you'd fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn't want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

    EDIT:

    Also, for pretty much the entire history of TV, different parts of the world have operated using different and often incompatible broadcast standards. I don't really see that changing and the rest of the world adopting ours, especially with the current administration being blatantly hostile to our allies. At best they'll adopt their own standards that will do something similar to BPS but probably won't be directly compatible, there may be devices that can make use of both, similar to how a lot of GPS devices can also use Galileo or Glonass.