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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
672
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • My family had an interesting experience with this

    My mom's cousin was a wonderful woman, I don't think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.

    Her husband was a piece of shit. I'm not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I'll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.

    She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn't going to take care of them.

    The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I'm a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.

    I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He'd calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.

    I go inside, there's her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He's sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment's thought to his wife dying in the other room. He's clearly more upset that no one's going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.

    We decide it's best if I don't stay long and I don't pick up the dogs at that time.

    I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.

    Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.

    Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.

    My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.

    My mom pulls up and asks what's going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they've had issues before.

    Turns out that they'd gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don't believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.

    Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.

    She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.

    Good for her.

    My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn't much.

    I'm especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom's aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn't have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.

    But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn't really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.

    My mom's main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.

    She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner's office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.

    After a certain amount of time, the coroner's office here cremates the remains, and if they're still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.

    I'm not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else's body, once they die. Once you're dead you're dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I'd just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.

    Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I'm willing to respect their beliefs.

    But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.

    In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn't be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.

  • What seemingly random thing do you vehemently hate?

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  • One time I was working my way down the bread/dairy aisle at a grocery store. It's one of the wider aisles there, if 2 people pulled their carts off to the side, a third person could squeeze down the middle as long as those first two took a little care to not stick out into the aisle too much

    Of course they never do

    So there I am coming down the middle of the aisle, trying to squeeze between some idiot agonizing over which container of sour cream they should buy, and some moron who can't decide on a loaf of bread who are stopped directly across from each other, uttering plenty of "'scuze me/pardon me/lemme just squeeze through heres" and of course neither of them move an inch

    I nearly make it, but do tap one of their carts a bit in the process

    I give her a quick "sorry" and continue on my way.

    Then she yells down after me with a very indignant "excuse you"

    Lady, you were the one blocking the aisle without any situational awareness, and I already apologized, fucking die mad about it.

  • BI: AOC asked voters why they backed her candidacy and Trump's reelection. They said the economy and Gaza.

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  • I'm an essential employee, and a lot of my hobbies are solo outdoor activities. so things were pretty much business as usual for me. But I remember the first few weeks of lockdown, I already commute at kind of a weird time and in a not too congested area, so I never dealt with much traffic to begin with, but there was basically no one on the roads then, and I don't think people realize how big the difference was because everyone was just stuck at home.

    My car actually averaged a whole mile per gallon better than usual just from the lack of my already light traffic.

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  • 2 bedrooms (one is an office that doubles as a guest room with a pull-out couch) 2½ baths

    The two full baths are attached to the bedrooms and are pretty cramped with pretty cheap fittings, but they do the trick. The powder room is downstairs, it's kind of an odd shape due to where it is in the house, and weirdly big but not in a way that makes it particularly more useable and still manages to feel a little cramped. No real counter space to speak of, or other storage options besides the cabinet under the sink. The master bedroom is weirdly huge, and the office is an ok size, but in both cases the way they're laid out with doors and windows, outlets, etc. often leaves us wishing we had a couple more inches any time we think about rearranging or getting new furniture.

    We could only afford this house because it was my mother in laws, she sold it too us for cheap when she moved in with her mother to take care of her.

    My parents have 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, a powder room, and then I guess it might be called a ¾ bathroom in the basement. The master bath is pretty sweet with a whirlpool tub (albeit a fairly small one all things considered) 2 sinks, and a shower (the shower is nothing particularly special) and a TV.

    The bathroom between the two other bedrooms is nothing too special, but has a nice-sized linen closet and pretty decent counter space.

    The powder room is small, nothing too special there.

    The basement bathroom has a sink, a weirdly huge linen close, and a shower stall, no tub.

    The guy who originally owned the home was a landscaper who did a lot of business with a local builder so they tricked the house out for him. He ran his business from the home and we're pretty sure that was the point of the basement bathroom, he could go in through the basement door and shower without tracking dirt through the house.

    The master bedroom is huge, 2 walk-in closets, high ceilings, plenty of space for a king sized bed, a plethora of dressers, a couple small bookshelves, a desk, and a chaise with room to spare. The other 2 bedrooms are decent sized, nothing too special, with pretty huge closets.

    It's a pretty sweet house, I wouldn't be surprised if my parents could get a cool million for it if they sold it now, the stars kind of aligned, they'd just inherited a bit of money, the market was right, and the original owner killed himself there, so they paid less than half of that probably about 15 years ago now.

    The house we lived in before that had 3 bedrooms, none of which were particularly big, and one bathroom.

    The apartment I was living in when I first moved out (to live with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, and a roommate) had 3 bedrooms that were oddly spacious. The master bedroom was pretty big, but again weirdly laid-out, with an en suite bathroom that was nothing too special, it had a pretty decent sized shower that was nothing too special, and there was a second bathroom by the two bedrooms with your typical shower/bathtub. The two other bedrooms were decent-size, our roommates technically had a walk-in closet that doubled as the utility closet for the water heater (and if I miss one thing about that apartment it was the water heater, you could practically brew tea with water from the faucet and it never seemed to run out, and since the apartment wasn't all that big it was almost instant) one of those bedrooms started off as mine, because my wife and I had just recently started dating and I wanted to have my space in case things didn't work out between us (we'd been friends for a good while before that and our plans to move in together had been in the works well before we started dating) but eventually it became her office/storage and additional living space.

    Honestly I liked that apartment, I could probably still be living there pretty happily if they didn't keep jacking the rent up. It was a first floor apartment with a washer and dryer and a decent little patio, my only major gripe was that the kitchen was tiny and there was no decent place to put any sort of dining table (at least not with how we used the space, we'd rather have a decent entertainment center setup and couches for entertaining) so we ate at the coffee table or on tray tables.

  • TIL Nintendo coats all of their Switch cartridges with extremely bitter denatonium benzoate to deter children from putting them in their mouths and swallowing them.

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  • My friend and her husband got a switch back when it first launched, I had heard about this and so the next time I was over I asked if they'd licked one yet.

    He said they hadn't, and he also denied my request to lick one.

    When he left the room, his wife got a mischievous look in her eye and asked if I wanted to lick one.

    I of course took her up on her offer and tasted a cartridge while he wasn't looking.

    I asked if she had tried one, and of course she had.

    They're both cool people, but of the two of them she's definitely my partner in crime.

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  • I think there's at least 3 factors at play here.

    First, you're probably living in a largely eurocentric bubble. You're not seeing other mythologies because they're not being marketed to you, and in some cases you may not even realize some of the ways that those mythologies and folklore and such are being presented to you because you just don't know what to look for (for example, Dragon Ball, in the beginning, borrowed very heavily from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is a hugely important book in Asian literature, and I swear every couple of years there's some new adaptation coming out, but it's not nearly as well known to Western audiences) and translations can get a little wonky, if you watch a movie or read a book from a non-western culture, instead of naming specific deities or other mythological figures, the translator may figure that no one reading the translation is going to know who that is so they'll translate it as something generic like "god" or "a great hero" instead of naming names.

    Second, Western media is huge, and kind of overshadows a lot of other cultures. White Americans making movies in Hollywood are going to tend to pull from their own cultural backgrounds, and that often includes Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology.

    Finally, a lot of it comes down to which mythologies we have actual written records of. The Norse, Greeks, and Romans all wrote about their gods to some extent, Slavic people, on the other hand, did not write until after they'd been converted to Christianity (the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and some other Slavic languages takes it's name from Saint Cyril, who helped to christianize the Slavic peoples, and was developed by his followers,) so there's no real first-hand accounts of their beliefs and practices, only second-hand accounts from other cultures who interacted with them and wrote down what they observed, and people recalling stories they'd heard about earlier times, and that comes with them inserting their own biases and interpretations and just plain getting things wrong. So if you wanted to write something about, for example, the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, you probably wouldn't have as much decent source material to work from as if you wanted to write about the roughly equivalent Norse gods- Thor and Loki.

  • TIL that recipes are not protected by copyright law in the USA (and likely Canada)

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  • It depends a bit on what you mean by "stealing"

    If you were to break into the coke vault, hack into their computers, threaten or blackmail a coke executive, etc. in order to obtain it, those would all be illegal acts on their own.

    But if you reverse-engineered the recipe yourself, or just happened to come across it in some legal fashion you could do pretty much whatever you want with it- publish the recipe, make your own cola and sell it (can't call it "coca-cola" or "Coke" though because of trademarks and such,) try to sell the recipe to one of Coke's competitors, etc.

    Anyone with the recipe is going to have a hell of a time trying to do anything with it though because one of the ingredients is allegedly still coca leaf extract and coke is pretty much the only entity that is allowed to do anything with the stuff.

  • What is your skincare routine?

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  • I've always been lucky and my skin is pretty bulletproof, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and shave with a broken beer bottle and be none the worse for it.

    I shower, normally every day but occasionally skip a day or two due to weather, lack of motivation, and how much I've been sweating, with Dr Bronners Peppermint soap and a washcloth.

    I like Dr Bronners because it's the best I've found at stripping the wax out of my moustache. I also find the mint to be nice and refreshing, especially after a hot day. It's also nice that its organic, fair trade, etc. and since it can be used for pretty much everything I like it for backpacking (I tend to go unscented for that purpose, but if I intend to brush my teeth with it mint in the way to go, still a bit gross and soapy tasting, don't exactly recommend it but it does the trick in a pinch)

    If we want to count it as skincare, though it's more hair care I suppose, my moustache wax of choice is Firehouse Wacky Tacky

    I shave my head with a double edge safety razor, I like Feather blades. I lather up with whatever bar of soap smells good to me when I bought it and looks like it will fit in my shaving bowl, right now I think I'm using Dr Squatch Bay Rum because they sold it in the checkout line of ace hardware and the line was moving slow one day leaving me with nothing much to do to entertain myself but stiff some soaps.

    Sometimes, instead, I splash on some lectric shave and use a foil shaver on my head.

    Then I splash on some aftershave. I used to rotate through the usual drug store brands- Brut, Pinaud Clubman, Aqua Velva, and Old Spice, but then I met my wife and it turns out she really likes me in Old Spice, so I don't switch it up too often anymore. I do tend to get a bottle of cheap bay rum to use over the summer though.

    I use whatever beard oil or balm smells good to me when I run out and find myself needing more. I honestly couldn't even tell you what brand I have kicking around currently, I use it pretty infrequently, mostly when I'm dressing up and feel like my beard could use a little extra taming and shininess. I tend to like woodsy scents like cedar.

    When my hands feel a little dry and cracked, which isn't a very common issue for me, I use Duke Cannon Bloody Knuckles balm. Again, I'm pretty sure that was an impulse buy from the checkout line of a hardware store or something, but I think it works pretty well. My wife probably uses it more than I do and she has an actual skincare routine so I guess she agrees.

    And for deodorant, I again like old spice. It works for me, and I've used it pretty consistently since I was in about 4th or 5th grade when we had a basic sex-ed/some-of-you-stink-so-use-deodorant-please assembly where they handed out a small stick of it to all the guyse Again, apparently my wife likes old spice so that worked out well, and I can usually find a 2-pack of it at most grocery stores and such that is probably the best value in the deodorant aisle.

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  • My gut says that most of the people who vote early have already had their minds made up for a long time and not much would change their vote one way or the other, otherwise they'd probably wait until the day of to see what new information might come to light in case it changes their mind.

    And in general Democrats vote early in higher numbers than Republicans. This wouldn't do much to change how the Democrats vote (what are they gonna do? Say "well I wasn't going to vote for they guy anyway, but now I'm really not gonna vote for him?") but you would at least hope it would for some Republicans (though that might be wishful thinking.) Since more of those Republicans are going to be voting in-person it may have made sense to hold this back so it was still fresh in their mind when they actually go to the polls.

    Just my 2¢ on the matter. Take it for what it's worth.

  • Insane Clown Posse Endorse Kamala Harris

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  • I haven't exactly spent a lot of time in Juggalo circles, but the few I have met have all been great people, the types of people who would literally give you the shirt off their back without a second thought. Generally not the brightest bulbs out there, but they also tend to be the rare type of person who can recognize that about themselves and are willing to seek out and listen to people who are more knowledgeable (unless we're talking about scientists and magnets) which is actually pretty amazing, that's not a common quality to find in any group of people

    I generally kind of think of juggalos as those kids in school who were a little too weird to be "normal" kids, and not smart enough to be "nerds" some of them have some issues, maybe more than average, but most of them are just trying to get by with what they've got.

  • What's a technology that was cooler in its older iterations?

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  • Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase "balls out" or "balls to the wall" (although many say "balls to the wall" has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)

    Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)

  • Launching c/Latvija, the community for Latvia on the Fediverse! Calling all Latvians and those interested in Latvia and the Baltic countries to join and support us.

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  • Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.

  • Supreme Court leaves in place Pennsylvania law barring people under 21 from carrying guns

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  • I'm not anti gun by any means, and I also do think that most people under 21 are not responsible enough to be carrying firearms around most of the time in their daily life.

    That said, I also don't like how we sort of have different levels of adulthood.

    At 18 you're old enough to vote, get drafted, serve on a jury, be legally responsible for your actions and are considered an adult with all of the responsibilities and privileges that comes with that

    Unless you want to buy alcohol, tobacco, carry a firearm, run for certain offices, etc. then you're not adult enough.

    And put mildly, that rubs me the wrong way.

    I don't necessarily disagree with the ages we set those restrictions at, overall I think they're fairly reasonable.

    But I do think that it means that if they're not getting all of the rights and privileges as an older adult, they shouldn't be saddled with the same responsibilities.

    I think younger adults need to be compensated in some way for the rights and privileges they don't get to enjoy. Lower taxes at least, maybe exemption from selective service (though I'd really like to abolish it entirely) until they're old enough to carry a firearm any other time, if they're not old enough to run for a particular office maybe their votes should count extra for those positions to ensure their voices are being heard, etc.

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    Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers

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  • For what it's worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can't be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.

    Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that's the case, but it's not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you're making it out to be.

  • How ham radio endures - and remains a disaster lifeline - in the iPhone era

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  • If you're fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn't and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn't get to the hospital in time.

    You didn't directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.

  • Snubbed by Tesla, Mexican government pledges to create its own small, affordable electric car

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  • The price point is way off, but strangely enough I've personally been champing at the bit for something with pretty much exactly those specs,just at about half the price.

    Currently, I daily drive an SUV and do get good use out of it. I have to commute in the snow (essential employee,) I have outdoorsy hobbies that require hauling people and camping gear around, I tow some small trailers, I use it pretty frequently to move furniture, pick up lumber and other bulky stuff from the hardware store, etc. and while I don't go off-roading in the sense that I don't purposely go looking for rocks to climb and mud to drive through for fun, I do sometimes drive onto a beach to fish or drive onto fields for various reasons, and find myself on some really shitty dirt roads where some ground clearance and 4wd are necessary. I'm doing those things usually a few times a month.

    But most of my daily driving adds up to 20 miles a day or less, on paved roads, rarely going over 45mph. I also have a wonky schedule where I rarely have to work more than 3 days in a row, and it's usually just me and occasionally my wife or my dog (rarely both at the same time)

    I can't quite afford 2 cars, but something like this at the right price point would probably tip the scales in my favor. I could daily drive the small cheap electric car and save my SUV (or maybe a small truck) for my days off when I'm doing stuff that it's needed for while the small car charges.

  • Harris announces plan for Medicare to cover long-term care at home

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  • In addition to higher pay and Medicare coverage, I'd also like to see some tighter regulations on training. What's required varies by state, but usually it's not too stringent, often something like a 2 week course and a background check.

    I work in 911 dispatch, people who have home health aides obviously have a lot of medical emergencies, and it's often those aides calling me when they do. Often they're completely clueless about the patients medical history, unable to answer basic questions like their age, often don't even know the address, and often are uncooperative with me and sometimes refuse to do things like perform CPR when I need them to.

    Some are great, most aren't.

  • What is the absolute last extreme sport you'd be willing to try?

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  • Anvil firing

    You get 2 anvils, stack them on top of each other, the bottom one upside down, pack some gunpowder between them, light it, run, and the top one shoots off into the air and eventually comes back down.

    I'm sure it's a blast (literally) but I'm not trying to looney tunes myself.

  • What is the absolute last extreme sport you'd be willing to try?

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  • I think "cave diving" is generally understood to refer to the underwater variety.

    If you're referring to general cave exploration, that would generally be called "spelunking"