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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
663
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • What phrases/sentences instantly reveal someone as a chud?

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  • It's been a while since I've encountered it, which is why I wasn't totally sure of the usage

    But anecdotally, the handful of times I have seen the term in the wild, it was always from someone inserting themselves into a conversation where obviously people aren't going to be open to hearing about veganism.

    Like if they hopped into a thread about, for example, a BBQ or hunting forum, and started berating people for eating meat, and when they get told to pound sand, they go off about how that's "typical carnist behavior" or something.

    Which I think you can probably agree is pretty CHUD-y

    Not saying that's how it's used in regular vegan circles, but that's how I've personally seen used it as a non-vegan

  • What phrases/sentences instantly reveal someone as a chud?

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  • I believe "carnist" is used by more radical vegan/vegetarians to refer to meat-eaters

    And I'm pretty sure "foid" is incel for "women", femoid became f-oid became foid.

  • Corned Beef Wellington - Am I crazy?

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  • The flavor is of course going to change dramatically by corning it, lots of salt and spices and such involved there, but I'm not terribly concerned about that, it isn't really the most flavorful cut to begin with, not a lot of fat and connective tissue to give it flavor, which is also why it's so tender which is the real draw

    In general my plan is to cure it, but otherwise treat it like I would a normal wellington, so overcooking hopefully shouldn't be a problem- quick sear, wrap it up then cook to probably medium-ish (normally aim more rare/medium-rare for Wellington, but rare corned beef just kind of doesn't sound great to me)

    And yeah I think the pudding instead of or mixed into the duxelles is a good move, not easy to find around me but I'll be looking around for it and I have almost 2 weeks to track it down

  • Pentagon puts Scouts 'on notice' over DEI and girl-centered policies

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  • My local council has a long-run ting exchange program with a Canadian council, where scouting is coed. Every 4 years we send a bunch of scouts up to camp and spend time with our Canadian counterparts, and then the next year they send a bunch down to do the same here.

    I haven't looked into how they work it since they started allowing girls to participate, but back when I was in we had an arrangement with the local girl scout council for them to participate and host female Canadian scouts and to travel to Canada with us(and of course female venturers also participated)

    The program has been going on for almost 60 years, and I've never heard of there being an issue. Girls and boys camp in separate areas but participate in activities as a single unit.

    And that's much the same way Scouts America is operating now.

    And on top of that

    Venturing and sea scouts have also been coed for a long time.

    There was always female camp staff at summer camp who were around our age.

    I'm sure along the way some kids have taken the opportunity to do what horny teenagers have always done since time immemorial, but I think it's probably fair to assume that if not at scouts they probably would have found another time and place to do that anyway, not being in scouts certainly hasn't put a damper on that for a great many people over the years.

    And of course, its 2026, gay scouts don't have to stay in the closet anymore.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • People don't really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.

    God damn do I feel that.

    I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.

    I'm a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.

    And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn't really hard, just time-consuming)

    I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there's a good chance the others weren't far behind)

    For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.

    And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.

    So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics

    So that's what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn't make financial sense to fix it.

    This wasn't a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it's an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn't a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that's pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic "3 inch roller wheel" for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.

    But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn't find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.

    They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I'd have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.

  • Scouts Will Abandon D.E.I. Policies Under Agreement With Pentagon, Hegseth Says

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  • Unfortunately I live a really long way from their HQ in Texas, and have neither the time nor the money to do so.

    And delivering it to my local council wouldn't really have the same impact, my local council isn't the problem, they actually tried to admit gay scouts back in the 90's when the national organization was still firmly against it.

  • Scouts Will Abandon D.E.I. Policies Under Agreement With Pentagon, Hegseth Says

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  • Kegsbreath has pretty clearly said that he hopes to have girls kicked out and is going to further reevaluate in 6 months though

    So it's coming.

  • Scouts Will Abandon D.E.I. Policies Under Agreement With Pentagon, Hegseth Says

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  • I'm an eagle scout, and I've been following this story.

    I'm going to be returning my medal as soon as I find a good mailing address that gives it the best chance of it landing on Roger Krone's desk.

    I've been in touch with every eagle I know. A good handful of them are on-board with sending their medals back as well. Most of the rest of them are at least going to be writing letters and doing whatever else they can to draw some attention to this.

    Look, in the grand scheme of things, the changes they've agreed to change little to nothing about the scout program.

    But if they caved once, that just means that hegseth is just going to try again, and they'll probably cave in next time too. And the next time.

    I'm not doing it lightly, I'm damn proud of my eagle scout award, that goofy little medal ranks among my most priced possessions.

    But after a couple more rounds of this bullshit, they're going to twist scouting into something I'd no longer want to identify with, so one way or another my days of being proud of that medal are coming to an end.

  • How did you meet your significant person?

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  • I slacked off in high school and went to community college.

    Where I continued slacking off. I sat in the back of one of my history classes because it was near an outlet, so I could plug my laptop in, pretend to be taking notes or whatever, but in actuality was just goofing off for most of the class

    Next to me sat another slacker, he was goofing off in much the same sort of way, and we hit it off.

    He became, and still is, one of my best friends. Most of my friends I can actually trace back to him in some way or another. He's one of those people whose ability to meet and befriend people everywhere he goes borders on the magical.

    One day we met up to go wander around a local flea market/farmers market. We ran into his best friend who also happened to choose that day to go wandering around the aisles of junk looking for hidden treasure.

    And that friend brought his girlfriend with him. Years later she would become my wife.

    It wasn't exactly love at first sight. We all wandered around together for a while chit-chatting, and eventually we ported ways. She didn't make much of an impression on me at the time, nor I on her, I actually don't think she even remembers this story.

    Since we shared pretty much the same circle of friends, we would bump into each other occasionally at parties and such. For a few years I don't think either of us really thought much about the other, we were just friends of a friend who seemed cool enough.

    Eventually, of course, the two of them broke up, as tends to happen. We all stayed in pretty much the same social circles, but she and I didn't have a whole lot of direct interaction.

    One day, that friend from community college hits me up. He's heading over to the house that she was renting with a couple roommates, no real plans, just chill, have a few beers, watch movies, maybe get some food. So I tag along.

    It was basically the three of us hanging out in her living room, and her roommates occasionally wandered in to grab a beer from us before disappearing back into their rooms.

    We refer to that night as "The Accidental Nazi Night" because just picking random movies from Netflix, we ended up choosing Iron Sky (about Nazis on the moon,) Equilibrium (dystopian movie with an authoritarian state surprising free expression and such,) and Fire with Fire (where the main villain is a Neo-Nazi)

    So that was my first time really spending any sort of quality time with her, just chilling in her living room, killing a case of beer, and watching movies of varying quality.

    We became pretty good friends after that. The house she rented basically became the usual hangout place for everyone, so I spent a lot of time there. Funnily enough, she tended to hang out in her room away from all of the action while we were all making a ruckus downstairs.

    And so things went for a few years. I'll be honest, I never really had her on my radar as someone I was interested in dating and was content to be friends.

    Apparently she was very interested in me though, and was laying the flirting on pretty thick, and it all went over my head. Eventually she realized she would need to resort to more drastic measures, and one night as we happened to be leaving a friend's party at the same time, as we got to our cars she grabbed me and kissed me.

    And I'll be honest, that broke my brain a little. From my perspective it kind of came out of nowhere. I kind of had to rethink everything about us and decided, "yeah, fuck it let's see where this goes"

    And so here I am a decade or so later, married for 7 years, and pretty happy with how things all turned out.

  • Car Wash Test on 53 leading AI models: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

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  • If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

    There's a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

    I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

    And I wouldn't be totally surprised if that's the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it's a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

    That's still a dumbass assumption, but I'd at least get it.

    And I'm pretty sure it's much more likely that it's just making up numbers out of nothing.

  • What is something about how people view or use technology that needs to die?

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  • So I've been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.

    1. Back up any important documents you really don't want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn't actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that's really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that's where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn't is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.

    If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that's a bit of a chore, but again if it's anything that can't be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.

    1. Once you've done that, you've got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it's intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can't just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend's computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you're not going to totally fuck up anything.
    2. Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can't break anything from that live USB.
    3. If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you'll have learned something from the experience. I'm actually at the point now where I'm kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I'm not trying to break something, but if it happens, it's an opportunity to try new stuff.
    4. Maybe I'm weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn't know was there before.

  • What is something about how people view or use technology that needs to die?

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  • Yeah, it's absolutely a weird curve like that

    I'm kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I've managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it's really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.

  • What is something about how people view or use technology that needs to die?

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  • My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They're not totally helpless, they'll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.

    They'd been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn't feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they "upgraded" their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.

    Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.

    My dad couldn't quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he's been using that just fine since then.

    Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They're old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It's not a beefy computer and they don't need one, I'm pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.

    On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they've had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it's been running smoother than windows 11.

    So when I go visit them tomorrow I'm gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.

    Pretty much the one program they use that's not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can't use that anymore, but fingers crossed I'll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don't think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

    So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.

  • Is your life better or worse than your parents (I mean specifically your parents, not your parent's generation)? (Specify country)

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  • It's a bit of a mixed bag

    By this point my dad was divorced from his first wife, married to my mom (they're still together) who was pregnant with me. I'm still 7 years into my first and no signs of that going south. No kids on the way, but don't want them.

    Couldn't afford them if I did though.

    They owned a house, I kind of do (sort of a complicated situation of buying my mother in laws house, lots of handshakes and verbal agreements, but she's kind of dragging her feet on paperwork. Wouldn't be able to afford it without the family discount, so not a terrible trade off)

    I didn't get drafted during 'nam, so I got that going for me. He never actually left the country though, he ended up stationed in Kentucky, so arguably he just got free room and board and a bit of free job training for a few years.

    My mom never had to work a full time job after they got married, my wife and I both work full time and still never seem to be able to save much money.

    I remember my dad once talking about how he almost bought a brand new Bronco II (he was somehow talked into a Ford Tempo instead, which was a huge mistake, that car was a piece of shit) when he was probably about my current age. The idea of buying a brand new car is absolutely wild to me. I've never been able to afford a car that was less than 10 years old.

    Mentally and emotionally I think I'm doing as good or better than they are. I have more and better friends. I've managed to do, I think, some much cooler things than my dad has (my mom has some pretty cool stories from a couple times her family visited relatives in Poland and when they managed to get one of them to visit America, not an easy thing to arrange during the cold war, especially when the family in Poland was basically dirt-poor)

    I have a dog, they didn't at this point in their lives.

    My dad had a little bit of a fucked up home life growing up, but he turned out mostly alright, and my childhood was pretty stable, and I also turned out mostly alright.

    It was really cool growing up with the internet before it enshitified. I'm glad I got to experience that.

    By this point in their lives, the cold war was or nearly was over, the US came out on top, and it seemed like things were gonna be all sunshine and rainbows from there on out. By contrast... Well you've all seen the news for the last 2 decades or so.

  • What's your pitch for a regional Bigfoot variant?

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  • Philadelphia - it's just Gritty.

  • What is the most ridiculous conspiracy theory?

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  • I don't know if "celebs moisturize with children's foreskin" is totally detached from reality.

    Now it probably isn't what a lot of the people who get worked up about this are thinking, but there are beauty treatments and products out there that do in fact use ingredients that are sometimes derived from infant foreskins.

  • Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free

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  • My dad retired a few years ago, he spent basically his whole life driving to work and anywhere else he needed to go himself.

    Where we live, senior citizens can get a pass so they don't have to pay bus or train fare.

    So now he takes the bus everywhere, sometimes he basically just goes and rides it for fun, doesn't really even go anywhere in particular, just gets on a bus and rides around for a bit, gets off at some random stop, and waits around for a bus going back the way he came from.

    Weird hobby, but I guess it beats collecting stamps.

    So I think that makes a pretty compelling case. If you make it free, people will use it

  • What is the weirdest story from your high school?

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  • Another one

    I was home sick one day, my sister was at school, the phone rings and I answered it. It was an automated message, something about the school being aware of a school shooting threat and that there was no danger at this time.

    It was really light on details, I called my mom who worked at another school in the district, she had no clue what was up. I couldn't really find much information, it kind of trickled out over the next couple of days.

    A lot of parents went to pick their kids up early, my mom texted my sister to see if she wanted to be picked up she didn't really care, enough kids left early that classes were basically put on hold and they were just goofing off and watching movies and such. There were a bunch of cops and news crews showing up at the school so she figured she was probably about as safe there as anywhere that day.

    Anyway, eventually the details started coming out, there was a kid who was planning a shooting, it was still a long way off if it was ever going to happen at all, but he tried to recruit another kid, and that kid turned him in.

    The would-be shooter didn't actually go to our school, he was homeschooled. His parents had pulled him out because of bullying a few years prior. He was a few years younger than me, so I don't think I was ever in the same school as him, I think he would have been a freshman when I was a senior.

    Now my school didn't exactly have a major bullying issue, it happened a bit, like it does in every school, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of anyone who had it especially bad.

    Now this kid was fat, he may have been almost as wide as he was tall, and I'm sure he got plenty of bullying for that, but this is America, we had plenty of kids in our school who were just as fat, and again, no major bullying problems. Hell, I am/was pretty fat myself, and a bit of a weirdo to boot, and I was actually fairly popular in high school.

    But apparently the real reason this guy was bullied was because he was just a real racist, misogynistic, homophobic asshole. If anyone deserved to be bullied, it was probably him. He basically was a bully himself, he was just too pathetic for anyone to take him seriously.

    And yes, it does sound a lot like I'm describing Eric Cartman.

    He did have one gun (that his parents apparently bought him) but no ammo, as well as a bunch of mall ninja swords and such, and a bunch of airsoft and pellet guns. Of course the local police made a big deal of showing off his "arsenal" when they confiscated it. I almost wanted to see his fat ass trying to lug all of that shit into school with him. I doubt he would have made it up the front stairs of the building before getting winded.

    But it doesn't end there.

    Remember the kid who he tried to recruit who turned him in? He of course got all the congratulations from the mayor and police chief and such that you'd expect. And then he tried to break into the would-be shooters house to steal his Xbox.

    And at some point during the various trials and such, the would-be shooters mom got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food while he was in juvie.

  • What is the weirdest story from your high school?

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  • A friend of mine, T, lent another guy, E, some money. Not a huge amount, but fairly significant for a high schooler, something like $50

    E decides he's not gonna pay T back, so like mature, responsible high school dudes, they decide they're going to meet up at the park after school and fight over this.

    T is not a big dude, and doesn't really expect to win this fight, so he goes and gets his friend, M, to come along, not to participate, just to watch over things and make sure he doesn't get killed. M is well equipped for this job being over 6ft tall and built like a brick shithouse. Nice dude.

    E, apparently, also had some friends coming along with this, and they show up after school dressed like some kind of school shooters, wearing fatigues and trench coats and shit

    And more importantly, sporting weapons- sharpened screwdrivers, a baseball bat, etc.

    M does his job, and takes those from them, throws them in his backpack, with a jacket or something covering the protruding end of the bat.

    Of course word of this whole shit show gets around, the school got wind of it, and had called the police.

    So as this whole group is walking off of school grounds, cops show up and start rounding them up.

    M of course gets nabbed being the one with baseball bat sticking out of his bag, as do E and his friends.

    T, however, lucks the fuck out, because his older cousin happens to be driving by just as the cops are showing up, and gets him into her car, assuring the police that he was with her and not involved in this. Miraculously none of the other parties rat him out, so while the police managed to piece together that there was one other person involved, they never figured out who he was.

    M gets sent of to an alternative school for a year, and is allowed to return after that on the condition that he joins the football team. Our football team did not win a single game our senior year.

    The others get various similar punishments- suspensions, alternative schools, etc.

    One of E's friends, on being informed by the cops that this was over $50, flipped out a little, possibly flipped a table, and sat down and calmly told the cops that he had been misinformed, and that E had told him it was over significantly more than that.

    The really wild part though, is how the high school rumor mill exaggerated this, there was a version of the story I heard where M attacked a cop with a samurai and tried to escape on a motorcycle.

    It should also be noted that these guys all actually remained on relatively good terms after this.

    And these were, overall, pretty decent, even boring, nerds otherwise. A couple of them have some of the usual sorts of childhood trauma and such (except for T, who has some serious, grade-a childhood trauma, I still see him regularly, he had some rough patches along the way but is in a really good place these days) none of them really ever ended up in any significant trouble again after that.

    And the area we lived in was a pretty safe, boring, middle class suburban area. I'm pretty well qualified to say that because I now work at the county 911 center, so I get to see what kind of shit is happening where, and that area of our county has nothing going on. If any one of the towns there has a dozen serious incidents (not counting stuff like noise complaints, traffic stops, parking issues, minor traffic accidents, routine medical emergencies and fire issues, etc) in a week, that's probably going to be one of the busiest weeks of their year.