Honestly, yeah.
It took next to zero effort, and it was a product I liked enough to have recommended even if the only thing I had gotten was the first sample.
It’s really the best kind of marketing I’ve ever run across. They made it so that the only work involved was handing something small to someone, plus the original feedback. If the product had sucked, even that effort wasn’t mandatory.
Yeah.
Mini story.
Back in the day, me and my best friend got on a mailing list for samples. We didn’t do it intentionally, but it ended up being pretty cool. We’d get all kinds of stuff. Some of it was shit, some was good, the way you’d expect.
But over the years, those samples worked. Sensodyne, the toothpaste for example. Tried a sample, and since it’s as good as anything else as toothpaste, the fact that I preferred the taste more than most was enough to switch.
But the cool shit was when they’d ask for feedback. Sometimes you’d get full sized freebies.
One of those was the candy, take 5. A pretzel with caramel, covered in chocolate. This was before they were for sale. We tried the samples, sent in the little card, and a few weeks later got boxes in the mail full of the samples, asking us to get other people to try it. So, we did, and those people usually sent the cards that came in the box the we gave them.
Turned out that the little number on the card was our number. So, when people sent in the cards with feedback, they knew it was us doing their marketing for them (that’s what the whole thing is, it wasn’t just them being nice). Well, another month or two passed, and we see them in stores. And we would buy them here and there, because they are insanely good, if a tad too sweet overall.
Then, we got more boxes from them, packed with the full sized packages, plus a whole booklet of coupons, and a surprisingly nice little form letter of thanks. It ended up being something like fifty free packages, twenty free coupons plus another twenty of half price.
Yeah, the diagram does a good job. And, English is a bitch lol. It’s hard enough as a native language to navigate all the weird rules and usages.
Look, I don’t want to nitpick much, or make you feel like I’m bashing you, that’s not my intent.
The post, however, is pretty far off of reality. “Gifted” is not the same kind of thing as other neurodivergence. It simply doesn’t have a well defined criteria. The only criteria that’s used in a majority of places that use the term is IQ or other testing scores.
Should it have the same kind of diagnostic criteria as other aspects of neurofunction? Maybe. Maybe not. There’s just not enough information on it all to tell if it really is a form of neurodivergence, or just part of neurotypical function with higher “intelligence”. I don’t speak Portuguese, so I can’t tell if that video is accurate in its information or not, but I can tell that “Gifted” as a term is not what you’ve presented in your post, not as of five years ago when my kid got placed into gifted classes and I went back looking into it and comparing it to what it was when I was a kid.
If there’s newer definitions and criteria, it would be nice if you put them into post instead of relying on a YouTube video at all, but that’s whatever.
I’m not saying I disagree. Every “Gifted” or “accelerated” kid I ever knew behaved differently than most people. It may well be a form of neurodivergence that isn’t just intelligence (which is a difficult thing to quantify properly in itself).
I’m just saying that the post here doesn’t really provide anything useful to someone coming across it. There’s no meat here.
Nobody has ever given me a compliment that wonderful. Thank you very much :)
Unusual overall? A lot, since she’s a chicken, and they’re batshit crazy.
But unusual for a chicken would have to be her habit of cuddling. She doesn’t do it often, but when she wants to cuddle she cuddles the hell out of you she pecks my arm until I wrap it around her, then borrows her beak into the crook of my elbow then starts her little content chuckle/purr.
After that, there are only two rules: no touch, only cuddle. And no moving, only cuddle.
Anything else is met with an indignant rage that can’t even be matched by a church lady at a strip club getting teabagged. There will be squawking, and you will obey, or suffer the Wrath of Marans (which rhymes with Khan, and the s is silent because it’s french).
The Wrath of Marans is mostly just more squawking, followed by angry stomping. But it’s terrifying if you squint really hard. Okay, if you squint real hard and pretend you’ve been shrunk to the size of a particularly small mouse.
The Wrath of Marans can also be doled out for other crimes such as; not surrendering the biscuit, not surrendering the peanuts, not surrendering the completely inedible piece of aluminum foil in your hand, or the absolute worst crime of all; Picking The Chicken Goddess Up to Prevent Her Pecking Things That Will Hurt Her. Which can be elevated to all caps as needed. Which is just the same thing with extra squawking and some growls.
You pull the string, the pointer spins and lands on: The Chicken says BAAAAAWWWWWWK! I WILL EAT YOU, PITIFUL HUMAN!
Yeah, that’s been a thing for ages. All the way back to tapes being copied because my parents had the best double tape deck out of anyone I knew. Vhs tapes of skinamax (skinemax? Idk how that should be spelled lol) movies, or regular ones being swapped around.
I still swap files in the same way. Well not the same I don’t use magnetic tape lol. But yeah, if someone wants something, and I have it, all I need is something to put it on. Since I have a disc burner, it doesn’t have to be a drive, though they’d need a drive to access anything on a disc, which gets less and less common. I don’t loan out thumb drives to just anyone, but I’ll usually be glad to copy files to theirs. Hell, that’s actually my preferred method for swapping files. It’s faster and less prone to hassles than p2p methods.
Me and my best friend serve as each other’s off site storage too. He keeps a drive with important/hard to replace files with me, and vice versa. When we visit, we’ll swap out with a second drive that’s updated. Ends up with triple redundancy, since there will be the last drive at each other’s, plus the second drive that’s being updated between swaps, as well as the original files on whatever device is the main source. I have another drive like that that I swap out at my sister’s.
Most of those drives we swap aren’t media, though there is some of that, what with hard to find stuff being easier to keep multiple copies of instead of trying to hunt down again. The media files, those are open to copy off, so it’s a form of sneakernet in that regard, rather than only being backups of stuff of our own.
Someone needs to cook up a bot that flags every post on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit with a DCMA takedown.
I get your point. And, while I don’t agree that this constitutes drama, I can definitely see how it can be read that way.
For me, the reason it isn’t drama is the personal perspective about how and why they changed as a person, rather than bashing hexbear. While there’s definitely some of the “hexbear bad” in the comment, it’s secondary to the story of a person finding a flaw in themself, addressing it, then changing it, and that change leading to a changing perspective. It isn’t about them finding flaws in the instance and complaining about it.
Btw, I’m in the “hexbear is more trouble than its worth” camp, so take that bias into account. But I don’t think it applies here. The post could be about someone discovering something about themselves that led them to join hexbear, and it would still qualify as a “best of” imo. It’s the depth of the story that’s the key factor, not the opinion itself.
But, again, I get where you’re coming from. It could be read as just another complaint.
You made a mistake.
You engaged with someone that wasn’t asking in good faith. The idea itself is so stupid that snagging engaging with it isn’t worth the time and effort.
The only useful response to that question is “are you really that stupid, or do you think I am?”
Well, the problem is that the kind of brace you’d want has to be shaped by hand right now.
3d printing will likely get there eventually, but turning out a chest/back brace that’s not only effective but wearable is as much an art as anything else.
I’m not sure where someone without training would get started. Orthotists and prosthetists are specialists; orthotics is a master’s program, and that’s the kind of endeavor your desired brace is.
It’s doable for sure; though whether it’s practical to recreate the decades of research and experimentation that led to where orthotics is today is a different issue.
Iirc, you’d start with thermoplastics, I can’t recall the ones that are used. But they’re shaped by mold, taken from the patient directly, then adjusted during fittings so that there’s no/less issues with long term use. And you can’t just skip the kind of shaping needed. Afaik, nobody is printing orthotics yet. Casts, yes, though that’s fairly new; but those are short term use, so don’t require the same kind of fitting.
I’ve seen, and been present during fittings for, braces for scoliosis, which is going to be similar to the kind of orthotic you’d need.
If you decide to go the home brew route, you’d want to start with a plaster cast of your torso. Best way to go, so you can have a solid form to shape whatever material you go with.
TPU was a common material back when I was still a caregiver, though that has been over a decade ago now, so it may have been supplanted by other thermoplastics.
Carbon fiber was starting to be used back then, but it tends to be too rigid for applications like a torso piece. Maybe with enough foam in between you and the rigid parts, but at that point, why not just go with something less expensive, and more flexible? Iirc, CF was being used for things like leg and ankle orthotics where they’d be bearing weight and need the extra rigidity.
I know that there was CAD based modelling and fast prototyping being done for orthotics, but it was mainly useful in prosthetics, where they could make reproducible units that would then be customized.
Tbh, I would try finding an orthotist irl to meet with and brainstorm. Even if they can’t/won’t help you make your own gear, they’ll likely still warn you off of really bad ideas.
That’s at least in part because you say you have little interest in medical or anatomical study, and that’s what you need if you want your end device to do the job you want. You just can’t fine tune a torso brace without understanding the musculoskeletal system in that area, and what you’ll need to avoid doing.
Like, the curvature of the spine. It may seem like you could just mold your body and make the brace conform to that. But, if the goal is to give support to part of your body, the brace has to apply pressure to your body applying it at the wrong place, or in the wrong way could make things worse. So if you don’t have the time/interest/willingness to gain the level of understanding of anatomy to achieve that, you’ll be better off consulting with someone that already has that knowledge. It’s kinda like self surgery, there’s only so much you can do blind without causing problems worse than what you’re trying to fix.
Well, I had been taught about Munich and Ribbentrop in public school, both during standard history classes (though they were only mentioned in passing during US history, as part of the background of what happened before the U.S. joined in)
The famine, I didn’t hear about until maybe fifteen to twenty years ago. Can’t pin it down exactly because of shit that was going on in my life at the time, but it was something I read about in one of the books on ww2 that covered events outside of Europe and the Pacific theater.
And I’ve seen many a debate about the degree to which Great Britain was responsible for it.
But, I’d have to say that none of them are exactly high on the list of what the average person remembers about the era. Most people I’ve even mentioned Molotov-Ribbentrop to had no idea what it is. They maybe remember hearing the words in school, but didn’t pay enough attention to link them to anything. The Munich agreement is pretty much unfamiliar to anyone that didn’t have an interest in ww2 beyond high school history. And the famine is outside of what most people that do have an interest care about. The only books I have on the subject of ww2 don’t mention the famine at all.
Ww2 is far enough in the past now that most of us no longer know anyone that fought in the war. It’s passed into the kind of history that’s “dead”. Even though we all, everywhere still live with the ripples in world events that started then, it might as well be aztec history as far as the typical person here in the US is concerned. Even my generation, that had grandparents that were alive during the war, or fought in the war, the interest is largely no greater than surface level.
And I’m not sure that the details like the two pacts really do matter now. They’re not anything that affects us still, unlike a lot of of events of the war. IMO, the famine is more important since it was a much broader event. Depending on how you look at it, the famine shaped a lot of events for India as a whole in ways that neither agreement did for Europe.
In general, it isn’t about waiting for prices to drop, though that’s definitely a part. It’s more about avoiding early adoption, imo. Waiting until there’s some degree of information about the game that isn’t marketing, then deciding.
The goal is to make sure the game is stable, that it’s something you actually want to play, and avoiding hype based playing. If the price drops, or there’s a sale, that’s icing on the cake.
In the case of visual novels, I don’t really think it applies. The only thing you’ll really avoid by waiting is any bugs that need fixing, and they aren’t prone to a lot of bugs that break the enjoyment of the story. It does happen, but it isn’t like the usual mobile game bugfest at launches.
There really isn’t much in the way of empirical evidence regarding this. It would be difficult to set up studies and experiments to even get to get that evidence.
So, you’re stuck with anecdotal info.
On that level, absolutely. I did health care as my main job from 92 until 2008. Nurse’s assistant.
During that time, my two biggest patient bases were geriatric and hospice. People that were dying, in other words.
The patients that had no dementia lasted longer than the ones that did, in terms of time from needing an NA to keep them cared for to time of death. The ones that had a goal, a thing they wanted to see happen, or to do, absolutely did better not only in terms of time, but in how they managed their life until they died.
Something as nebulous as “will”, that we don’t even have a way to quantify at all is difficult to impossible to credit with anything at all. But we know that the mind and body influence each other. But I am convinced that we have some ability to maintain our lives to some degree in extremis. The only question is how much, and how much of that is individual.
Looking back at all of it, things blur, but there were so many patients with terminal cancer that just didn’t die while moving towards a goal, that died within days of that goal being met. And it really didn’t matter what that goal was. Could be something as minor as seeing crocuses bloom again, to something like seeing their child married or graduated. But it happened so fucking often it’s a little scary.
I can answer for my wife! She said three folded, when it’s our normal tp, Charmin. Two extra for other brands.
That’s all it takes with her configuration to be dry. I’ll vote on the comments, but since she gave more than a number, and it was variable, figured that might help too.
Fwiw, I make sure to give things an extra squeeze with a few pieces myself. Not a fan of late drips in my drawers. Pee, shake, paper & gentle squeeze. Then wash hands.
Brobdingnagian.
It’s a very big word that means very big.
It comes from Gulliver’s travels. The Brobdingnagians are giants, 12 times the height of humans. The word isn’t limited to that scale, but it’s definitely for things that are unusually large compared to us.
It’s the literal opposite of Lilliputian, which is from the better known race from “Travels” that are 1/12 our size.
It’s my absolute favorite word. Not just because it’s a literary reference but it’s fun to say. Brob ding nag ian. It just burbles off the tongue like a drunken stream stumbling among the rocks of its bed. And, it’s a big word that means big, which is just fun wordplay. Like the phobia of big words, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which was inevitable as soon as the idea of a phobia of big words was conceived.
I mean, if you don’t mind solar cell production also taking a hit, yeah.
It isn’t going to doom the world or anything, but if the mines aren’t recoverable in a fairly short amount of time, it will put a major crimp in solar deployment. That includes driving up the price (which, unless we’re willing to kick off a revolution, is a major factor in a capitalist system) of solar right when it’s really starting to be so much cheaper than fossil fuels that it can be a big shift for energy.
Short term, it isn’t going to do anything at all. Even a few months would be a blip. But if the mines take much longer than that, it’s a big problem for everyone.
And, as an added problem, you’ve got the people that do the work now displaced. They’ll only be able to just sit idle for so long before they have to move on to other jobs, likely well away from the area. So you have a talent drain involved that can ripple out just as badly as the production drop for solar.
I don’t think anyone legitimately gives a fuck about the semiconductor makers taking a hit financially (well, assuming it doesn’t fuck the rest of us down the road too), but the “tech” industry isn’t just companies churning out the next GPU model or AI scam.
Yup, mine are drm free.
Why would I change either?
I mean, I’m a hoopy frood, So I know where my towel is, and it’s full of all kinds of nutrients due to the competing microbes that compose its flora. You don’t just waste that kind of ecosystem by changing towels every decade.
And sheets? What about the memories? Every stain is a mark of something wonderful that happened. Except the ones that are marks of something horrific that happened. Or the ones that are just spilled beverages. But, you know, that’s still plenty of good memories you want washed down the drain, you animal you.
There isn’t a single one.
But, I’d have to give the nod to either “fade to black”, Metallica; or “closer to fine”, the Indigo Girls
Fade to Black should be obvious. It’s the lyrics, the feel of the song, etc.
Closer to fine isn’t really about the actual lyrics, it’s about the sentiment of them, of moving through life and reaching new places and becoming. You get closer to fine by whatever path you’re on. So, when shit is real, it’s nice to have the reminder.