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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • Yeah, I mapped my public transit commute out one time. For starters, it’s complicated because Google/Apple/Waze/etc have the public transit option greyed out. Like it’s not even an option. If I try, Google suggests getting a Lyft. Which is really just saying “lol get a car, scrub.” I wish I were making this shit up:

    Here’s a quick visual of my daily drive, versus the public transit route I would have to take:

    So my commute starts with me biking 20 minutes away from work, to get to the nearest bus stop. Then I take a 20 minutes bus ride to the nearest rail hub. Then I take a commuter rail south-south-west for an hour, to get to the connecting line. Then I make a connection. The rail times rarely line up, so I’d probably have to wait at the station for ~15 minutes for the connection. Then I take the second rail line 45 minutes northwest.

    But here’s where I run into my next problem… My house is serviced by one public transit system, and my job is serviced my another entirely separate transit system. Due to local politicians in the different cities not getting along, the two systems don’t connect. So now I need to bike 20 minutes north, to get from the northernmost station in one transit system, to the southernmost station in the other. Then I take another train 20 minutes north. Finally, I have about a 10 minute bike ride to get from the train station to my job.

    All together, that’s ~50 minutes biking, ~20 minutes on a bus, and a little over 120 minutes split across three different trains. Plus the waiting time in between each connection, because the trains I need only run every 15-20 minutes. Bare minimum, I’m looking at around 3.5 hours for public transit… Or I can just take the highway 10 minutes west.

    “But wait, you have walking and biking options! You could do those instead! The biking option in your screenshot is only 54 minutes!”

    While this may be true on paper, I’d like to refer you to the “I had to go 2 hours out of my way to avoid certain death” panel in the posted comic. That 54 minute bike route is on a 70 MPH two lane highway, with no shoulder or sidewalk. I’d be dead before I was even halfway there.

    “So take an alternate route?”

    That giant loop I listed earlier is the alternate route. That 10 minute highway route cuts through a nature preserve. There are no other roads or paths parallel to it. You either take the highway, or you go all the way around.

    I can’t even legally reach my grocery store without a car. I have to cross that same highway to get to the store, and there is no sidewalk that crosses it. So I’d need to break the law to walk to the grocery store.





  • Yeah, the primary reason people end up exposing things to the internet is because of friends and family. I can call my tech-illiterate “anything more difficult than logging into Facebook has her throwing up her hands in defeat, saying it is too hard, and tech is just too complicated these days” mother-in-law and walk her through setting up Plex, but that only works because Plex is exposed to the internet. If I had to walk her through setting up Tailscale on her living room TV before she could connect, it would be a non-starter.




  • Yeah, I did a few of those tests for my ADHD diagnosis last year. I’m in the 99th percentile for spatial reasoning. I’m also a 5 on this scale. I can see a puzzle piece and know where it fits in the puzzle. I can see a bunch of weirdly shaped blocks, and figure out how to put them into the shape I want. I was really good at those “you have a bunch of geometric shapes, make them look like a dog” types of things as a kid. My shrink was visibly shocked at how quickly I flew through that section of the test, because the primary limiting factor was how quickly I could rearrange the pieces.

    But I can’t fucking picture any of it in my mind. If I have a sketch pad, I can draw a scaled floor plan of my house. But I can’t picture what my furniture looks like. I can describe it. I know what it looks like. But I can’t picture it. Part of my current job involves making scaled drawings. I’m sure that’s not related at all \s








  • American cheese is just mild cheddar and colby jack, with an emulsifier added to help it blend together and melt smoothly. You can literally make bootleg American cheese by shredding the two together, adding an emulsifier (like sodium citrate) and heating until they melt.

    That same emulsifier is what makes it so good for burgers. Aged cheddar tends to melt into clumps, and tends to get greasy as the milk fat separates out of the solids. The emulsifier helps the cheese solids and oils stay together, making it less clumpy and greasy.


  • Or just incorporate more modular designs. Steering columns are only made for the middle ~70% of drivers. Anyone outside of one standard deviation on the bell curve will struggle to get their steering column adjusted properly. It will either be too short, (meaning they have to reach too far for the steering wheel, and the airbag won’t fully cushion their impact), or too long, (meaning they’re cramped when driving, and dangerously close to the airbag when it deploys).

    For instance, I’m tall. I have proportionally long legs. In order to be able to properly reach the pedals without my knees next to my ears, I need my car seat basically all the way back. But that means I’m constantly reaching for the steering wheel, which doesn’t extend far enough to be comfortable. It also means that if I hit something, my airbag basically won’t do anything. I may rub my face on it, but the vast majority of the stop is going to be handled by the seatbelt. Meaning my left shoulder and collarbone will take the brunt of the force instead of having it evenly distributed across my torso. It also means I’ll be more likely to develop whiplash, as my head won’t be sufficiently cushioned by the airbag until after it has already snapped almost all the way forward.