Feeling’s mutual.

If you need someone to teach you how to ride a bike, hit me up.

Alright. If that’s what you want to nitpick here

The average adult (in the US) can ride a bike, whether or not they ever actually do is a different matter, but the majority of us learned how to at some point, and there’s a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is a saying.

From being able to ride a bike to being able to ride it a reasonably long distance just takes time and work to build up to it, which is what he said.

Now a lot of people won’t put in that kind of work, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.

I’m fat, I won’t sugar-coat that. In a couple weeks when it warms up a bit I’ll hop on my bike, and I’ll probably manage around 5 miles, and by the end of the summer I’ll probably work my way up to around 15 miles, and I’ll still be fat. I do this pretty much every year (and worth noting, I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was in my 30s)

There are parts of the world where damn-near everyone gets around on bikes, they don’t have some sort of unattainable genetic advantage because they grew up in Amsterdam or whatever that gives them some “dormant athleticism” that Americans don’t have, they just ride bikes.

The average adult can ride a bike. They just don’t or won’t.

He was replying to a comment about e bikes, and concluded his comment talking about them. The whole comment was building up to that fact. Just because every sentence didn’t explicitly mention e-bikes doesn’t mean that they weren’t the point of the entire comment.

He spent a couple paragraphs talking about his own struggles building up to riding a regular bike and then concluded by basically saying “or you can skip all of that hard work and get an e bike”

And if you finish reading, he talks about ebikes and trikes helping to fill that gap

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.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like that kind of illustrates the point though

There’s a lot of precise grammar rules because the language is a little bit of a clusterfuck (I say that with love, I like the French language and speak a bit myself.) If you were to create a language from scratch, you’d probably choose to make one with much simpler grammar.

Like most languages, French evolved organically out of other languages. There wasn’t really a point in time where someone said “hey I made a new language, here are the rules, I call it ‘French.’” Instead, for centuries people just kind of picked and chose what parts of Latin, Gaulish, Frankish, etc. that they liked and didn’t like, mashed them together in whatever way felt “right” and eventually French happened.

Then when some eggheads decided to write down the rules, it was more of a “Ok, here’s all of the weird bullshit most of you are already doing, and there’s kind of a lot of it. It sounds very pretty, but let’s just all agree that thats enough and this is how our language works. Try not to add any more weirdness” (and they’ve been remarkably good at sticking to that, l’Académie Française doesn’t fuck around, which may or may not be a good thing depending on your views)

You got a lot of words with letters that don’t make sounds or make very different sounds that you might think if you weren’t already familiar with the language’s eccentricities, you got some very common verbs that conjugate in weird ways, you sometimes mash words together with an apostrophe basically because it sounds nice, the Académie Française, when confronted with a new thing, sometimes decides that the terms that most of the rest of the world have decided on for that thing just aren’t “French enough” and goes and makes up a new word for it, etc.

And again, I like French, I’m not shitting on it, English isn’t any better and the rules are certainly less formalized

I think it might be worth re-reading this comment through the lens of the other comment where you dug up the details of the (alleged) actual story. Not too sure which came first due to the edit in the other comment.

The guy pulled his car over to grab her and lecture her after the incident happened. That’s not ok and shouldn’t be covered under good Samaritan laws. Really that could be grounds for something like assault charges in some jurisdiction. Potentially if she wasn’t a minor she could have even had a decent shot at a self-defense claim if she’d shot him when he grabbed her (this is 'murica after all) he continued to escalate a situation that was already resolved and introduced physical force into circumstances where it wasn’t warranted.

What you probably pictured (I know it’s what I had in mind) was probably more like someone grabbing a girl to keep her from walking into traffic. That would probably be covered under good Samaritan laws.

But holding onto her after that to yell at her probably wouldn’t/shouldn’t, that’s uncalled for, though there may be a little more leeway there since it would still sort of been in the heat of the moment. Odds are probably pretty good that she wouldn’t have even pressed the issue since he just potentially saved her life if that were the case.

As for it being considered a sex offense, I think that’s a case of the laws being poorly-crafted, the insane way we craft laws to “protect the children” (except when the rich and powerful are involved apparently) and the justice system being broken because that aspect of it is kind of bullshit and probably should have been thrown out on appeal. What he did was wrong and I think there should be consequences for that, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think it was wrong in a sexual way unless there are other details to the story that have been glossed over.

And the person you had the conversation with that prompted this either misunderstood the circumstances, possibly because they only got the information second hand themselves, or are trying to twist the details to suit their agenda. The first is probably more likely, but we can’t really know for sure.

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.

I’m still looking for what to do if I’m alone and something happens.

You can do abdominal thrusts on yourself, or you can use something like the back of a chair or a railing to rest your fists on and use your body weight to basically perform the same action

In addition to my advice on your bloody Mary abomination chili

Around 10 or 15 years ago, I learned this chili recipe from this comic I probably found on Reddit. It has always served me well, and it is the basis for how I make chili today

To this recipe I also add some chili peppers, usually jalapenos (because otherwise it’s not chili)

A can of chipotles in adobo

I’ve tweaked the ratios spice blend a bit to my taste and added a bit of cocoa powder and cinnamon.

It should probably be noted that I tend to make bigger batch, often working with 2-5lbs of meat (and I prefer coarse ground or something even finely cubed meat as opposed to regular grocery store ground meat)

I usually have 2 or 3 different cans of beans in mine because I like beans

I’ll usually do 2 or 3 bell peppers, usually of different colors

Some bacon, some chorizo

Screw that “a shot of beer” it gets a whole can. Occasionally wine instead if that’s what I’m drinking while I’m cooking.

Often some coffee and/or various liquors (whiskey, rum, tequila, or Brandy)make their way into the mix at some point. Sometimes there’s beef stock involved.

I also pay really fast and loose about what canned tomato products go into my pot, whole, crushed, diced, sauce, doesn’t matter too much, it’s all gonna cook down into unrecognizable red-brown deliciousness by the time I’m done. Just try to get roughly that sort of ratio of tomato products to beef

For bonus points, get your cowboy on and do this in a pot hanging from a tripod over a campfire.

Normally I end up letting this simmer for up to around 6 hours. If it starts looking too thick/dry, add some liquid, usually beer in my case.

Credit for the original recipe: cookingcomically.com

Yeah that’s basically what I’m describing.

I think you just have more of a precise, technical way of describing it probably because you’ve actually professionally worked with color and received some formal training

Whereas I’m a guy with some self-taught Photoshop skills who paints minis, so my color theory is a little rough and ready.

If you absolutely must use bloody mary mix for some reason

Brown up your beef, saute up some diced onions and crushed garlic and the peppers

Add it all to a pot, add the bloody Mary mix

Season with some cumin, and (if needed, some bloody Mary mixes can be pretty heavily seasoned) salt, pepper, garlic & onion powder, chilli powder, maybe some herbs like cilantro, oregano, maybe basil

Maybe a bit of flour to help thicken it, otherwise you’re gonna need to be very judicious about how much mix you use or it’s gonna take forever and risk the flavor getting weird trying to reduce it down and concentrating the seasoning in the mix.

If it’s coming out a bit too tangy and acidic, a bit of sugar or maybe brown sugar can help cut that

If you can, consider using some fresh or canned tomatoes, or even plain tomato sauce, that’ll probably get you a better texture, but I suspect that if that were an option you could, should, and probably would skip the bloody Mary mix

I’d also maybe consider adding some bell peppers to the mix to make it a little chunkier. Maybe some corn.

Maybe some bacon, chorizo, some diced meat in addition to the ground, etc.

I like to add a beer, but starting with bloody Mary mix that’s probably gonna thin things out a bit too much. Wine and stock would be other options but with the same problem.

End of the day, chili is a stew, and the origin of stews is pretty much just throwing whatever you have in a pot and letting it simmer, there’s not too much to it.

Not a Cincinnati guy, but I have eaten chili there and made my own, and I’m gonna second that

But I do add some cocoa powder to my regular chili recipe, and people rave about it. Sounds a bit weird, but consider, for a momento the existence of Mexican Mole sauces that often contain chocolate. I’m not adding much, it doesn’t taste chocolatey, but it does add something nice to the whole flavor profile.

Adding it to Cincinnati style chili wouldn’t be traditional, but I could definitely see it working very well with the flavor profile if you didn’t care about making it authentic

You are right that paint is kind of its own thing and doesn’t really fit into the RGB or CMYK systems

But I would say it’s overall still subtractive. The paint and whatever you’re painting on isn’t giving off any light on its own, its just reflecting whatever ambient light there is (which is usually more or less white) and subtracting from that.

You could maybe argue that it’s more replacive (is that a word?) than additive or subtractive. It just kind of is what it is. It’s just replacing the substrate’s reflectivity with its own since it’s opaque like you said.

And when you mix paints it tends more towards that grey-brown because like you said it’s not layered, it’s more that each pigment is right there on the surface next to each other reflecting and absorbing their part of white light.

So if you mixed cyan and magenta paints together, instead of light passing through layers of cyan and magenta until all the red and green are filtered out so that only blue light reaches the white paper and is bounced back to your eye, you’d have cyan piments reflecting blue and green, mixed in right next to magenta pigments reflecting red and blue. So both are reflecting blue and the resulting color will probably look blue-ish, but the cyan is reflecting some green, and the magenta some red, so that pulls the color more towards grey (somewhere between white and black, even if you mix all 3 it cant really get down to true black or true white because some light is always going to be absorbed and some reflected)

You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird

I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue

EDIT: Or perhaps from a certain point of view the pigments are more perfect than our eyes are. The point is the whole system is pretty wonky, a bunch of happy evolutionary accidents happened that allowed our ancestors to be better able to tell what fruit was ripe and spot predators, and at some point we also invented art, computers, monitors, and inkjet printers, and all we have to look at them with are some squishy orbs in our skull meant to spot berries and lions.

Put another way, let’s say white is 100% of each red, blue and green light, and black is 0% of each. Every other color is made up of different percentages of those three.

Your monitor is counting up from zero, you just need to add the colors you want.

On a white canvas you need to subtract from 100.

Cyan is basically negative red, magenta is negative green, and yellow is negative blue.

Like others have said, it’s about additive vs subtractive color

And to start off with, probably everything you know about color is probably over simplified, or even outright wrong. Light and color and how your brain interprets that information is pretty complex stuff. Even this explanation is gonna be glossing over things.

Starting from the basics, white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow.

Your eyes, however, are mostly only sensitive to red, green, and blue light, most people only have receptors in their eyes (cones) for those 3 colors. They do pick up a little bit from the surrounding parts of the spectrum but not much, and your brain sort of fills in the gaps from there. If your red cones and green cones are both getting stimulated by light, your brain will interpret that as yellow or orange depending on just how much each is picking up.

So your monitor is starting with no light across all 3 colors (black)

And then adding light to get the desired colors.

But if you’re drawing or painting, ou’re starting with a white canvas, not a black monitor, so how do we go about getting the colors we want!

Well we’re going to put paint or ink on the canvas to absorb the colors we don’t want.

Back in elementary school art class you probably learned about complementary or opposite colors. Unfortunately the colors you learned were kind of wrong. Close enough for kids mixing finger paints, but not exactly.

The opposite of red isn’t green it’s cyan.

The opposite of green isn’t red, its magenta

But the opposite of blue is in fact yellow, so one out of three is something I guess.

What does that actually mean though? Well yellow ink absorbs basically all of the blue light while still reflecting red and green.

Cyan absorbs all the red light, while still reflecting blue and green

And magenta absorbs all the green light while still reflecting red and blue

So by mixing and matching those 3 colors, you can dial things down from 100% white light to a mix of red green and blue that your brain can interpret as other colors.

In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect, and even if they were it would get expensive to use that much of those 3 pigments which is why most color printers are CMYK, with “K” standing for black for reasons I’ve never bothered to look up and I’m not gonna start now.

So your monitoring is adding light from 0 up to make the color you need. It’s “additive.”

And paint is dialing things down from 100 to the desired color. It’s “subtractive.”

Hopefully that all makes sense, color is weird.