Tar_Alcaran

“pfft, I don’t need to learn biology before taking chemistry!”

–teenage me being wrong

I’ve heard this is basically the same reason why autocad will never move away from their fucking terrible UI. Too many people have spent too many hours getting really good at using it, and the investment cliff is too big now.

Did the Proud Boys not understand

No

Between Anonymous, Occupy, and proud boys all using the same mask, the only shared symbolism for the Guy Fawkes mask is really “resistance” of some kind. Which is so broad, it’s hard to call it a symbol at all.

Same with paleolithic bifaces and arrowheads.

You have to do some shopping around if you want a nice one under a hundred nowadays. But OPs requirement wasn’t for it to look good

Charcoal isn’t as bad as wood, it creates less smoke and the most complex chemicals are already gone. Gas is better, since it burns much cleaner, and electric obviously doesn’t create any gasses at all.

On the other hand, grilling and smoking red meat means dripping fat, which means smoke, meaning you create a whole new set of PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), which you breathe in and get stuck to the meat and those are carcinogens. On top of that, red meat is already not too great for you. Eating burned food (charring) is also really unhealthy.

But assuming you don’t spend every day breathing mostly bbq-smoke and gasses, I wouldn’t worry about this too much. If your main diet is home grilled beef over self-made charcoal, you definitely need to reevaluate your lifestyle choices though.

I work in hazardous materials handling and safety, and I studied chemistry. I’ve done a lot of soil remediation and I’m pretty up to date on how we (Europeans) handle the safety of our air, food and water.

So, good news: your air hasn’t been cleaner since basically we started burning coal. Your drinking water hasn’t been this safe since, oh, pre-agrarian times. Your food is probably less nutritious per gram thanks to faster growing food, but your diet is (potentially) better than any human has ever had (depending on your personal choices).

That said, there are some things I avoid like the plague:

• Swimming in open water. It’s (potentially) full of parasites, toxic algae, human and cattle feces and chemical runoff. Probably not all at once, but still. YMMV if you don’t live near the sea, mountain streams are much cleaner then those at the river delta.

• Home grown food from urban gardens. Your soil is probably completely untested, and the idea of “maybe I shouldn’t just pour chemical waste out of the window” is barely 4 decades old. And that’s counting the dubious quality of planter soil that is basically unregulated, and what people use as decoration. (Do NOT use wooden railroad ties or tires as planters for food). And of course what people use as pesticides isn’t exactly closely monitored either.

• Drinking water from wells, springs etc. see all the above.

• Ordering anything with wish/aliexpress that comes in contact with food. You know that stuff is completely unregulated, why the hell would you lick it? Nobody knows what it’s made of.

And there’s one thing I don’t avoid, but it’s super unhealthy: wood fires. Yeah, a hearth or a campfire is awesome, but the smoke is super fucking bad for you. The carcinogens are stronger and last longer than in cigarettes, and its a hell of a lot more of them. I lie to myself and say it’s worth it though, and that I don’t do it every day, and other bad excuses.

I can promise you it’s not nearly as bad as not taking your insulin.

I think you’re confusing volatile organic compounds like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and HFCFs with general aerosols. CFCs destroy the ozone layer, and are banned worldwide.

Aerosola are just droplets in a gas. Clouds are aerosols. They’re perfectly safe to use in general, assuming the droplets and the gas are safe.

You make clotted cream from milk? Doesn’t that take like a week? Don’t you usually start with some form of cream?

I mean, I made it once from double cream, but they don’t sell that here in the Netherlands, and it’s so not worth the time compared to just buying a jar of clotted cream.

More power to you though!

Also, it helps for a currency to not only be hard to duplicate (the costly/difficult extraction and refining process helps here), but also for it to have no other purpose.

When you’ve got money that you can directly use, people will use it for that, and not as money, which is bad for the flow of money. And you run into divisibility issues: a tiny gold coin is fine, but 20cm of cloth is pretty useless.

It hit the magical crossover between being non-pushy and asking about privacy

Thanks to denial, I’m immortal

The Dutch word “poepen” (taking a shit), is a Belgian euphemism for sex. Which is always a great source of fun when making friends near the southern border.

The answer, of course is “jenever”.

The funnier answer is “witte wieven”

Ah dutch.

I’ve heard someone translate “dat is geweldig” not with the correct “that is amazing” but “that is like violence”, which shows amazing skill in Dutch grammar, but a tiny lack in knowing words.

For those not fluent:

“Geweldig” means “Amazing”, but “geweld” means “violence”. Meanwhile, most words that end in “-ig” are nouns used as adjectives, like “fun” -> “funny”.

It’s achieved by saying, “I know you don’t really mean that” when someone says some weird shit

And what if, as frequently happens, they do in fact mean it?

Well, obviously the usual drops for humans, but since I’m a unique, named encounter, I also have a chance to drop:

• A three-prong soil moisture sensor
• 1d3 polyhedral dice, random
• A plastic card with a random certifications and qualification (roll 1d20 on the qualification table, six time. Duplicates mean last year’s card wasn’t thrown out)
• Air sample filter disks (used or clean)

“30% more percentages”

This seems like a munchkin’s dream. Meta-items can be super overpowering

So, how DO you have a conversation with a group that thinks you or your friends aren’t people?