There are two types of dashes. One is the “n-dash” (or “en-dash”), which takes up one space, and is most often used to hyphenate words; and the other is the “m-dash” (or "em-dash) which takes up two spaces, and is most often used to bracket off parenthetical information within a sentence, like kind of a lighter weight parentheses. Em-dashes get used a lot in novels and other published writing that is subject to correction from a professional copy editor, but very rarely in the daily typing of regular people. So now when people see it getting used they just assume it must be a clanker.

but hover each one just above the water for about 5 seconds before gently putting it in. This prevents the shells from cracking due to shock of the hot water

If you want to keep your eggs from cracking from the temperature shock, put them in a bowl, fill the bowl with the hottest water you can get from the tap and let it sit for a minute before you put the eggs in the boiling water. Unless you have some crazy volcano of a hot water heater, the tap doesn’t get hot enough to crack the shell, but will warm the shell up uniformly to much warmer than you’d get hovering the egg, or doing that weird thing where you try to lower the egg into the water a teeny tiny bit at a time.

No. Not really. They’re different things. Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe how previously good tech companies break their own platforms to maximize short-term profits. The AI bubble is just a regular investment bubble where people are throwing too much money at a product that can’t deliver on its own hype.

A good example of enshittification is why Google search sucks now. A while back they noticed that the number of search queries was hitting a plateau. It hit a plateau because Google controlled over 90% of the search market, there are a finite number of humans on Earth, and there’s a limit to how many things a person needs to google in a day. But Google is a publicly traded corporation and line needs to go up. So what Google did was to make their search engine worse at searching so that people would have to perform multiple searches to find what they’re looking for. More searches = more ads delivered. More ads delivered = line go up. Their flagship product doesn’t do the only thing it’s supposed to do now, but the shareholders got a bigger return on their investment that quarter.

The AI bubble is the tech industry promising a fantastic blowjob machine, and selling investors on the vision of a future of unlimited bespoke orgasms where you’ll never have to foot the bill for taking a woman on a date, or pay a prostitute, ever again. Everybody started throwing money at that because, duh, it’s a magic blowjob machine. But now that people are using it they’re finding out that, yeah, sometimes it sucks your dick, but a lot of the time it just punches you in the balls, or it hallucinates that the definition of “blowjob” is anal penetration with a leaf blower. And sometimes it randomly turns into a nine-legged spidergoat that vomits acid on your crotch, and nobody really knows why. Also, it seems to be burning through a crazy amount of energy and water just to punch me in the balls. So now people are getting less and less enthusiastic about throwing money at it. And when the market can no longer buy into the hype because of all the testicle punching, the big investors will dump their holdings while they can still do so at a profit, and the bubble will pop.

I grew up when you’d read the same shampoo bottle 10 times every time you took a shit, hoping you’d find some new detail you once missed.

Tell me your family didn’t have a subscription to National Geographic without telling me your family didn’t have a subscription to National Geographic.

Using Shoe Goo to hold a patch in jeans. It’s orders of magnitude better than those crappy iron-in patches that usually fall off after a couple times through the wash. It lasts longer than needle and thread because it gets into the weave, stabilizes and reinforces the weakened denim around the hole/tear.

Shoe Goo is great for fixing lots of stuff. It’s basically liquid duct tape. Of all the things I’ve attempted to fix with Shoe Goo, the only ones that failed were, ironically, shoes.

Almost certainly fly as in birds came first. Trousers with a fly are a pretty recent fashion development, like within the last 200 years or so, whereas people have been watching birds since before the invention of language.

Pulling that stupid ahegao face. I don’t know who that’s for, but it’s definitely not me.

No, Walmart is kind of an outlier by having a greeter. In other places that have a “greeter” it’s usually an extra layer of security/theft prevention, or it’s a place like Costco where you need a membership to shop there. That said, it’s basically standard for an employee to seek you out and ask if you would like help finding anything fairly soon after you walk in the store. It’s generally seen as good customer service, and in larger stores it’s not uncommon to be approached by several employees asking if you’d like help finding what you’re looking for over the course of your time in the store.

American customer service culture tends to be a little extra. There’s a premium on going the extra mile that’s tied into America’s self-image of the “land of opportunity,” and the hustle culture that goes with that. But when that’s what you’re accustomed to dealing with, the customer service cultures of other countries can be kind of jarring. I know from my own travels through Europe that shopping in some countries can range from feeling cold and indifferent, to feeling actively hostile.

That said, most Americans wouldn’t think of complaining to your manager about it. It’s only a specific kind of over-entitled asshole that does that. Sounds like you had a real karen on your hands.

On the plus side, considering the average lifespan of Samsung appliances, you probably won’t have to put up with it for very long.

Ibuprofen.

Or did you think people were just like, “Well, my knees were kinda sore going up the stairs today. Guess I’ll go slash my wrists?”

South Park didn’t invent Casa Bonita. It’s been around since the 1970s. It’s basically impossible to overstate how much people who grew up in Denver love that place, even in spite of how famously terrible the food is.

Pedro Pascal’s sister is a trans woman. He has been publicly very vocal on the subject of trans rights and inclusion. Consequently, a lot of transphobes, chuds, and miscellaneous fascists have been targeting him for a while and trying to smear his reputation any way they can. I don’t really pay much attention to celebrity stuff so I don’t know to what extent JK Rowling is personally involved in that, but given that she has been a very outspoken anti-trans bigot for some time, I would not be surprised to learn she was egging her followers on to that end.

There are huge sound effects libraries that have been continuously built up and added to since sound in movies became a thing. Foley artists dip into them constantly. If you watch enough old movies you can pick out some almost 100-year-old foley effects that still get used in modern tv and movies. A lot of the time foley artists will toss them in as a joke or reference that mostly only other foley artists are going to catch.

But yeah there are a lot of foley effects that get used a ton. I hear the exact door opening/closing sound from the old AOL instant messenger used in a movie or tv show at least a couple times a year. There’s also a specific cat noise that gets used constantly which people who played Postal 2 back in the day will recognize instantly.

Word.

Hate is probably a strong word, but I don’t really care for their music. There’s nothing technically wrong with it, they’re competent musicians, but it all feels boring and generic to me. It’s bland and inoffensive, like it was written to play over a grocery store PA at a barely liminal volume for a middle-aged housewife to absent-mindedly hum along with as she compares laundry soap.

Green chile is life.

Yup.

Green Chile, and various food items smothered in green chile, with a craft beer from one of the kajillion small breweries we have around here.

This song by Slot. I know nothing about the band except that they’re Russian so I’ve always been a tiny bit worried I was actually listening to some anthem singing the glories of the Putin regime.

I don’t know if it’s still there, but when I visited the town of Ayr in Scotland about 25-ish years ago, they had a playground very similar to that right off of the beach. Everything was large enough to accommodate adults, and I think it may have actually been castle themed. No ball pit though. They did have a thing like a tilted merry-go-round that was at waist height and had no handles. Not sure what it’s called, but it was probably the funnest and most dangerous single piece of playground equipment I think I’ve ever come across. There were about a dozen of us traveling together, and I don’t think a single one of us walked away from that thing without catching a boot to the face at least once.