• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.

    My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.

    There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.

    …I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.








  • I would likely go case-less if it wasn’t for my dry hands, and the occasional need to have my phone sit on my leg (while I am driving) so I can go hands-free with it.

    My problem is that any phone without a case (and about 99.999% of cases out there) has the phone being as slippery as an enraged hagfish. It literally leaps out of my hands with most operations, which is why I need a case – to grip it effectively.

    And now with my iPhone 15 pro max, I have been in a desperate search for any case which is sticky enough. As in: with the phone in the case, place it face-up on your open palm without gripping it and tilt your palm 30-45°. If it slides off, the case is too slippery. I’ve had sticky cases before, but it seems that everyone suddenly stopped making them some time after the iPhone X.




  • but you’d already be hard pressed to read the data off a deck of punch cards or reel of magnetic tape

    Even something like a 3¼″ floppy is getting hard to find a drive for, because not many USB drives were made, and non-USB drives need a motherboard with floppy compatibility. Which would be more than a decade old by this point.


  • We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.

    I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.

    A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.




  • False equivalence. Many co-ops have a top-down hierarchy for exactly this purpose: execution speed. But the person “at the top” is there as a navigator, not as a captain. They are there to make those quick decisions based on the will - and projected/estimated will, when time is of the essence - of the actual owners, the employees.

    There are also many instances of companies - and even entire countries - going months to years without “top leadership” because the entire framework has been effectively empowered to make critical decisions. The effectiveness of the U.S. Military is also based on this doctrine. This allows a company to respond to market forces purely via effective communication between employees and managers coordinating across the different components of the company.