I’ve sung “Sweet Child o’ Mine” to my son (with minor lyric changes, she->you for instance) in a soft voice almost every night since he was born… three and a half years now.

Possible, but super tricky. Good luck trying to sell a producer on minimizing dialog!

I don’t think your premise is correct. From memory, and scanning a couple episodes illegally uploaded to YouTube, it doesn’t look like Captain Planet flies away at the end. Usually, the scene just transitions to later after he’s gone, but the few times we see it, he dissolves into light, presumably returning the rings powers to the planeteers and disincorporating. He doesn’t go anywhere, he bodily ceases to be.

Where does his mind go? I think he’s a spirit. Where does team spirit go after the football game is over and everyone goes to bed? It still exists, but it’s not… here. It has to be activated to be tangible.

Chesterton’s fence applies here.

You ever have an image of something like fire or mist or galaxies and stars or whatever taken with a black or white background, and you want to make it a transparent background instead? Color to alpha keeps the translucent elements intact at the appropriate translucency while removing the background color. Super useful for compositing images together.

Yeah, this one took me a while to wrap my head around and intuitively “get it”. I first learned it was true from that mythbusters episode where they correct their past mistakes… and even they had thought that two cars hitting head on would receive the same energy as hitting a stationary wall at the speed of the sum of their speeds. They were corrected in letters written to them, and then they experimentally verified it.

And even seeing the experimental verification, it still took me a while to really get it. The opposite speeds cancel out, making you go from your speed to zero. Same as if you hit a brick wall at that speed.

Let’s say the two cars are going 50 mph (kph, whatever unit you want). 50-50=0. You experience the same as hitting the brick wall. It’s the difference between initial speed and final speed that matters, not the sum of their speeds.

GIMP isn’t quite as feature rich and useful as photoshop… except GIMP has the “Color to Alpha” function which I’ve still yet to learn how to imitate in photoshop, and I’m not sure it even can. And I use that function all the freaking time.

I do teach English as a Foreign language, I used to teach computer programming (at a beginner level), and sometimes I daydream about teaching math according to principles from the essay A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart, but I am unlikely to be given the leeway to try.

Remember when windows said 10 would be the last version of windows, and they’d just keep sending updates from then on? That lie didn’t last long…

And they’re EoLing it this coming October! Can’t they wait until 12 at least to do that? I can’t remember the last time the end of life came before two versions had gone by. Wtf!

Mine was just all repeated digits of whatever hour. 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, 5:55, 11:11 all “counted” in my mind when I was entering university, and it happened so freaking often it was really weirding me out. It seemed like anytime I glanced at a clock without other intention, it would be one of those times. There were probably times I looked at a clock normally, but of course confirmation bias reinforces things. But it really did seem far more often than you’d expect. My bet is that my inner clock was prompting me to look at those times because I got an adreneline or dopamine or something spike, so my subconscious got trained into finding it.

Yes and yes. I followed the rules as a kid. I played the games with the full rules multiple times even, in defiance of everyone saying that everyone only does so once.

Looking at YouTube playthroughs for nostalgia, it looks like the game rules today have the trap set up to start? When I played, the rules were that you had to build it up slowly over the course of the game, one piece at a time, and only once it was built could it be activated. Yes, I played that way.

Interestingly enough, originally it WAS a Mario game, during initial development! Doki Doki Panic started as an engine test for a new Mario game with vertical scrolling in addition to horizontal scrolling. It was swapped to Fuji TV characters shortly after, mid development… and then ironically switched BACK to Mario for the US release!

Dusting and cleaning does not defeat the purpose. You’re making the mistake of thinking that cleanliness is boolean… true or false. It’s not that it’ll just get dusty again, it’s that it will get more dusty, and then even more dusty, and then dustier still, and there is actually no real practical limit to how filthy a place can get. Cleaning resets the progress to a point where you can live again.

Now, there is a related cleaning story that could be called defeating the purpose that stuck in my mind. It’s a bit Luddite in nature, but does have a point. It’s a micro-story from inside the book “Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh”:

The story was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all of her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop.

But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town—so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in the town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running.

In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever.

Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long, the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones every bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

That’s an example of defeating the purpose, where the thing you do actually makes it worse. A similar “defeating the purpose” is when a bunch of companies lowers wages to save money, making it so that people can no longer afford their products, meaning that they earn less money after all.

Just let anyone scrape it all for any reason. It’s science. Let it be free.

I will say that the blow dry option doesn’t really help sufficiently after using the bidet to avoid me wanting to use TP to dry off, but it might be sufficient for lady parts after peeing. Don’t have a vagina personally, so can’t say for sure.

A paramour is an “other lover”. Para = beside, amour = love. It’s not a casual fuck buddy, it’s your cheating partner. I’m surprised to hear you say it’s unknown as a word these days? Seems like just a normal word to me, albeit one I’m happy to go without using as cheaters suck.

I’ve got my overseas ballot. Just have to fill it out and send it in now.

It affects the election, but not in the way you want. It is literally the equivalent of not voting at all. That does effect the outcome if you would have voted for one of the two main parties otherwise.

“Oh please don’t throw me into the briar patch Mr. Fox! Anything but the briar patch!” -Br’er Rabbit, who was born and raised in the briar patch, and knows Mr. Fox can’t follow.

My advice is to know that, unlike dogs, a cat’s personality is not built into their breed, with maybe very minor behavior exceptions. Quite frankly, dogs were bred specifically for their behaviors, artificial selection created breed personalities— cat breeding was never for personality, but usually appearance instead, leaving personality to go whatever which way.

And secondly, you must know that a cat will not fully develop their personality until they’ve grown up a bit— you can’t learn a cat’s personality when they’re still a kitten. If you are adopting, adopting a kitting will mean rolling the dice on what you get. But adopting an adult cat will mean you can pick out a personality while at the shelter.

Seriously. You can learn a cat’s personality from 10-30 minutes hanging out with them in a room at the shelter… but only if they aren’t a kitten. And some personalities will fit with you and your family, and some will not.

Do you want a cuddler? An active playful cat? Or one that avoids you mostly and does their own thing? Or are you just looking for something pretty that matches your furniture? (I don’t really recommend you get a cat in this case, but historically, you’d be in good company)