Don’t worry, some of us are keeping the astronomy spirit alive in the younger generation. There’s a 5 year old kid I work with who can name tons of celestial objects that my coworkers have never heard of. It makes for fun inside jokes/references. Sometimes when we’re with another person, he’ll compare our distances to each other and say, “You’re Alpha Centauri A, I’m Alpha Centauri B, and he/she’s Proxima Centauri.”

Aw crap, that’s my age.

I’m easily mistaken for younger, though, being a playful adult. I don’t think there’s any age I’d want to go “back” to from here, unless I could bring the knowledge and skills that I have today with me.

Eww, I wouldn’t do him even if I were at gunpoint.

Punishing descendants is absolutely a part of the bible. Women experiencing pain during childbirth is supposedly a punishment for Eve eating the forbidden fruit.

One doesn’t have to be internationally important to not want their audio recorded in their own private space.

And the mess will return in no time, because the kid will be looking for something specific and they’ll have to pull everything out of the closet just to find it.

No paid leave no matter what.

Unless you’re a cop and you just shot a kid, of course. Then it’s paid vacation time, baby.

The laptop I have now has its own camera cover, but when I had a laptop that didn’t have it, I was able to buy little slider stickers to put over it. I don’t want to link any particular website, but if you look up “laptop camera slider sticker” you can easily find them.

I hope they like me talking to myself in funny voices and belting out songs at the top of my lungs, because that’s all the audio they’ll get out of me.

“It” from South Park might as well be a reality.

Salt has been demonized a lot, and that bothers me because individuals’ needs can vary significantly. I rarely eat processed food, or at least “processed” meaning “with salt already added” - I do use a lot of frozen veggies.

Anyway, whenever I get blood tests done, my sodium levels are almost too low - it’s in the healthy range, but at the lowest threshold of healthy. I shudder to think what the level would look like if I didn’t cook with soy sauce now and then.

Salt isn’t like a poison we all need to avoid - it’s crucially important for us all, just in the right amounts.

My work recently treated my group of coworkers to subs, but I don’t eat meat and didn’t have any. Instead, my manager said she’d reimburse me, and broke down the price of the sandwiches (which everyone else split) to calculate $7 per person. So I was given $7 Doordash credit.

$7. On Doordash. The fuck am I supposed to do with that?

c/DadJokes is 👉 that way

A few months ago I decided to listen to a few albums I used to be obsessed with as a teen. I just… didn’t feel anything anymore. The music used to vibe with my teenage angsty energy, but being in my 30s now it just doesn’t hit the same.

Meanwhile, I still rock out to classic rock and oldies from before my time. I was just singing Steve Miller Band and The Beatles on my way home from work - no radio, just felt like singing.

Though some stuff I listened to in my youth is more relevant now than ever. Songs written during the Bush era criticizing politics are as cathartic to scream out as they used to be…

This reminds me, I need to make a living will. “Do not take extraordinary efforts to prolong my life, unless either of two situations occur - 1) capitalism collapses during my infirmity, or 2) I somehow receive a windfall of wealth such that any accrued medical debts would be covered by said-wealth.”

In other words, just pull the plug. Even if I wake up from a coma, being forced to spend the rest of my life paying off the debt from however long my hospital stay was would be a fate worse than death. At that point, fuck it all. I’d be done playing this stupid game.

Oh hey, that’s literally me. Just barely staying afloat, with my studio apartment. A good month is one where I don’t have to withdraw from my meager savings to pay for groceries.

Androgen insensitivity syndrome is fascinating. Plenty of people with it grow up female and have no idea their genes are different, until they reached puberty and never get their period.

Born in the late 80s, making me a 90s kid.

My siblings, neighbors, and I would play in the woods behind our neighborhood. There were trails and a creek that flowed through it. My older brothers and their friends would build bridges over the water (which vandals would destroy, so they rebuilt several times.) My parents allowed me to go play there as long as I didn’t go alone. There was evidence of past generations playing in the same place, like platforms from old tree houses that had mostly fallen apart and strings along the tree line from old cup+string “phones” that kids in the past used to communicate. I’d also pick wild blueberries and climb trees. My siblings would fish and just chill.

We were among the last families to give their kids such freedom. One of our neighbor families had early “helicopter parents,” so the kids lived very different childhoods from us. I remember other parents talking about that family, almost always disparagingly about how the kids were always stuck at home and were being raised on video games. It was like most adults saw adventuring outdoors with other kids as a typical way to spend childhood. I learned to navigate on my own, walking and bike riding around town without any way to contact my parents for hours on end. It was normal, it was expected, it was even seen as important for a child’s budding independence.

Some kids would use payphones to make prank calls. There was one trail behind a park where somebody left a bunch of porn magazines, because it seems every town had a random “porn mag” patch somewhere. It was the first time I saw adult content, and I remember us kids treating it like it was funny.

I spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. My first kiss was on a nature trail in my home town. There was even a tire swing that the boy pushed me on, before we walked to the edge of the inlet for that first kiss moment.

When indoors, I played NES and SNES games. My family also played board games and my siblings and I made up our own creative games to play together. Car rides were great, too, with plenty of time to stare out the window and let my mind wander. At one point my mom bought a van and it came with a heavy-ass TV for the back, but my parents got rid of it. It only played VHS tapes and although at first I thought it would’ve been so cool to have a TV in the vehicle, I look back on it now and am glad that we didn’t keep it. Even when we drove for 25 hours to get to Florida, I didn’t miss having a screen. I brought books, a portable CD player, and toys, then spent most of the time gazing outside anyway. I remember seeing the full moon in the sky and thinking about how cool it was that it was always there, no matter where I went…

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I often think about the shitty parts of my childhood, so it’s nice to remember the parts that didn’t suck. I’m really glad I got to enjoy the outdoors as much as I did, without being treated like a delinquent for having a childhood that mirrored all the generations of children that came before me.

It’s ironic that wanting to use one’s own brain makes someone a “boomer.” I know not all baby boomers are as intellectually-lazy as the ones I grew up under, but considering that’s one trait that I’ve seen a lot from that cohort, this is weird to see.

It’s a combination of the water depth, suspended sediments, and the phytoplankton population in an area. The Bahamas are on shallow waters, where the light doesn’t penetrate as deeply as it does in the open ocean. In the open ocean, sunlight gets absorbed until it reaches a depth where no light remains. On shallow waters however, especially where the sea floor is built out of white sand such as in the Bahamas, more light gets reflected back to the surface, making the area appear brighter.

Sediments and phytoplankton also play a role. Less sediment around the islands leads to clearer waters. There’s also less phytoplankton in the area. Phytoplankton, much like plants, use chlorophyll to make their food. As a result, both phytoplankton and plants reflect a lot of green light. Without phytoplankton, the area looks more blue.