This reminds me of the time I went on vacation with my brother (solid coke only guy; ftr I don’t drink soda, I drink tea, that’s a whole other meltdown in similarity lol) and we wound up in a “1950’s” cosplaying shopping square. Coke memorabilia EVERYWHERE. My brother was dying cause all the stores and restaurants we’d been to were Pepsi only. He excitedly goes into the convenience store with a display window full of coca cola bottles, a coca cola fridge and a COCA COLA SOLD HERE sign.

Pepsi only lol. Next time we went on vacation I bought him a 24 pack ahead of time and made space for it in my suitcase.

I was so confused lmao thanks for illuminating me. l Legit thought OP had some weirdass dungeon masters and was about to respond actually most don’t do that you just got a find the one for you lmao

Yep and CR10 when you’re level 7 and decided to fuck around is also a proverbial dildo

Just from DMing perspective I feel this when my players decide to fight a NPC they weren’t supposed to fight at a level I don’t have a block for lol. “Well your options are cr3 and cr10 and you’re level 7 so…10 it is and imma just shave some stuff off while hoping for the best” lol. Shout-out to every time my party says they’re looking for shady people to circumvent the legal way to do something then balk when the pricetag isn’t a handshake and an IOU their reputation proceeds them will never be collected.

Last week of 1997 I think (got a computer programmable barbie for xmas and somehow my older sister took this as “time to put her on the internet” lol). First thing she did was sign me up for AOL chat then put me in a “kid friendly” chat room (think there was a suggested list or smtg). Ended up being a roleplaying animals chat and…well it wasn’t just kids in there lol. Half of us were just typing “turns into a panda and rolls around” and others were typing “bear sits at bar and winks at panda”. We quickly exited that and she searched me a cat facts site and left me to it.

With the new found power of search I started looking up where we were blocked in whatever the current Tomb Raider was which led me to fanfic porn which led me to what’s 69 which actually led me to a couple different groups of older people who were very chill and “you shouldn’t be here”, but also gave me a lot of advice on sex ed (which was appreciated, my mom’s period talk was vague and conducted like I was in a war now lmao), keeping private on the internet and what’s an inappropriate conversation someone’s trying to have with me, saying no and I don’t have to talk to anyone who’s making me uncomfortable. Also taught me how to download music and safe practices. So thanks “perverts” of the 90s, I appreciated learning what reverse cowgirl was, no means no and how to download music for free so I could stop tape recording my favorites off the radio lol.

I’m not a mineral person going to be honest (I work in healthcare lol), so not sure I can really answer your questions. Also sorry being a bit cagey didn’t want to dox myself before a google, like felt 99% sure this was a common mineral, but again not a mineral person.

Basically I lived in some foothills along a ravine made of granite. Home 1 I think we had a neighborhood well and home 2 was a personal well. I can’t list the equipment being used to soften the water (if at all), I just know neither were on town water and home 2 I helped my dad install a softener since there wasn’t one (which tbh didn’t help too much besides making the water coming out of the faucet less cloudy and mildly less thirst inducing).

I don’t think my hometown has a lot of limestone (idk may be wrong, like said I’m not a mineral person, all I know it’s a granite ravine) so can’t comment too much beyond that. This was just my experience with water growing up and what put me off it for a long time.

Bit confused here. There’s levels to water hardness and what I listed you’d know pretty much instantly. It doesn’t sneak up on you or anything. If it makes you feel better I grew up in a town on a ravine lol it was all rock. You may not be dealing with the same situation.

ETA also limestone wasn’t the mineral that was the issue there, was a different one

I drink it now…on town water lol. Growing up outside of town proper in my area it did not taste good and left you more thirsty than when you started drinking it. The water was hard enough taking a shower felt like washing down with iron wool and if you stayed in more than five minutes you came out peeling. I was actually amazed the first time I lived in a town center on town water and the water didn’t make my skin feel raw lol. I was floored when I lived in a beach town and not only was the water mild, something in the area made the water taste slightly sweet and enjoyable to drink instead of “somewhat metallic from old pipes, but inoffensive cause it’s thirst quenching instead of thirst exacerbating”.

Being that person providing a better method halfway through a process. A cave person standing on top of another to cave art the ceiling? Halfway through I go “…You know you coulda just grabbed the log from outside, leaned it against the wall and climbed it”. Someone halfway through whittling a bowl? “Oh, yeah, I saw some coconuts on the beach they’d be perfect”.

I have the great hobby of Looking At Random Things, but the bad habit of assuming everyone else saw those things too so they must be doing what they’re doing for a reason lol. That all said I’m sure I’d be dead from dysentery within a week or smtg, they wouldn’t have to suffer me long.

Gonna be honest and maybe not a popular take, but reading the article I feel like the author is taking the wrong vent here. (Idk Boston Globe so could just be like another commenter said they’re trying to piss on teachers, but I’m going to take good faith here as dumb as that probably is). This reads like someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about teaching and is an avid reader doing the Principle Skinner no it’s the children who are wrong meme.

Going to cover a couple thoughts, I apologize if I don’t have them ordered well. First off there’s always been “tell me what the text is saying so I don’t have to read it”. Sparknotes was the go-to when I was in school for example. You can decry AI, but all that shit was there with sparknotes too. I did try using it once or twice for books I hated cause all my classmates were and holy fuck did it miss the mark, I didn’t even find it useful for the tests cause they’d be about the writing itself and sparknotes was just about what happened and some prominent metaphors. To give an example one class we read The Scarlet Letter in highschool, I hated the fuck out of this book. I only read a few chapters and then synopsed the rest on wikipedia, majority of my classmates did sparknotes entirely. I scored higher than them on tests cause I read enough to understand the writing style and all they could say was what happened and not the whys or hows of it or why specific descriptions were given and what those descriptions meant besides “innocence” or “guilt”, they really could not discuss the book at all. So this isn’t an AI thing. Like we’d go over a chapter we’d supposed to have read and I didn’t even read it cause I only read the first few and we’d get asked why the priest guy was whipping himself and my sparknotes classmates would say guilt. Me who only heard for the first time he whipped himself in this chapter was able to say religious guilt and sin, that he is failing in the eyes of society and his god and can never make up for what he’s done and has to whip these bad thoughts in the eyes of both out of himself, oppress himself to conform, etc etc like they actually read more about the chapter than me, but only got a “what happened and here’s the theme” with no critical thinking. So AI is just the latest version with just about as much vetting (I feel really confident it’s just cannibalizing sparknotes too lol). (Please don’t debate my The Scarlet Letter accuracy with me if I don’t have this entirely right it’s been 20 years and damn did I hate this book lol it’s just an example)

Secondly I don’t feel this covers how outdated the curriculum can be. I did Shakespeare in highschool and holy fuck it was horrible. I had read a lot of 1700/1800s originally published books at that point (not personal interest, just class divide in my town where I got placed in the “poor” school and that was the library lol) so it was not a struggle for me. But we spent a whole semester on a book with word and syntax notes for Romeo and Juliet cause it’s obviously not modern English and the rest of the class was just translating. We basically spent every class translating 1-2 pages at best. To me this is a holdover from Shakespeare’s own time where it ACTUALLY had a point. Like Elizabeth II translating Cicero from Latin was a) to teach her Latin and b) his discourse (as I understand, not his actual politics, but his lawyer technique, kind of like a light debate class). This was not what we were doing. It was just reading a “classic” for tradition and the teacher had to spend a shitload of time translating the class through it. The reason given was to learn his poetry structures, but while I’m not a poetry person I have to believe there are more modern language poets who use/d it that don’t require a whole semester spent on straight translation just so the class can understand the words, how they’re pronounced to fit into the structure and the general syntax for the time. Shakespeare absolutely deserves to be taught, but when you’re that far removed from modern language K-12 is not the place because you can’t engage in the point of learning what he has to teach in a timely manner, you’re basically teaching half a language. My English class in high school had way more discussions about Cyrano de Bergerac and its themes because everyone could follow the language (and honestly this was great cause a lot of people had dating experiences to compare being teenagers whereas Romeo and Juliet we spent so much time to translate we didn’t get that discussion). The amount of people who have English as a second language aside, it’s not helping anyone to have to learn a new form of English in a semester when your purpose is something else entirely.

Thirdly SAT (and ACT? Dunno didn’t take that one and been a while since I was in k-12, but think that’s the other one) has a reading comprehension test, not a “did you understand the art of writing here” test. Which I do think is kind of fair cause work wise the amount of times I’ve been asked to identify a metaphor or simile is 0 lol (I know there’s jobs where that’s important, but my experience is they’re the minority). But everything is informed by those tests so if the course focus is going to be on comprehension over writing style I don’t agree with this article’s take. We are in a system to teach to the test (I may be wrong, but I feel like this would be generally everywhere cause the test is what matters, like in school for healthcare even though I had patient care techniques from work for how to discuss with the patient in an understandable and accessible manner, I couldn’t use them because the test required I use confusing technical terms I would never ACTUALLY use with a patient to show my knowledge like I’m not going to say ambulate to a patient when they would understand walk better). So you may say here yeah comprehension and the test is what matters or you may say the point is to teach the art of writing in which case the test should be reworked (idk I might be forgetting and SAT did have a poetry section, but fill in the blank Y is like X is is a whole world different from read this and what is the theme, what was the motifs, etc; if I’m totally misremembering or it’s changed and there is some in-depth writing style testing I apologize lol would still stand by k-12 stick to modern language cause teachers only have so much time with students).

I am not an educational professional so idk might be way off the mark here, but as a reader who did have to walk my classmates through a lot of shit (absolutely no fault of theirs, they read too, they just had money for Harry Potter and I didn’t lol) this article just rankles me.

Got it a little confused, Jefferson is the one who was obsessed with owning his half-sister-in-law. For Washington I’m talking about [https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/ona-judge](http://www.ona.com/ Judge) who Washington was particularly insistent on reclaiming up until he died. He may have said he abhorred slavery, but he didn’t seem to particularly practice or actually believe that.

Didn’t Washington stalk and harass his half-sister-in-law (who was a slave who escaped him) till his deathbed… Ig tbf coulda just been gender slavery rather than race slavery, but idk I’d say he was against people as property.