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I've always been under the childlike impression that my tap water is clean clean, but when thinking about it today I realised that it's unlikely that tap water is completely sterile, certainly not by the time it reaches my house through miles of pipes. So, just how unsterile can it be and still pass muster with the local government?

If we accept a certain number of rodent hairs or cockroach shells in each helping of our processed foods, I can only imagine what's considered acceptable when it comes to tap water.

For reference, I'm in N. Ireland, which is, regrettably, the UK. But obviously the island of Ireland is where my water comes from. From this nightmarish swamp, to be precise.

Stay moist, hydrohomos.

I recently posted a thread about an old movie from the 1950s (12 Angry Men), and provided spoiler warnings. More than one person replied jokingly that they were grateful for the spoiler warning for a 70-year-old movie. I've heard the same comment in one form or another many times over the years, and I really don't get it.

What's the expectation here? That we're all LLMs who've been trained on every movie released prior to 2010? It would be literally impossible to watch every film - even excluding obscure or foreign films - that humankind has produced since the beginning of cinema. I'm a huge movie fan who watches 2 or 3 new (to me) movies a week from pretty much every era, but I had only watched this very famous movie from the '50s in the last year, because I'm not a magic space baby with a brain containing all of the film scripts in history. The more films that are made every year, the less they will be watched by future generations, because time is a straight line and we haven't figured out how to pause the fucker yet so we can all catch up on 100 years of film.

I'm grateful that this old movie hadn't been spoiled for me, because I wasn't even an itch in my father's nutsack, nor he in his, when the film was first released. But the jokes in that thread would seem to imply that I would have had no right to be annoyed if the film had been spoiled for me, because... what? I should have had the good sense to be born during the depression instead of the '80s? I should have a working knowledge of every story every told prior to my birth? The fact that this very famous and very old film hadn't been spoiled for me shows that even very famous and very old movies don't automatically weave themselves into the fabric of your reality by the mere force of time itself. I had no clue what the movie was about beyond the very basic premise, because even spoilers for old movies are hard to come by when there're so many movies in existence. The jokes would only make sense if the opposite were the case.

If you care about spoiling films for other people, then there is really no time frame for a film's release that makes it 'fair game'. People have varied and unpredictable lives when it comes to the media they've consumed, and more often than not they're busy watching the current output of Hollywood rather than watching their grandparents' favourite films featuring actors who are all long dead, and before colour image was even technologically possible. The noble spoiler warning should be eternal.

And all of the above also applies to novels, plays, TV shows, video games, and anything else where spoilers might ruin one's first taste of it. Spoiler warnings are free, but they can conjure great cultural value seemingly out of thin air for those who are protected by them.

We really need to bring that back 👀

I always assumed it came from Shakespeare, or something along those lines. That it actually came from putrid legalese was like finding out that my online girlfriend was an AI chatbot all along.

It's the first of January 2026. You wear your t-shirt with the VHS cover art for 1992's 'Passenger 57' on it. You bump into an old friend you haven't seen in 10 years, let's call him Sebastian McGillicuddy. You chit chat, he compliments your objectively awesome t-shirt, then you part ways, expecting to never see him again.

It's the third of February 2026. You decide that it's time to break out the Passenger 57 shirt again, because you haven't worn it since the first of January. You somehow bump into Sebastian McGillicuddy again. You now think "dammit, Sebastian McGillicuddy must think I have one fuckin' shirt and that I wear it every day like a fuckin' madman".

What's the word for that? How do you refer to it without having to type out paragraphs of text like I did above? "Oh yeah, bumped into Sebastian McGillicuddy the other day, had a moment of [word] with him lol, hate when that happens".

P.S. FUCK Sebastian McGillicuddy.

[For those who don't know, Cenobites are the sadomasochistic torturers in the Hellraiser movies]

Most animals, absent contact with humans, would never know the feeling of having their ears deep cleaned or their bellies full all day every day. They'd never feel scritches and pets once they grow into adults. They'd never have a big fat human belly to sleep on in complete contentment and security, inside a warm and secure house, a house filled with soft furnishings they'd never otherwise feel. They don't even know that many sensations and psychological states are possible until we give them to them.

Ever seen videos of a cow playing with a yoga ball? They have the capacity for joy and play that they almost never get to express or feel. But we can do that for them if we want. Yet they seem to not know such things without kind humans showing them.

We suck when it comes to mistreating animals, of course. But those of us who love the hairy bastards must be like gods to them. My wee dog would surely never in his entire life know the pleasure of having that part of his back where his tail joins with his spine scratched if not for being around me, because he has no way to reach it himself, and dogs don't scratch each other. Cats being played like bongos would never get that experience anywhere else.

Well-treated pets must talk about us like "they're explorers in the further regions of experience; angels to some, even bigger angels to others".

All of this is true for wild animals especially, although I'd never advocate interfering with their lives in that way. But if you gained the trust of a bear and got to the point where you could scratch its back and maybe even relieve pain from a wound or something, it'd be like an entirely new lobe of its brain was born and activated. It would wander off thinking "what the fuck just happened??" in a good way. The fact that it's a bad idea to socialise large wild animals actually makes me a bit sad, because they'll never really experience any of the things our pets and domesticated animals will experience, and will go their entire lives without even knowing that their minds and bodies can reach such plateaus. They have all of this neural wiring that just never gets lit up.

It gives us a lot of power that can do a lot of good at no cost to ourselves (in fact, it benefits us as much as it does the animal in question). Pretty nice state of affairs, really. I believe it was Nietzsche who said "scritch the pet, and the pet scritches you".

Huge spoilers ahead!

The jury, in particular the main protagonist, seemed to wade into illegal territory more than once. But being a complete layman who's never been on a jury, I don't know for sure.

Doing one's own research and bringing one's own "evidence" into the jury room, and not presenting it to the prosecution or defence, seems like a no no. The knife the protagonist finds in a store and brings in to show his fellow jurists that the prosecutor was wrong about its uniqueness; this feels like mistrial levels of inappropriate. Making judgements about credibility based on whether or not someone was wearing their glasses in court by noticing their nose has the telltale markings of a glasses wearer, something not pointed to by the defence as worthy of note, likewise seems off limits.

Is it not the case that the jury has to work only with information and evidence presented during the trial? And in fact can be told to ignore certain evidence from the trial if the judge deems it stricken from the record? Is it expected or acceptable for jurists to come up with their own alternate scenarios and narratives that fit the evidence or are they bound only to consider the theories presented by the defence and the prosecution?

Perhaps in the '50s this was all above board but the law changed since then. Or maybe my movie-based understanding of juries is a Frankenstein mishmash of true and bullshit. Probably that.

Great film deserving of its place atop "best films ever" lists, and I even liked the '90s remake!

As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you'd get baked like Marie Curie's ovaries from the radiation. It's mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.

And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀

"How do we ensure our patient drops and loses ~80% of his pills and that he slices the absolute fuck out of his fingers in the process?"

They're locking my mental health goals behind a fidgety Saw trap built from scissors and miserliness.

I've had boxes where there were several single pills snipped from their blister packs rattling around in them. These pills in particular are tiny, like you can't even feel them in your mouth when you take them, but they expect me to be able to finesse one out of a single blister with at least 3 extremely sharp and piercing corners on it 😒

If you're a pharmacist and you do this, please go ahead and take the pills yourself, you clearly need 'em more than I do, ya sick fuck.

I need to load a second page to enter my password in some sites. Why is this? I even have a site I use that has the username, password and 2FA entries on separate pages that each need to be loaded one after the other.

My uneducated guess is that it makes it harder for bots, but I can't imagine it being that much of an impedance 🤷‍

Cheers!