You put it way better than I did about packaging before plastics! There's so many fascinating examples of things being reused back in the day because of the cost that would never happen today, and will need to start happening again if we want to avoid a societal level catastrophie

The funniest part is I'm not the one who watches it, my wife is. Most of it is just background noise to me, but she'll poke me to pay attention when they get something really rediculous setup (like the staged assassination plot. Listening to Chatterbox and Vivek planning it was honestly funnier than the staged assassination attempt itself!)

But yeah honestly I find the pacing of live streams to be too slow for me, I just can't pay attention for that long without anything meaningful happening, then suddenly I've missed something massive in the 1-2 hour long conversation I tuned out. But having my wife who finds it's perfect second screen content for her ADHD to poke me when I need to pay attention or summarize some of the long meandering conversations between characters (seriously I can never tell when it's an important conversation or not!) it's almost like I'm a viewer

What were the impacts of Roots? I remember watching it in middle school for one of our history classes and I can appreciate that it gave me perspective on what slavery looked like but that was decades after its release that I saw it

For context, the animated family movie genre was on a trajectory for much deeper and more thoughtful movies, if a bit darker that would appeal more to adults. Then Shrek hit the scene with a banger soundtrack, subversive comedy, and some really good dunking on Disney. Shrek then absolutely shrekked the box office and ever since then basically every animated film has been chasing the bar that Shrek set

There's also an argument to be made that Shrek indirectly lead to the massive western market for anime as adults seek prestige animated films that aren't being produced in the US

I've been very hyperfixated on my model railroad recently. I got halfway decent at woodworking, pretty good with a drill and some brackets and wood and right now I'm building soldering and electronics skills. I've also been doing some locomotive repairs and getting pretty good disassembling, diagnosing and repairing them!

Most recently I've been focused on electronics and building a nice collection of components. I'm strongly considering spinning up a side gig selling some pre-made circuits that for whatever reason just arent available right now despite being fairly desirable and fairly simple to solder up if you're willing to do a bit of reading and warm up the soldering iron

It's so funny seeing Ramaswami step back into the public eye after giving Squeex basically half a decade to write a public image for him amongst his audience with his parody character Ramasquamy

Like, I seriously can't think of Ramaswamy as an actual politician that people take seriously after several years of watching Ramasquamy prance around announcing "Day One!" whilst holding up double peace signs, stage a "peaceful protest" at the city hall on Jan 6th after he lost the mayoral reelection, or setting up a fake assassination plot to have his ear get shot during the mayoral debates last month, pretending to be the incumbent mayor because of being referenced as mayor in the trailer despite there being nobody actually filling the mayoral role, etc.

Can you drag your friends on a camping trip? Or even just a walk on a local trail? Basically organize a friend activity that's not really compatible with scrolling on phones so they might get a break from the dopamine drip?

I have one still in my town as well. Sure they charge $3 for a single 555 chip and I can get a pack of 100 of them for $8 online, but if I'm in a bind and need it today, as long as it's before they close at 6pm I can hit up the RadioShack (they're phasing out the RadioShack branding but still) and probably get what I need

I've been doing similar as I've noticed my general happiness on a given day is inversely proportional to my amount of time spent staring at screens that day. So I've started filling out my office with bits and bobs for making models and soldering together electronics and I've been reading a lot more books and honestly it's been super amazing for my mental health

Many businesses are for gathering or socializing. If this were the Middle Ages, we’d hang out at the inn after the work day was done, or maybe talk and drink down by the town well.

In many rural communities especially in the Midwest this is the role that the town bar(s) fill. You need something like 50 people living in a given community for one bar to be sustainable, and because of that you get towns with ~250 people that have 3-4 bars but only 2 churches. These small town bars generally know their role and price their food and morning coffee accordingly-making it as affordable as possible so the few customers they have can afford to come back more than once a week

My workplace is regulated by the FDA and USDA. Everyone is very focused on compliance and food safety and ready to jump on a call with a dozen executives if there's so much as a whisper of an issue. There's clearly still some teeth in these regulatory agencies if it's causing the executives I support to be so concerned about maintaining regulatory compliance!

My wife had undiagnosed vaginismus for quite a while, so we used a lot of lube to try to compensate and quickly figured out what we liked. One evening running into a walgreens to restock on lube for some planned activities, I couldn't figure out why the cashier was being weird until I remembered what I was buying. Poor young lady looked to be about 16 years old. Sorry ma'am!