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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • German is Fledermaus if I remember correctly, so Flittermouse seems to be Germanic in origin, as is the Swedish word, fladdermus. Etymology is interesting, but I know next to nothing about it. Guessing is fun, though. If I’m wrong here, I love to be educated.

    I get why bat is preferred as the Germanic versions are more than a little clunky and not nearly as cool or scary sounding. Here comes the amazing Flittermouseman! Villains beware!

    Raspy voice “I am Flittermouseman”.


  • I you make your own, there is no risk for blindness. Blindness comes from methanol, not ethanol. If you use a yeast based process to produce the alcohol and then distill it, there is no way to accidentally produce methanol in that process. The cases where people get blind or die from moonshine stems from when the feds replaced moonshine with methanol to be able to make that claim and disrupt the business of organized crime during the prohibition. There are still cases now and then where people try to make drinkable alcohol from some industrial base and don’t know how to.

    TLDR: Don’t buy, make.



  • I guess the effectiveness and line of sight also depends on which way the door opens, standards on this differ wildly between countries. If the grenade explodes as soon as it exits the can, and the can is more than a grenade-length away from the door, much of the direct detonation shockwave and shrapnel would be blocked by the wall being between the explosion and the pranked person, especially if the door has to be pulled open. If the door is pushed open, chances are that at least the opening hand and arm is exposed.

    It also depends on the material and thickness of the wall, of course. I have personally been about three feet from a hand grenade going off, with no I’ll effects other than some dirt falling on me. There was of course a bit of reinforced concrete between me and said grenade. It was also outdoors which obviously makes a huge difference on experienced pressure.

    Hitler, for example, survived a pretty big indoors explosion just a few yards away, only because he was mostly shielded by a table. Some windows may have been open which affects lethality more than one might assume. Didn’t Mythbusters test exactly this?

    It is also quite possible I’ve given this a lot more thought than I should’ve. When you know a lot about a subject, you want it to be correct. This is not such a subject.









  • TL;DR: Capitalism sucks.

    So that was a bit of a depressive read. Can’t say I’m really surprised as I grew up in the 70’s and was around to see how Ruhr in Germany spew out enough sulfur to poison the lakes even in the Nordics.

    The ruthless effectiveness of the suppression of any opposition is what gets me about all this and that is the major difference about how the debate was back then. I’m not saying that the perpetrators were any better back then, it’s that they get away with methods and arguments that simply wouldn’t fly in the 70’s. The press would have had a field day taking down someone trying to lie or suppress to the extent they get away with today. More often anyway, not saying it was perfect in any way shape or form, but the press had more freedom and was actually feared because they could make a difference and was much freer to do so. The reliance on ad money instead of subscribers is a large part of what killed the free press. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. Media owners do and did obviously play a large part on what stories and spin they allow, but if the spin was too blatant, competing media would be oh so happy to point that out and shame them for it. This does not happen today because all media that counts is owned by a small click of people with the same interests and goals.

    Any left leaning media have had a much tougher time switching to a mainly ad based revenue streams because the ones buying ads have an interest in keeping the status quo and why would they buy ads in media that works against their interests? There are basically no left leaning mainstream media outlets left, even in the paradise on earth that is the EU, and for a smaller outfit it is basically impossible to get a dissenting view heard.

    *This comes from a European perspective, where the difference is more pronounced between then and now, but the difference is there for US media too, albeit to a lesser degree. There were still large outlets with a bit of a backbone willing to run a story that was embarrassing to or was contrary to the wishes of powerful people back then. Not so today but for slightly different reasons in the US.

    *By left in this post I mean European left, not the hard right Democrats that the US define as left.




  • Correct. You’ll start breathing after you black out. Also, you’ll probably fail to even hold your breath that long. Takes training and a LOT if will power to be able to. You know that very uncomfortable panicky feeling that starts after a while when holding your breath? When that gets going for real, you are not even halfway to blacking out. Our body has strong feelings about breathing and is pretty good at letting you know how it feels about the lack of air. Or technically, the build up of CO2. You can somewhat bypass your body’s CO2 detection by hyperventilation, but the end result is the same, you start breathing after you black out. Source: used to apnea dive, but as with everything I do, I quit before I got good.