“Nothing” is a bit of a stretch, but it’s true that milestones pretty much stop happening for much of adulthood. I’ve traveled, I’ve dated, I’ve moved and changed jobs. But I don’t want to fall into a rut, so I’ve been working to give myself a new “milestone” every year. Last year I achieved a key certification for work. The year before, I learned to identify every country on a map. The year before that, I learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube. Other things have been learning to knit, identifying every nation’s flag, and learning to fly an airplane.

I’m not sure what to aim for this year, but I’m open to suggestions.

I keep forgetting that I’m 37. I could swear I was 27, like, yesterday.

I’ve got a coworker in his young-20s who admitted to being “ageist.” When he heard my age he reacted weird, saying something along the lines of not caring about people 30+.

I wasn’t offended. I simply told him, “You’ll be there before you know it.” My other coworkers (also 30+ years old) backed me up. Dude can enjoy his time now, though from his response I suspect he might have a fear of aging that he’s not fully come to terms with yet.

Reminds me of when I play Kingdoms Reborn and I’m trying to conquer a small tribe. Somehow, a handful of unarmed villagers will kick the asses of all the warriors, cavalry, and archers I’m able to send.

I’m usually asked this at work, so my go-to response is, “Well, I’m here.” Which most seem to understand.

Random, but this pulled up an old memory. When I was a kid bordering on teenagerhood, one of my friends was excited that her parents were finally permitting her to swear. “No shit, Sherlock,” was her favorite, and it ended up practically becoming her catch phrase.

But if you do, that means we’ll have 6 more weeks of winter.

Guess it’s time to destroy that, too.

Why did you put this in our brains. Why.

Synergize? Mult? Sorry, I don’t speak corporate.

"I feel like we’ve been too afraid to make jokes that might make people uncomfortable.”

She added, “But the really good ones, they’re not tame jokes. They’re jokes that are kind of, ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ Comedy is about surprise. You need things you didn’t see coming.”

So she thinks good comedy is just saying something unexpected. That’s it. Shock value and nothing more.

Weird, I think of good comedy as poignant observations relayed in an amusing manner, or clever twists that highlight something unexpected. Just stating an unexpected thing doesn’t cut it, the delivery is important for making a joke land. It takes extra work, but that’s what good writers are for.

No wonder I never liked Friends.

Thank you for saying something. I didn’t know anything about this guy.

It also provides yet another reason why it’s important to keep artists’ names in their work. It’s not only for giving credit where it’s due, but for providing context when the artist has questionable leanings.

I’m down for politeness, and teaching politeness. But the thing about these situations that bugs me is when the parents insist on teaching politeness, but they don’t practice it themselves.

Does the parent say, “Please hand me your dishes,” or “Please come into the living room”? If they use polite language regularly, then it’d make sense for them to instill polite manners in other mundane situations. If the parents model the behavior they want, they extend respect to the kids, and as such it’s fair to request the same behavior in response.

But too many people, including many parents, skip over that “model the behavior they want” part. Saying please/thank you/etc. becomes a rule applied to the kids, but not to the adults. Of course a kid’s going to be resentful about that.

I teach small kids, I use please and thank you with them all the time. I then praise them for independently using such words. I see it as a show of my respect for them, and they pick up on that. I may be in charge, but as far as I see it, we are equals. I learned the value of politeness through trauma, but I’d rather these kids learn about it by experiencing the pro-social benefits that it comes with.

Politeness isn’t a problem, but making it a one-way street absolutely is.

Not all of them do. I work with autistic kids, and sometimes we have to modify how we teach echoics (repeating what someone else said) because of it.

We may have a kid that we’re trying to teach to ask for help when they need it. So say, for example, we see them unable to open their lunch box. For some kids, we’d go, “Say, ‘help’.” The kid replies, “Help,” and we help them open the box.

But some kids will repeat exactly what we say, which means they end up going, “Say help.” So we have to change the way we make the suggestion. In this case we’d omit the “say” part, and just say “Help.” That way the kid will repeat just the important part, enabling them to communicate more functionally to get their needs met.

[Velvet ants] can be found worldwide with about 230 genera or subgenera and around 8,000 species worldwide. Over 400 species occur in the North American Southwest.

Velvet Ant Wikipedia page

This question reminds me of an exercise my elementary school class did once. We were told to pick an idiom and draw it literally.

I don’t remember what I picked, but my friend drew her mom’s favorite saying, “You drive me up the wall!” I can still vividly see the drawing of a lady with her eyes bugging out, driving vertically up a living room wall.

On a related note, the idea that all it takes is a simple line on the ground for a lot of disaster not to happen. Sometimes when another car passes in the opposite direction, I think of how freaking close we are, at the relative speeds we’re going, and I’m amazed/frightened that a line dividing our lanes, an imaginary border, is all that’s keeping us apart.

Well, yes. We are built from the Earth - our atoms cycle with the Earth’s over and over again.

The Moon was created after a collision with Earth, so some of our atoms are from the Moon, too.

Then ultimately, the Earth and the Moon were made of leftover material from the sun’s formation.

But the heavy elements that we rely on for life weren’t made in our sun - they only form in much more massive stars, ones that must have existed long before our sun was formed.

So actually, yes! We come from planets, the Moon, and stars themselves.