RoabeArt

If we had the ability to control the weather, do we use the tech to guarantee ample rainfall and stable temperatures in agricultural regions to ensure successful crops? Maybe bring rain to drought and fire stricken areas? Nah, let's use it to send floods and tornadoes against ourselves.

As a weather nerd, this kind of shit infuriates me most.

On my city's local doppler radar, there's a hilltop some distance away that shows up as red or yellow blotches on the raw radar feed. This has been like this ever since the radar was first put online in 1995. It's literally unavoidable unless they move the dish somewhere else.

Most commercial weather apps have algorithms that filter out this kind of ground clutter, but every now and then the algorithms miss it, and the spots become visible.

Literally every time it would happen, people on the local Facebook communities ask what it is and most of the responses range from wrong to conspiratorial, while the correct answers are met with "laugh" reactions (which are Facebook's unofficial "down vote" button).

I wish appliances lasted 2-3 years. I bought an air fryer a while ago and while it doesn't run on any app/IoT slop, it still had a touch-based LED screen that just quit working after about 4 months. The air fryer was essentially bricked, and the whole process to send the thing in to get it repaired under warranty would have cost me almost as much as buying a new one (in addition to paying out of pocket to ship the appliance by Fedex/UPS/etc to the service center).

I'm with the boomers: bring back knobs and switches, fuck digital buttons.

It's hard to not "engage in politics" with family when they're usually the ones who instigate it. Every time I'm over their house, my dad mentions something or brings up a chud ragebait video complaining about "the left."

Last time, he pulled up that video of Mamdani yelling at Tom Homan from a few months ago. As it played, he commented to me, "these are the people you want running this country?" I'd have answered yes (the obvious answer), but I knew he was trying to bait me into an argument.

Quiet local dive pubs became either overly loud clubs or sports bars

I partly blame those TouchTune jukeboxes (which themselves are a consequence of the Internet) for the decline of the bar atmosphere.

Before them, each bar had their own eclectic collection of songs, which either slapped, sucked or were somewhere in between, but they were all unique and reflected the atmosphere of the place they were in. Now every place has the same flashy RGB Internet connected screen kiosk that theoretically has hundreds of thousands of songs to pick from, but almost everybody in every bar picks the same pop, country or dad-rock slop.

Even the quiet bars that adopted those jukeboxes became loud clubs not long after.

You mean plutonium doesn't look like a vial of cherry flavored cough syrup suspended in a larger vial of water?

Until a few years ago my cat used to make a mad dash for the outside any time i had the door open. There were a few times where she'd ninja her way out while I'd bring in groceries or something, and she'd be gone for days.

Now I could leave the door wide open for any given time and she'll just sit there staring at it from her spot on our couch. She's getting pretty old though (about 13 years) so I'm wondering if she's become aware of her own vulnerability. She's still spry regardless but she couldn't care less anymore about escaping.

In my town, before the Interstates were put in, the county/state transportation departments bought out and set aside strips of land in the 1950s and kept them empty for 20-30 years until construction started in the 1970s. Trees grew in during that time while the land around it got built up. It's weird looking at maps and aerial photos from that time period and seeing empty space. They would have become cool little wooded areas if the highways were never built.

I'm assuming the same happened in New Orleans in the "before" picture: the highway was planned and the land was bought out well in advance, and trees grew in during that time.

That's an impressive hook. I'm curious to see Storm-Relative Velocity data from that 15kft slice.

I used to have all kinds of weather nerd programs on my old PC, like GrlevelX etc. Radar apps for phones just aren't the same.