Just a rock-licker who loves all things sci-fi, boardgames, and growing my own food, especially heirloom tomatoes.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Hah! I love how different the reactions are. Some kids seem to have no sense of fear, while I’ve had others straight nope out. This year I had a mom grab her kid under the arms to drag him screaming towards me (but don’t worry, heard him giggling back down the driveway with a “that was scary!”), and another one shouted “now you die!” (using his flashlight as pistol) after I startled him. 😆

    If you see my set up from a previous year in my other comment, one of my favorite reactions was a trio of teenage girls where one saw me approach and let out a “FUCK THAT!” and ran, with her friends on her heels. Left me standing there holding the bowl with a faint “wait come back, I’ve got candy…”



  • Oooh, you can try what I’ve done before. Leave the front door open with the interior dimly lit and her hiding in a dark room beyond. When the kids come, she steps from the darkness into the dim light, and it’s a pretty good effect with a masked costume.

    [Image description: a dimly lit red room, with a dark masked figure with horns standing in the doorway beside a table draped in black with a vase of dead flowers. An illusion of hands pressing through the wall is projected onto the wall beside the figure.]






  • I completely agree. Every so often I get an itch to have a look at Reddit, and though the niche subs still seem alright, the comments of anything near the front page are beleaguered with low-quality jokes and karma grabs.

    God forbid you’re actually interested in discussing the subject, any comment that takes more than a few seconds to write or read gets buried under a thousand others like your first examples.








  • I’ll confess I do this with some regularity. If I unwrap a piece of cheese and see it’s moldy, well I’m not tossing a nice hunk of aged gouda in the trash! I’ll slice the mold off, then do a sniff and nibble test. If it still tastes moldy, keep slicing until it doesn’t.

    I’ve done this since I was a kid, so who knows if it’s actually safe, or if I’ve just spent decades rolling the dice and getting lucky.





  • As someone with ADHD, the results of this study are encouraging, but limited. They summed it up well in the article, but the study only covered people who were self-microdosing and then self-reporting, which leaves lots of uncontrolled variables.

    “This study is a naturalistic prospective study, meaning that we measured participants over time without manipulating any variables such as substances and doses they used for microdosing during the study,” Haijen said. “In contrast to a controlled lab-based study, where drug- and dose uniformity is guaranteed. Also no control group was included, so we cannot say if this effect was purely because of microdosing, or if other factors, such as placebo- or expectancy effects, were the main force behind the changes we observed. So this study should be seen as a first step in this research direction, as more and controlled studies will hopefully follow.”


  • I’ve come to learn your brain is really good at subconscious processing of things that don’t quite make it to conscious awareness. Some part of your brain saw the cop and the deer and was trying to alert the rest of you.

    I had that happen once when I was out hiking alone doing geology research. I reached this area of the woods and was suddenly overwhelmed by this feeling of TIME TO LEAVE. I tried arguing with myself that there was still enough daylight to check out an outcrop I could see in the distance, but the feeling got so powerful, I finally gave in and called it quits for the day.

    I realized while walking out, that with all the little noises of the quail and other animals I’d been hearing all day, that spot in the woods had been silent. The next time I visited the area (and not alone this time), I found a cave right behind where I’d been standing, with fresh mountain lion tracks. Who knows, some part of me might have seen a mountain lion in that cave and was doing everything it could to tell me to get the fuck away!