Fondots

It really kind of depends on the type of anchor and the intended use

The most common little plastic ones that you're probably picturing are pretty bad in most cases, but some of the heavier duty ones are pretty damn strong if used properly

I'd tend to chalk that up to user error, if you're putting enough force on your toilet paper holder to pull it off the wall you're doing something besides just pulling toilet paper off of it or maybe you installed it with the world's shittiest drywall anchors

I've always thought that most toilet paper holders are over engineered. You don't need a little springy rod between 2 posts, you just need an L-shaped bar with the short end screwed to the wall and maybe a little knob on the end of the long side to keep the roll from sliding off. And it's not that the spring style is especially difficult to use or prone to failure or anything, it just seems like a no-brainer to me to use a one-piece holder with no moving parts instead of one that has at least 4 parts (the base, 2 halves of the roller, and a spring) I'm seeing more of that style around these days, which I appreciate.

Stove vent hoods that don't actually vent outside are fucking stupid. My over the range microwave basically just takes smoke from my stove and blows it back out over my head almost directly at the smoke detector.

I've frequently run into shelves, mounting brackets, etc. that seem to totally disregard stud spacing. We got one of those fancy Samsung frame TV's a while back, to get it to sit so flush to the wall it has its own special mounting brackets, 2 little plates with sort of a modified keyhole slot that you slot 2 little knobs on the back of the TV into. It's actually not a half bad way to mount a TV, probably one of the easier TV wall mounts I've ever personally used, the tv itself is actually pretty damn lightweight (because they moved all the heavy electronics into a separate box you need to hide somewhere) but still I wanted to make sure my fancy TV wouldn't fall off the wall, so I wanted to mount it to the studs, but of course the spacing of the brackets doesn't allow that option. I was able to bolt one side a stud but I had to get some toggle bolts for the other side. I'm pretty sure the whole TV is well within the rated weight capacity of one of those toggle bolts in drywall, let alone 2 in drywall and 2 in a stud, but still, it feels like a dumb design choice. (It's possible that other sizes or newer models do allow for mounting entirely to studs, the size and model I got didn't)

I helped a friend replace the wax ring on his toilet recently with one of the newer style rubber gaskets, which as it turns out made the toilet sit imperceptibly higher, which meant that the bolts holding it down were no longer quite long enough to screw the nut onto to tighten it down. With a quick trip to ace hardware and a minute perusing my options, I settled on some Danco zero cut bolts, and I definitely think that is a far superior design to the standard bolts that are probably holding down damn-near every toilet you've ever used.

On the subject of toilets, I can't think of any particularly good reason for the tank to be a separate piece from the rest of the throne like on most toilets. The gasket and bolts there just add more places for something to start leaking. It's probably an ease of manufacturing thing, but we have the technology to make one piece toilets now, the two piece style should be obsolete.

I think you're going to get into some "no true Scotsman" territory here pretty quickly, there's not exactly a worldwide organization that determines the "feminist agenda" or a universally agreed-upon checklist that determines that you are or aren't a feminist if you check so many boxes. It's going to depend a bit on who you are, where you come from, etc.

For example, if you come from some sort of backwards ultra-conservative Christian background, it might be fair to call you a feminist just because you think women should be allowed to wear pants instead of a dress, because in that context you are, even if most of the rest of the world has long-since moved past that stage of feminism.

I think most if not all TERFs probably hold some amount of views that could be called feminist from certain perspectives. Whether or not they mesh with any of the more mainstream views on feminism is a different matter entirely.

EDIT: to be clear, TERFs absolutely do not mesh with my idea of feminism, to me you're way behind the curve on feminism if you're not recognizing trans women as women.

Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works

Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.

As part of that, they generally can't be toll roads, and rest stops can't be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn't be competing with local businesses)

There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they're grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that's neither here nor there)

You got some misinformation here

The current Post Exposure rabies Prophylaxis (PEP) regimen is definitely not "a shot a day" for 20 days

First day you get a dose of vaccine and a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG)

Then you get an additional vaccine dose on days 3, 7, 14, and if you're immunocompromised you get an additional dose on day 28

And if you've previously received the rabies vaccine (for either pre- or post- exposure) you only need a booster on days 0 and 3.

And the incubation period varies, like you said location and viral load plays into it, in humans it can be as little as a week, but more commonly it's a couple months, and even up to a year. There are a lot of variables at play, and the sooner you can start PEP the better of course, but generally speaking it's usually not a "rush immediately to the hospital in an ambulance or you will die" situation. If it comes to it, you usually have at least a couple days of wiggle room to start PEP.

And no, bats don't always bite the neck. Head and neck are pretty common, they're usually pretty exposed, and bats fly so it would be kind of weird for them to bite you on the leg for example, but it's not like they're magically drawn to act out the plot of a vampire movie. It is true though that a lot of people don't recognize a bat bite for what it is.

HAAAWOOO!

HAAAWOOO!

HAAAWOOO!

Yeah, overall the policies where I am are pretty damn sensible. Technically we're not supposed to, but unless you do something stupid like show up to work high, I'd have a hard time thinking of a way you'd get in trouble for it.

Of course if you ended up getting in trouble somehow on your own time, since it's still illegal here it would probably lead to some sort of disciplinary action, revoked certifications, termination, etc. which I suppose is understandable

It's always interesting to me how different some of these policies are from one agency to another. I see a lot of dispatchers in other places talking about how intense their background checks were, and they had to do a polygraph test and all of that. My background check process was all pretty out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Filled out some paperwork, I don't even think they called any of my references (although to be fair, I was able to list a few firefighters and such as references, and got a friend of a friend who works here to vouch for me, which I'm sure helped) no polygraph, did have to go to the county detectives to get fingerprinted during training, but technically I was already hired at that point, and that was about the extent of it.

I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.

My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.

I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.

Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.

I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.

So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.

And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.

Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.

I don't have any specific recommendations for software or services, but I do have a couple general thoughts on this problem

How many pieces are missing and how ornate is the set?

If you have at least one of every piece the easiest course of action is probably to 3d scan them. A scanner is probably a bit pricey to buy just for this one project, but if you ask around you can probably find a hobbyist or makerspace that will let you use theirs.

If you can't find a scanner, as long as your set isn't too ornate, most chest sets are probably pretty easy to model for the most part. Except for the knights which are of course horses which are a weird irregular shape, most chess pieces are essentially cylinders and cones of various sizes stacked on top of each other. With a little quality time taking measurements with some calipers and some youtube how-to videos, you could probably learn enough to make a pretty decent model pretty quickly.

You might even be able to carefully trace your pieces onto a piece of paper or maybe use a contour gauge to do the same, scan that tracing into your computer, and create a 3d model from that profile. Heck, you might even be able to just take a picture of the pieces then trace them on your computer.

It's been a long time since I've done any 3d modeling personally, but something like that is a feature in a lot of software I've used.

Then you'd just need to add some details- a slot cut into the bishops hat, some crenulations at the top of the rook, a cross on top of the king, etc. which should all also be pretty straightforward to model

Again, if you ask around at makerspaces and such you can probably find someone willing to take up the challenge or help you figure out how to do that.

Of course if your set has a lot of textures and details you wouldn't be able to capture them that way, like if your pieces have a face or otherwise aren't rotationally symmetrical, or the rook has a brick pattern, etc.

And if you need to model the knight, that's going to take some more advanced modeling skills unless it's a really simple and kind of abstract horse.

If you are missing pieces entirely, unless you can track down another set to use as a reference, you're going to have to recreate them from scratch. You can take some styling cues from the other pieces- like the bases are probably all pretty much the same, but beyond that you'd kind of have to work off of memory and eyeballing them.

EDIT: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I was thinking about good ways to recreate your missing pieces by 3D printing so I kind of forgot to consider other techniques

Again, assuming you have at least one of each of the pieces you need, make a mold and cast new ones out of epoxy or something.

Also, again assuming no detailed textures, except for the knights, most chess pieces are almost perfect lathe projects. There's some really cheap tiny lathes to be had on Amazon that would probably be up to the task of turning a chunk of plastic into a chess piece.

Policies vary on this place to place, and of course there's no accounting for police who don't bother to follow the policies

But as a current dispatcher.

1. Yes, people do call about that. I went into some more detail on that in my other comment.

2. Phone calls are only half of what we do, we're also the ones on the radio with the field units. If they pull a traffic or pedestrian stop, they call it in to us over the radio so we can check their status, send backup, run information for them, etc. because if we don't know they're out on, for example, a traffic stop and something happens, we otherwise wouldn't know about it until it's too late. They give us a short disposition at the end of the call- if someone was cited, parties advised to separate, they turned the music down, crowd dispersing, subject in custody, etc. We don't get all the details, we don't get their full reports or anything, but we have a pretty good general overview of the outcome.

Current 911 dispatcher here, same kind of experience.

Recreational is not legal in our state. FWIW, I don't smoke myself.

Seen our officers give plenty of warnings for weed, but really the only time anyone gets cited for it is when the person is already getting taken in on multiple charges and being a massive dick about it so the officers are really throwing the book at them.

I know at least one of the sergeants in my county used to smoke a lot because he went to high school with me. I've occasionally seen him enter some colorful notes into calls, like that he gave someone a "warning for the electric lettuce"

I know a handful of my fellow dispatchers smoke, and I'm pretty sure at least one of my supervisors does, and even more of my coworkers admit to smoking in the past (as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired, past drug use is not a disqualifier for our agency, though lying about it could be if something about it comes up on your background check, and unless they have reason to think that you're under the influence on the job we're not subject to testing otherwise)

We pretty much all roll our eyes when we get a call where the main complaint is "someone's smoking marijuana"

We have to enter something about it, we can't just ignore a 911 call for liability reasons. But we all know it's a waste of everyone's time and resources. We don't really have a specific code to enter it as so unfortunately we usually have to enter it as something like "suspicious activity" which is a fairly high-priority call, but when we can we'll try to bury it in something trivial like a noise complaint because cops don't really need to be going out lights & sirens to tell someone to be more discreet with their smoking.