“According to the model, you set the mood with vintage polka music and then start leafing through a paint catalog.”

didnt dump any in the tank bcs no idea if it could break something

Yeah, that’s a good point. Hmm… This sounds like a good weekend project.

It’s flashy, does just enough to look impressive, and a lot of people throw money at it. Just like them.

20 minutes later and a loooot of vinegar essence

I’ve got a toilet that takes forever to fill up and live in hard water country. Did you just dump distilled vinegar in the tank and let it sit?

I’m guessing it really flies over the neighbor’s tree, unrolling perfectly and leaving enough on the other side to throw it back across.

My first thought was, why didn’t she just paint a finger? Something small in case she was wrong. But then I remembered how I was in pretty much every lab at that age.

Not as cool as the original story, but I was working with a big carboy of dilute HCL in a CHEM 101 lab. The previous person that used the carboy had managed to spill dilute HCL all over the stopper. I was not aware of this.

The protocol was to grasp the stopper between middle and ring finger, pull it out, then pick the carboy up with both hands and pour into the beaker. That way, the only thing the business end of the stopper ever touches is the inside of the carboy.

I’d just started pouring when I felt the skin between the two fingers start to itch. It was obnoxious, but I had a heavy piece of glassware in my hands trying to measure out a precise amount. So I ignored it until it started to burn. By that point I almost had enough in my beaker so I topped it up. Then I lowered the carboy and replaced the stopper.

Then I ran over to the sink, turned it on full blast, and washed the acid off my hand. I had a red, tender patch there for days. After that, I always wiped the stopper off with a paper towel before I pulled it out.

I was unprepared for how red he gets by the end. Also, why do his eyes look like a smaller man looking out of a human-shaped periscope?

Word salad is your friend. The bigger the context of the prompt, the more it has to thrash. So if you ask it for a longform essay about elephants in the blue diamond-shaped trifold organza station wagon and the quality of fudge it can expectorate in the style of an old timey sea captain who just dropped his iPhone over the starboard bow, it has to pull in more data. And then tell it that whatever it did was awful and nonsensical and it should redo it.

Alternately, ask for a list of one thousand random numbers, with no repetition, between one and a million. Whatever it does, tell it it’s wrong and duplicated numbers and/or gave you too few. Repeat.

Odo, centaurs, and the Grinch just standing in the middle trying to avoid eye contact with each other.

Dan Brown writing men: “He had steely grey eyes and was very smart. Scientists thought he was an idiot but that’s because he was smarter than them and didn’t spend as much time writing papers. He did four hundred pushups and took a shower. ‘Not bad for a fifty five year-old guy’, he thought, which was smarter than other thoughts even if those thoughts had won prizes.”

If the christian god exists and the reward for serving him is eternal life in his presence, I will gladly accept the alternative.

Introducing tech debt.

Let’s go Phillies?

Reading Shakespeare is torture. That is why we make actors do it for us.