Can you truly love one type of apple if you aren’t furious at lesser apples that come up short?

I dunno, anything that applies to the guy who has to get 1600 condoms probably applies to the guy trying to get 1500 condoms. That doesn’t seem like a significant difference to me.

I did have a torrid love affair with a pretzel once.

Hydrogen is half as dense as helium. Is it a tiny mass difference? Actually, no, it’s quite significant.

7.7% increased buoyancy per unit volume isn’t nothing, but I’m not sure it would qualify as “quite significant” in a colloquial sense.

Why?

It’s not creepy until actually directed at someone in particular. It’s tasteless and kinda trashy, but doesn’t cross the line into creepy until the guy wearing the shirt draws a specific person’s attention to it.

I don’t know where my wife fits into this equation, but I find Stanley to be the best match for who I am, and is definitely the most relatable character on the show for me.

Is it still a thing? I thought they moved most of the existing red delicious rootstock over to cosmic crisp branches. And I also think the transition takes time, so there might still be stragglers. Cosmic crisp is less than a decade old.

Density of air is about 1.23 kg/m^3 at standard pressure/temperature at sea level.

Density of helium is about 0.16 kg/m^3.

That’s a delta of 1.07 kg/m^3. So for a 70kg man, they would need helium balloons equal to 65.4 m^3, or 65400 liters. Spread across 200 condoms, that’s 327 L per condom.

I’m not sure where my numbers come up differently from yours, but that’s still not feasible.

there’s no real way to practice social interactions in a safe setting

There are small talk opportunities if you know where to look.

Dog parks are my favorite. Bring your dog, make small talk with the other owners, get to know some of them. It’s a low stakes environment that doesn’t cost any money, allows you to exit at any time, guarantees at least one shared interest or commonality with people who live near you. You don’t even have to talk to people the first few times you go, and can build up comfort/familiarity in the specific place before you take the next step of striking up a conversation with another regular you see a lot.

Another option is where unrelated parties might mingle in shared space: communal tables or bar seating at coffee shops or bars or parks or even restaurants. These fleeting interactions might help practice the skills of small talk, enough to where it’s easy to have conversations with strangers.

And sometimes you can outsource the actual cold approach to the extrovert strangers you might encounter, by giving them something to talk about. A baseball cap with your university, a T-shirt with your favorite band from a tour you saw live, a tattoo of something fun, other items of clothing or accessories that might attract positive attention. Sometimes people will say something about it, and then you can talk about a shared interest or background at that point.

Lines and waiting rooms are also sometimes good places to pass the time with conversations. It’s a little harder now than 20 years ago, with the rise of smartphones, but it’s still a place where people might be bored and appreciate a little conversation to mix things up.

The two fictional courtroom dramas that changed the course of my life (eventually persuading me I wanted to become a lawyer and make sure the system works towards justice) were A Few Good Men and To Kill a Mockingbird.

And even though recently things have seemed kinda bleak on the justice front in the big seats of power in the US (in the three branches of government), there’s still a million tiny ways to improve things locally, including in day to day interactions with others. So I still draw some inspiration from those ideals.

Exactly.

There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.

That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.

It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.

For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.

But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.

aight this scene takes place in Mexico so lemme color grade it very Mexican, but also it’s a flashback to the 50’s so I’m gonna dial down the color saturation and digitally add some film grain