I knew a lady who used to get ladybug infestations every spring - one time I counted more than 3o on a single 3x5 pane of her window. ANY insect in sufficient quantity is gross and creepy - the only difference is in the numbers.

She should definitely try - alcoholism is a scourge that ruins lives. The incredible effort it takes to achieve long-term sobriety is endlessly worth it.

I feel you. I don’t come from a family that really supports games or gaming, so vanilla WOW in 2006 was the first video game I’d EVER played, and you can just imagine the “Whole New World” song playing over the whole experience. AND it was junior year of college, which was just a magical time of irresponsibility and…

I’m down to power through all the other inconveniences, but if they get so faithful to the original that they take away the dungeon finder, I won’t be able to hack it. I did read all the Sherlock Holmes stories while waiting for my character to travel from place to place back then, though.

90% of alcoholics relapse within four years of their first attempt at sobriety. It doesn’t feel great to hear, but those are the statistics. The trip to sobriety isn’t a straight line, it’s a cycle, and damn near everyone is going to have to try and fail a few times before they make it through.

It’s awful, the power imbalance, but in a lot of cases it does even out or become lopsided the other way eventually. My mother was always and forever threatening to cut me off/kick me out/disown me, the whole gamut and for any number of offenses - being bisexual, not being a great student, having friends she didn’t…

When I was living in Czech Republic, I had no visa (and thus no access to affordable healthcare) and I also saw a resurgence of a heart problem I’d had when I was a teenager that I thought had been taken care of. My boss offered to take me to her doctor, who would process the visit as though my boss was the one he was…

I was 31 when I made cranberry sauce from scratch for the first time, and I’m still goddamned furious that no one ever told me it was easy.

Absolutely. I love Groupon.

Related, if you have a coupon or groupon or something, tip based on the full price of whatever service you got, not on the reduced price.

Exactly. Your first post wasn’t a dig at people’s tastes, it was a suggestion that perhaps adding some knowledge to the situation would get them what they really want at a lower price. Unfortunately, there’s a certain type of person who doesn’t like being reminded that they don’t know something, and I’m not surprised…

My mother is Not A Cook, so I’d only ever “prepared” canned cranberry sauce in my own home, and only ever had “real” cranberry sauce at restaurants or other people’s homes. In an effort to improve my own cooking, I signed up for Blue Apron, and last November they sent me the ingredients to make orangey cranberry sauce…

Make it all about health and safety or something.

Also, it’s not like Kentucky is just going to grow more coal. One of the reasons coal is expensive compared to other fuels is that a lot of the longrunning coal fields are tapped out, and that’s a problem you just can’t fix.

One of my best friends’ sisters was just able to get here on the lottery with her fiance. My friend hasn’t seen anybody in her family for 5 years - her Sudanese passport didn’t have the RFID chip that makes them, you know, function as a passport, and the only RFID-chipped-passport making machine owned by the Sudanese…

Untrue but a pretty good shot at an explanation. In history, only Asia (China/Korea/Japan) had the knowledge to make porcelain (from kaolin clay, and its name is only related to pigs through a much more convoluted etymology that’s already been clarified in other comments.) The Europeans wanted to get in on the act and…

I have no idea how I could have made it clearer that I’m not even hypothetically going to take the stance of arguing that what he did was even a little okay, nor am I going to give any more details to fulfil your prurient interest in a situation I don’t know very much about. The point was - I’m aware that unfair but…

I’m not even clear on how much wiggle room he had to refuse to do the spinoff. For a franchise that huge, I’d imagine they’d have locked in first-in-line rights and whatever else they had to to make sure they could do whatever they wanted with the Rock’s time and the time of any other members of their central cast.

This is the thing about The Rock that explains why you’re never going to win against The Rock - he’s not just big and lucky and dumb. He’s dedicated and works his ass off and he’s smart. He’ll put in more work, he’ll stick with it longer, and he’s overall cleverer than almost anyone else going, and the fact that he’s…

“People either like you enough to hang out with you or they don’t” is an all-or-nothing idea, no matter how you qualify it. What’s more, it’s just not true. I’m not attending my best friend’s costume party even if she paid for the drinks and the Uber, because I hate costumes, but I’ll walk to drinks at a bar with…