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playmobil

…or you could just go all billy gibbons…
desert high -> spanish fly -> sal y pimiento

…players are paying you; solutions are your f*cking job…

^(moo.)

…i have an embarassing quantity of editions of tolkien’s books, and i keep finding new ones i want to pick up…

peeeEEEEK-A-BOO!

IT’S A SERIES OF TUBES!

…i always ask providers up-front what is my cost without using any insurance versus my out-of-pocket cost after insurance, and most of the time it’s substantially cheaper not to use insurance at all even though it won’t count toward my deductible…

…those private-industry middlemen are a huge burden on the healthcare system, and they persist only because their costs are hidden from patients…

…texas is trailing at 41% low-carbon but wind and solar are gangbuster growth industries here…

22% wind
12% solar
7% nuclear
48% natural gas
11% coal

…i work in the sustainability industry and the dogmatic backlash i’ve seen against electrification is absurd…

…we used to visit louisiana from mississippi when we wanted to indulge in a classy weekend…

…it’s interesting to see the art style in these really early strips; bill had been drawing foxtrot for only a couple of months when this was published…

…i have a closet full of identical clothing; one of my coworkers shared in confidence that they had a pool going as to whether i ever changed clothes, so someone discretely left a mark on the back of my sleeve one afternoon and money changed hands the next day…

…i’m old enough to have gone through gradeschool when the prevailing paradigm was for teachers to push all students to write right-handed (last i experienced that was corporate policy for all mice to be set up right-handed in the early nineties) so most of my peers growing up cultivated a grab-bag of super-immortal habits and terrible handwriting, to boot…

…and your face / torso is where the camera is?..if so, you’re writing vertically in columns, right-to-left; that’s how i write left-handed, but we’ve actually rotated the page 90º clockwise, and if we angle the page just a bit more ergonomically we’re literally upside-down from the right-handed paper position…

(maybe you’re super-immortal)

…it’s only the customer’s problem if they exploit commercial arrangements where gratuity is expected: 15% for table-service ±5% for quality of service…if you don’t wish to engage that system patronise another restaurant; there are more counter-service options available than ever before these days…

…for those stupid card-swipe gratuity options, just ignore the recommendations and do your own math, or manually enter zero if it’s not table-service…i can understand foreign travellers feeling overwhelmed by POS systems proffering gratuity at every turn, but that’s a UI problem which can be completely ignored in every instance other that table-service or similar concierge arrangements, and if someone’s patronising the latter sort of establishment they already know where gratuity is expected…

(look left to mouse, looks down at sideways notebook, looks back to display)

…so here’s the thing: ergonomically, we hold and manipulate writing implements around 135° from the writing surface, which most-smoothly draws across the page at that oblique angle, pulling your hand outward, back of pen and and hand first, fingers and writing tip last, character strokes moving center-out and top-down so we can see what we’re writing and avoid smudging everything with our hand…left-handed or right-handed, that doesn’t change, and although some lefties struggle to contort their hand around top, stabbing into the paper at an acute 45°, it’s an awkward, uncomfortable, smudgy mess fighting against both ergonomics and mechanical advantage of the pen-and-paper…

…righties write accordingly, pulling the pen out-and-down, but if we rotate the page 180° (90° from a left-handed perspective) lefties do exactly the same, pulling the pen out-and-down, it’s just that text flows along the down-axis and the rows flow on the out-axis…

…another way of looking at it is to take that japanese text above and rotate it 90° counter-clockwise: now it flows left-to-right, top-to-bottom…sure, in either case one might counter that the letters are sideways but that’s just a matter of convention in how one interprets the rotated glyphs; books spines are still perfectly legible…

…fascist propaganda, governance, and nationalistic zero-sum resource hoarding are trending globally; i fear it’s only a matter of time until regional conflicts escalate into global warfare…

…some do, but most either rotate the page ninety degrees to write vertical text right-to-left or they cramp their hands and smudge the paper…

(not to mention that pushing your writing implement is generally much rougher on both the tool and the paper surface; pens clog + jam, pencil tips break, and paper tears much more frequently)

…vehicle registration taxes should be based upon ton-miles driven and speed limits should be based upon kinetic energy…