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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mloctopus
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    4 months ago

    You do have the benefit of being right though.

    The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don’t speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add “s” or “es” to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.






  • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI guess I'm doing my part
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    9 months ago

    There was a story going around yesterday about Wendy’s supposedly trying it. It sounds like the kind of headline that’s going to turn out to be BS, but I also didn’t really look into it so I don’t know any of the details. Seems like the kind of thing you’d have to be an idiot to actually attempt. Hard to imagine a universe where that goes over well.



  • I’m talking about how it’s literally impossible for your eyes to focus at more than one distance at a time. This has nothing to do with speed, training, or how good you imagine the marksmanship of your average soldier to be. It’s about how your eyes work.

    Correctly lining up a shot with iron sights doesn’t mean everything in your sight picture is perfectly in focus. Unless you’re shooting a handgun with a very short sight radius you usually can’t even keep both the front and rear sights in focus at the same time, forget about doing it with both your sights and the target. Your eyes can’t focus at three distances at once. Or even two. You have to pick one.

    Most people when they learn to shoot learn “front sight focus.” And front sight focus is exactly what it sounds like: the front sight post is what you focus on. You line your sights up with each other (equal height/equal light), and line that up with your target, with your focus on your front sight. With this sight picture your target will be blurry and your rear sights will be blurry, but you can still see the mass of your target well enough, and your rear sights well enough to keep everything lined up.

    There’s also “target focus,” which is basically the same except the target is in focus and both your sights are blurry. The people who prefer target focus tend to be more experienced shooters who have already developed good enough muscle memory, and are comfortable enough with their weapon, that they don’t need to spend much of their attention maintaining EH/EL.

    You can shoot target focused, or you can shoot front sight focused, but you can’t do both. The appeal of red dot sights is that they kind of flatten all of that out. They make it easy to look at your target normally with both eyes open. You put the optic up in front of your dominant eye, and now there’s a dot in your regular field of vision showing you where the bullet will go. You don’t need to direct your focus to the dot, you don’t need to be tempted to close an eye for a clearer sight picture, you don’t need to line up a bunch of posts. The dot is just there. It really is like having a cheat code for aiming.



  • They’re becoming a lot more common. A lot of police departments didn’t or don’t allow them. Attitudes are changing fairly quickly, but there are a lot of old-timer gun people (including some who write policy for police departments) who see red dot sights as a gimmick, the same way weapon mounted lasers were in the 80s and 90s, or as a crutch to compensate for poor training.

    They do have a couple of legit drawbacks like the possibility of the battery dying or the slim chance some part of the electronics might eventually break under force of the action cycling. And that’s why you’ll usually see guns with red dot optics having backup iron sights that co-witness with their dot. Also, a lot of pistol optics are open emitter designs which means, for people like cops who open carry, the optic is exposed to the weather and can collect rain, snow, or debris on the glass or between the glass and the emitter.

    More and more departments are beginning to allow them though. Despite their drawbacks it’s like having a cheat code for aiming. With traditional iron sights your eyes can either focus on your target or on your front sight, but not both. With red dot sights, you put the window on the target and put the dot where you want the bullet to go. You get to see your sight and your target in focus at the same time, and it’s easier to keep both eyes open while you’re shooting. So as these optics become more proven and “battle tested,” more departments are starting to feel like the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.




  • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI love those path
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    10 months ago

    Student: “Hey, a shortcut! Let me first just walk around the long way so I can measure the length of the other two sides, multiply those lengths by themselves, add them together, and find out how much extra walking I’ve saved myself by taking the shortcut. Boy, this shortcut sure is saving me a lot of effort. Hooray Pythagoras!”





  • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlIf you needed motivation
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    11 months ago

    Sure, let’s all hustle like crackheads:

    “Oh, your job isn’t paying enough? Well, have you tried stealing from your family? Your grandma has a social security check coming, right? Oh, your family doesn’t talk to you anymore, huh? Well have you tried selling your neighbor’s car stereo? What about his propane grill? How about stealing tube socks from Walmart and trying to sell those on the street to anyone who walks by? Still not cutting it, huh? I don’t know man, maybe it’s time to try sucking some dicks.”

    These memes seem a lot less clever if you’ve ever been close to someone whose life got snowed under by addiction, or lived in a neighborhood that has a crack problem. Seeing real crackheads really hustling is pretty fucking bleak. They’re not getting ahead. They’re not winning. They’re burning everything with even a shred of value to service their addiction, including family and personal relationships.

    I don’t know, maybe it’s a very apt metaphor for capitalism, and what our capitalist system expects of us, but I have no desire to trade the people and things that make my life bearable just so I can brag about having a couple extra dollars in the bank.