Here’s an old but short one. I was selling my Xbox 360. A couple comes to pick it up, so I start it up so they can test it out. Red ring of death. It never had any issues before. I was so flustered and embarrassed that I just gave it to them.

This is a great idea! I also get tons of time wasters. We once had over 10 people flake on picking up a free couch. I could instead list things for cheap and just give them away to whoever shows up.

I’ll start with one that happened over the last two weeks. I had a weight set I was giving away. I was first contacted by a fellow who was interested but couldn’t pick it up for two weeks. He asked if I’d hold it for him. For two weeks. WTF. I refused and told him that I’ve literally never had anyone follow through when I’ve held items, so hit me up in two weeks if the posting is still up.

He calls me and lays this sob story on me: his mother needs it for physical therapy but they don’t have a lot of money. They’d pick it up now but his father is out of town with their only vehicle for two weeks. He promises me that he’s a man of his word and he will keep his word to get it if I keep mine to hold the gym set. My inbox is already blowing up from others wanting to get it, so I know I’ll be able to offload it, no problem. I decide to give him a chance and hold it.

A week later, I text him to verify he’s still interested. He assures me he is and that he’s so grateful I’m holding it. I text him again the day before he’s supposed to pick it up to check again. He tells me they bought a new set instead. I respond, telling him how I made an exception to not holding things and he gave me his word. He tells me to go fuck myself.

I relisted it and it was gone within two hours. Just for giggles, I check a few local listing apps later that day. My former weight set is now listed on Facebook Marketplace, using the same picture I had, for $100.

Same. I just switched a few months back. My laptop runs cool and quiet on Linux. When I need to boot to Windows, I hear that poor cooling fan laboring even when Windows is idle, plus everything is much slower and poorly organized. Why does my context menu have 14 selections?! Going back to Linux feels like coming home.

Often they only want the illusion of output, just enough to keep the profits eternally rising.

How’s your colon?

Looks great, bravo!

It doesn’t, it still has some exclamation point action that might be the issue. If it helps, you should be able to copy and paste my example markdown. I gave it a try and it still works.

I believe this is what you’re looking for:

::: spoiler Visible Text
hidden content goes here
:::

Looks like:

As a music performance major, graduating in four years with no summer classes required 16-18 credits per semester plus about 3-4 credits worth of zero credit courses. The joke was that college was either the worst four years or best five years of your life.

I ultimately switched to an even more difficult degree but graduated after 5.5 years. I had a blast.

Same, except I also changed my major twice more and bombed out of two semesters. Employers give zero fucks. I was just discussing earlier how none of them even verify my education and I work in a pretty technical field requiring specialized education.

Just started, great suggestion.

I can’t believe this shit. 2023 me wouldn’t believe I’d be doing half of the things I’m doing now.

It’s not even fun in a bad way!

About a year. It was a really toxic relationship. It started when I was 20 and my ex was about 26. I was enamored of them and they took advantage of this to reel me in, then manipulate me.

Warning: mildly entertaining breakup story follows.

We actually split up because we were fighting about living together. We had been together for about four years. They had never moved out of their parent’s place so, at almost 30, had no experience with housing or self sufficiency. They wanted to find an upscale house being let for about the price of a 1 bedroom apartment. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating. After three months of looking with no housing miracles in sight, I tried to impress upon them that what they wanted wasn’t going to happen. They got very upset. When I asked them to come over so we could discuss, they did - and broke it off.

20 years later, I can recognize what a massive favor they did for me. To be fair, I was also crazier than a sack of cats, but who in their early twenties isn’t? I hit therapy hard and got myself straightened out. Highly recommended.

Hah! You get two signal words with GHS: caution or danger. Caution is low stakes, where you might get skin irritation or maybe a mild burn. Danger is supposed to clue you in that it will fuck you up, but there’s no indicator of magnitude of fuck you up. Will it just give you a bad burn or will it melt your skin off while intercalating with your DNA?

I always wanted a third “oh helllll no” category for the really awful substances. For things like tert-Butyl hydroperoxide (it’s a straight 4-4-4) or Osmium tetroxide.

This is actually my field of work. The composite method queermunist is referencing is the industry best practice for exterior hazard labeling. NFPA diamonds don’t always or even often give first responders enough information to enter a building, so there’s no utility to multiple diamonds. Responders really don’t care how many chemicals are in a facility so much as what they are, and not many facilities actually using chemicals are set up in such a way that your example of encountering one chemical then another would work. They’re just everywhere, even during normal operations due to distributed storage and distribution systems.

What these signs do is alert them to the degree of danger inside so they can make decisions, e.g., enter if just flammable, avoid water use, or (most common of all) to act as a reference to ask the building owner more questions before doing anything at all.

You have good instincts - that’s also what NFPA recommends. This isn’t a typical presentation as usually it’s one diamond with the worst score of all present chemicals in each category.

You CAN list them individually but it’s a pain in the ass for both the building owner and first responders. The whole point is to quickly convey the level of hazards in the building for emergencies. They need to know if they need more information before entering. 2+ diamonds doesn’t provide any additional useful data and makes it harder to interpret in a rush.

What’s interesting is they could have made one compound NFPA diamond that encompasses the worst ratings of everything in the building instead of two individual diamonds. The primary intent of these on buildings is to inform first responders of what they might be rushing into.

Chlorine trifluoride! Nasty, NASTY shit. Guess which industry I worked in as safety!

Edit: I remembered this quote about ClF₃ from John D. Clark’s book “Ignition!” and wanted to share. For the non-scientists, hypergolic means it’ll ignite on contact with another substance without an outside energy source, like a spark.

It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

Making rabbit stew!