You know, it’s now occuring to me that I have absolutely no clue what Roblox actually is. It’s been around forever, I’ve been seeing gift cards for it in stores for I’m pretty sure well over a decade, I hear lots of talk about all of the dangers and how addictive it is for kids, etc.

But I haven’t the foggiest idea what the game is actually like. To the best of my knowledge I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a single screenshot of it, at least not one that was clearly labeled as being from Roblox.

And while I’m a childfree curmudgeon in my 30s, I do have a few friends with kids that I see with some regularity, and I’ve never heard any of them mention Roblox even in passing.

I feel like I’m in a really weird bubble of roblox-ignorance, I’m not exactly mad about it, but it feels weird that for as big as Roblox is supposed to be that I’ve never seen anyone talk about the actual game, just how big of a problem it is.

It’s funny that you specifically mentioned the '60s, because back then they were pretty routinely administering the oral polio vaccine on a sugar cube for school children

That’s how my dad got it back then

It’s possible I missed it, but I didn’t see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it’s a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn’t gone horribly wrong yet. It’s certainly worth being cautious about, and I’m certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it’s probably a pretty low likelihood.

I’m kind of wondering if the plan here isn’t to goad trump into retaliating by blurting out where our own missiles are pointed at.

They threw some obvious ones out there like the Pentagon (duh of course they have missiles pointed there)

And then padded out the list with some defunct sites to make the list longer because someone like Trump is going to want to one-up them by listing at least that many of our targets. Russia probably doesn’t actually have missiles aimed at most of those places, but this way they don’t actually have to give up any of their actual targets.

And trump will probably take the bait to beef up missile defences around those defunct sites, wasting money, time, manpower, and resources that could be better used anywhere else.

There’s a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

He’s created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

But there’s a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won’t want to eat powdered yeast

But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker’s hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

And if they’re able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you’ve potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It’s not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it’s “just” a beer.

And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don’t need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

Hell, I’m pro vaccine, but I know I’d probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

Again, there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

There’s also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it’s likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

I definitely think it’s something worth exploring.

My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.

I remember hearing somewhere that the final exam to be certified as a master calligrapher is to make your own certificate.

My own handwriting is barely legible to myself sometimes, so I’ve never looked too far into it, so I can’t say if that’s actually true or not, but it’s a cool idea if true.

Something about Chabad-Lubavitch and Brooklyn rang some bells for me, which isn’t normally the kind of thing that would catch my attention, so I figured I must have seen something particularly weird about them in the news in the not-too-distant past.

And only one weird story from New York about Orthodox Jews comes to mind for me personally, and sure enough it was Chabad-Lubavitch that was involved in the Synagogue tunnel incident

Not that I think there’s any direct correlation between these two incidents, I’m mostly just bringing it up for anyone else who had the same “why does that name ring a bell” feeling.