Yeah, they’ve been in Texas at least 20 years. Looks like they are in most of the states in the eastern half of the continental US and the states along the southern border.

Only office workers and managers are allowed to sit. If you’re in a customer-facing position with a chair, you’re supposed to stand up when helping a customer.

I can remember a time that after a search, you’d just have a list of links. No extra boxes on the side or even an images tab, just the list of links. At the bottom of the page was the word “Google” and there would be more O’s, as they were links to other pages of results.

If there were sponsored links, it didn’t say so and you’d end up with different sites at the top of the list. So I don’t think way back there were.

Oh that’s true, my headphones with noise canceling were also over-the-ear. I found that turning on the noise canceling worked great and brought down the sound of a lawnmower really well by playing sound waves opposite the waves of the motor to cancel each other out. I wasn’t thinking about another pair of ear buds.

The wireless headphones that I was using went around your head and didn’t pump the sound directly into your ear, but were supposed to use some bone conduction. I’m not sure if that’s part of the battery issue that I saw. I just know that my phone itself would die before the end of my shift if I was using Bluetooth headphones (provided the headphones didn’t die first) and I would still have battery left after using wired earbuds.

I’m confused how your pro #2 has to do with wireless headphones, as you could find much cheaper wired headphones with noise canceling even 20 years ago. I’m not sure about pass-through, but I imagine that’s more of a feature now because of technology upgrades.

I even used those wired headphones while mowing the lawn with noise cancelling and could hear the music without having to crank the volume to max. I think there might have even been an EQ button with different settings pre-made (however weren’t customizable to my knowledge). Not sure whether that’s also just because of the technological process now or not.

I’d say battery life is another con for wireless headphones, both for the headphones themselves and the device being used. I have worked a job where we’d have some shifts as long as 10-12 hours and with wired headphones, I’d still have 20-30 percent of the phone battery left, even if I had been listening to YouTube videos with the brightness all the way down. However, with the wireless headphones either my headphones or my phone would die before the end of a long shift like that and I’d be stuck without my music for the last 2-3 hours, even just listening to music with no video.

The US isn’t any more concerned about sexual orientation now than any point in the past. Back in colonial times, it wouldn’t have been safe to be anything other than straight with all the hyper religious colonists. They were even forcing their gender conformity and the straight sexual orientation on the Native Americans. Baron Friedrich von Steuben got a pass for being gay, probably because he was the one in charge of training the troops for Washington. 100 years ago, you could be killed on the street for being anything other than straight or denied jobs. The Lavender scare of the mid century brought this more to light. The AIDS crisis that started in the 80s and bled through into the 90s and 2000s as new medicines were being invented, further brought negative light to sexual orientations outside of straight. The cause of all of this attention to sexual orientation has been the religions brought over by colonists.

In recent years, sexual orientations outside of straight are finally being seen in a positive light with Lawrence v TX (2003) legalizing same-sex relationships and Hodges v Obergefell (2015) legalizing same-sex marriages. In Bostock v Clayton County (2020) legal protections against job discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity were finally put into place over 70 years after the start of the Lavender Scare.

The attention to sexual orientation has always been part of North American history. It has just changed from acceptance with the Native American peoples to hate, death, and intolerance under the colonists, to a more accepting present day. With some of the positive news in recent years, it can be easy to forget (if you’re surrounded by progressives in a blue state) that the hate of sexuality injected into North America in the 15th Century still has hold over large portions of the population today.

He set out buckets filled with water like Davy Jones to keep from setting foot on land.

I’m sure the practice of net neutrality helped back then. Sure net neutrality is the rule again, but that doesn’t mean everyone instantly started following the rule.

Enya can be helpful for me. Otherwise soothing classical music, the fast and loud works can be a little too distracting. It also helps me to listen to the same thing when doing a task to train my brain to focus when listening to it.

Lol, sorry I recently went to the dentist and the 2 minutes to brush your teeth was fresh.

Hand washing should be 20 seconds of scrubbing after lathering your hands in soap.

Yeah, they don’t use that specific ingredient anymore, however the same concern is still there. Some bacteria could survive the soap if everyone using said soaps don’t wash their hands properly every time they use the soap.

If I recall correctly from a report early in the covid pandemic, regular soaps attach to the cell membrane of bacteria and to oils/debris on the hands. Physically rubbing your hands together for the 2 minutes rips the bacterial and viral matter apart and dislodges whatever other debris is on them and then the water pulls the soap and everything attached to it down the drain. There’s nothing really for the bacteria or viruses to adapt to in that scenario.

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.02312-18

They use antimicrobials and don’t always kill everything when washing hands.

They don’t seem to use the same active ingredients as antibiotics, but the concern of bacterial resistance still apples.

"The [FDA] issued a proposed rule in 2013 after some data suggested that long-term exposure to certain active ingredients used in antibacterial products — for example, triclosan (liquid soaps) and triclocarban (bar soaps) — could pose health risks, such as bacterial resistance or hormonal effects. "

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-issues-final-rule-safety-and-effectiveness-antibacterial-soaps

There’s another web page from the FDA entitled “Antibatcerial Soap? You Can Skip It, Use Plain…” however I can’t open the link to see if there’s mote talk about bacterial resistance.

The antibacterial soaps also help create supergerms that can survive the antibiotic used. They should only be used in medical settings when necessary. The overuse of antibacterial soaps and antibiotics are going to help create more pandemics should enough bacteria become antibiotic-resistant.

It’s largely the same system. You can play as the Greeks, Norse, or Egyptians. Each civilization has the choice of 3 major gods (is Zeus, Hades, or Poseidon) that choice is kinda like choosing your civilization in AoE. Instead of going feudal age to castle age, you choose a different minor god to worship. Each god gives you a different god power and mythological unit (Cyclops, trolls, anubites, etc). The final civilization upgrade allows you to build a building that unleashes a titan on the map.

There is a new currency called favor that is used to research some improvements unlocked by worshiping specific gods and to train mythological units.

The types of games are largely the same as AoE, with different maps. The campaigns are a lot of fun. It’s a great game, especially if you like mythology. The stories are original and not based on the original myths, but you can learn some of the myths of heroes, mythical creatures, and the gods by right-clicking on them. The campaigns walk you through how to play and through the features that are different from AoE.

You can choose varying difficulty for the scenarios and can choose the difficulty of the computer players when playing a random map. This makes it about as complex as Age of Empires. However, just as with online AoE, the player vs player can have a steep learning curve if you’re matched against people that have been playing a long time.

Age of Empires and Age of Mythology play similarly, where it’s easy to cross from one to the other with many similar human units shared between the games. I think it’s definitely worth a look into! Even the remake that’s already on steam is worth it in my opinion.

Only other place I can think of off-hand is the local library for rentals. Half Price Books and thrift shops will have some for sale, but I’m not sure how much lower they may be from Amazon’s rental fee.

Use your knuckles and the space between from left to right. The higher points are longer months.

The left pinky knuckle is January, the space between pinky and ring knuckle is February, the ring knuckle is March and so on. The left index knuckle will be July and you continue with August being the right hand index knuckle. All the months that land on a knuckle are 31, while everything else is 30 (except 28 or 29 for February).

Remember originally that -1 was 1 BC, meaning 1 year before the birth of christ. The negative numbers are measuring the distance away from 0.

Edit: in the positive direction, the 1 was 1 AD, meaning the first year of our lord. Just like when talking about the reign of kings/queens, the first year of their reign is 1 and the 14th year that they reigned is 14. I believe the timekeeping for Ages in LOTR may also be similar.

I assume he means Haunted Chocolatier.