Get a skein of medium-weight yarn in a light color (it’s easier to see what you’re doing) and whatever the recommend hook size it says on the label. Then watch some tutorials for basic stitches. I’d start making a little pot holder kinda thing with double or half-double crochet stitch. It’s small enough that you can get used to turning rows, and it’ll work up pretty fast with the medium weight yarn to give you some nice dopamine when you finish.

I would definitely recommended learning with just regular yarn, nothing fancy, until you get used to it. Yarn with lots of variability in the weight (as i expect plastic bags would have) is going to be difficult if you’re not comfortable with the basics.

Has that ever stopped them before?

Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks (“banded iron formation”).

Great Oxidation Event

it means we can change it enough that it will no longer support US, but life continues at its own rhythm, we are oarr of that rhythm, not separate from it

We are not the first instance of life forever changing the environment to the point of mass extinction. When early cyanobacteria figured out photosynthesis, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere they produced as waste killed off massive numbers of other species for which oxygen was toxic.

However, we are the first instance of life capable of understanding our place in the ecosystem enough to do something about how we as a species affect the biosphere and the pressure we are putting not just on other life forms but on ourselves as well. We are not mindless cyanobacteria pooping out oxygen to the detriment of all others; we can and MUST do better.

A huge part of that is understanding exactly what you pointed out: we are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it. I just wish someone could get the mega-wealthy and fossil fuel CEOs and politicians to understand it. There is no safety for them; their money and power will not save them.

The Memedela Effect?

Pretty sure it’s the beaters (assuming that’s an electric hand mixer type-thing, i’ve never heard them referred to by that term) that made them gummy. Over mashing will break up the cell walls too much, releasing the starches and ruining the texture. Cooking chopped or whole doesn’t matter as much, since the number of cells broken by chopping is negligible. And the skin is water permeable anyway.

You gotta mash by hand, that’s all.

The only thing that makes sense is that they honestly DO believe a big pile of money will save them. Their big pile of money has been getting them out of trouble their whole lives, why would they expect it to all of a sudden stop working in this case? They’re wrong, but they don’t know that (yet).

for real. like half the commercials are for pharmaceuticals.

Wow. Well fucking said, my friend. You are absolutely right.

a nature preserve with fancy radiaton-eating mushrooms, to boot! (the jury is still techinically out on whether or not they are “eating” it, but in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe)

Chernobyl had such a far-reaching environmental impact. Beyond even the radioactive pollution stuff, it scared everyone away from nuclear power and back to fossil fuels for energy production. I sometimes wonder where we’d be wrt CO2 levels if nuclear energy adoption had continued along the same trend as it was before Chernobyl. Would we have had substantially more time to mitigate climate change? Maybe we’d have been in the same boat (or an equally bad boat) due to other factors; maybe it would have stymied renewables even more due to already having a readily available and well-established alternative to fossile fuels in nuclear power. Idk. But if someone wrote one of those what-if alternative history novels about the subject, I’d read the heck out of it.

There’s a lot of missing data for gun violence in the US thanks to the NRA lobbying to limit federal funding for research and block the release of data.