The auxiliary water pump on my car broke (the plastic rotted and cracked so it was spewing coolant everywhere) and the mechanic wanted me to pay $300 for a $150 part.

I went to an auto store and bought the part for just under $150 and was gonna have the mechanic install it until I called them back and they said they don’t install customer parts.

So I figured if they won’t install customer parts, they’ll at least fix existing problems with the vehicle.

So, naturally I poorly installed the new part myself, then took it to the mechanic saying I had coolant issues and wasn’t sure what the problem was. They fixed the problem in under 20 minutes and only charged me $30 for the labor.

Ho l y

Imma try that last one

I went to my doctor’s office and asked if they had any slots open for that day.  They told me they don’t take walk-ins, you have to call ahead for an appointment.

So I pulled out my phone and called the office.  The other receptionist answered the phone and the first one literally WATCHED ME say “I’d like to make an appointment today if you have any slots available.”

He said to me (on the phone) all they had available was for 9:00, could I make it in time?

I said “Yep, I’m standing right here.”

He didn’t understand what I meant and happily put my appointment down.

I hung up and said to the original receptionist, “Hi, I have an appointment in five minutes.”

She (very angrily) entered me as arrived and gave me my forms.

bureaucracy works hard but humans work harder

yknow i never noticed the sheer rareness of images having ids or alt text on this website until i started adding alt text to my art (and trying to remember to add it to any images i post in general, especially text screenshots) and that makes me kinda sad

I feel like a lot of people just don't know how to do it or are intimidated by the prospect. I was too, actually, and I couldn't find any good guides on how to do it (beyond basic formatting) and most guides boiled down to "just describe what you see and important details!" I really wanted to add alt text bc accessibility is important to me, but I would always get kinda stumped on how to do it.

But then I saw this image, I think in a discord server, and I immediately started doing it. It kinda broke the ice for me

Oh my goodness thank you!!

just found the most fucked up plane

bro what

bro how do you think airplanes get between airports

alright i’ll give it up they turned it from awful to delightful. now it’s like the oscar meyer wiener mobile of planes

@newportsandhennessy

general relativity for babies

babies? Hell, I’m an adult this is the clearest and most understandable explaination I’ve ever seen. This book is for anyone

dang, an actual useful and real "life hack" instead of those insane videos of people doing arts and crafts with a background of copyright free music

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

The moon landing was fake: tired, passé, heard it before

The moon landing was an elaborate marriage proposal: fresh! sexy! I’m going to be thinking about this for months!

Romcom where two dudes in the 1960s fall in love and come up with an elaborate plan to become astronauts to get married in space because gay marriage is illegal everywhere but it can’t be illegal on the moon

Might make things a little awkward for Mike Collins.

He was the officiator

This is an excellent take. He officiated in orbit, and the landing was their Honey Moon.

Oh my god they were moon mates.

JayKyle ,

everything is better when it involve knives and choreography

U.S. people, if you bought cinnamon from Dollar Tree, Dollar General, or other discount stores, throw it out. It's got lead

It’s these brands specifically, just in case you picked them up somewhere else (via WaPo’s “the Seven” morning newsletter)

Loid a day☆

Loid: Looks like we can't manipulate, mansplain, malewife our way out of this one.

Yor, pulling out a knife: Manslaughter it is.

my dog Katie

I love it when my culture is mocked properly.

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

Solar Eclipse & friends (x)(x)(x)(x)(x)(x)