• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 9 days ago
Cake day: April 10th, 2025
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Given how paintball guns work, could you swap paintballs for waterballs?English
    8·
    3 days ago

    Not only are they water soluble and easily washed out… the vast majority of them are also non toxic.

    If you get paint on your mask, and it splatters through to your mouth… non toxic. Tastes terrible, but its not gonna harm you via ingestion. Much of the ‘paint’ is … basically just food dye.

    …

    … Also… a whole lot of police… just use paint markers (they are technically, legally classed as ‘markers’ because they aren’t firearms thus are not ‘guns’)… they use markers with pepper balls.

    They just shoot miniature tear gas / skin irritant /eye irritant ‘paintballs’ as a less lethal weapon.

    You can put a whole lot of different liquids inside what is basically a semi rigid gel/plastic capsule.

    …

    The old devious trick I remember was people would freeze their paintballs the night before a match.

    Nowadays, I’m fairly sure if you are caught doing that, you don’t just get banned from that field/course… you probably get prosecuted.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?English
    3·
    5 days ago

    American here:

    About 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate, 2nd grade or worse reading and writing skills.

    The average literacy level of Americans is between 5th and 6th grade… meaning the next 30% have the reading/writing skills of someone who basically only conpleted elementary school.

    These are numbers for adults 18 and up, by the way, not kids.

    Almost every single person I’ve met who learned English as a second language… can speak it more fluently than most native English speakers I’ve known who grew up in America. More extensive vocabularies, better grammar, better spelling.

    And this will get worse.

    Covid resulted in a year to two years of remote or missed classes for Gen Alpha, and the Repulicans look poised to finally kill off the public education system in all but the wealthier, solid blue states. Department of Education will be disbanded by the end of the year or earlier if nobody stops it.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoFediverse@lemmy.world•[Solved] What just happened to 4 million posts?English
    11·
    7 days ago

    i apparently cannot figure out ascii shrugs, nvm

    I don’t know exactly how that post counter … actually, technically counts posts, but:

    1:

    Zip going down could have uncounted all posts anywhere made by zip accounts.

    2:

    There could have been some kind of… propogating post count negation effect, as various other instances reacted differently to zip users posts on their instances could not pull them anymore, on different time scales.

    3:

    If a zip user had a … top level comment, on another instance, its possible all lower level comments responding to that comment may also have poofed out of existence, in some respect.

    …

    I may be misusing some terminology here, and this is just spitballing, but yeah.

    Almost all of my .zip account’s posts/comments… are not on zip itself, and its possible that that is fairly common amongst .zip users.