because i'd previously been scraping by hand and i've never heard of that tool before right now. i regret nothing; i learned a ton. i'm curious how they got around the cloudflare captcha issue.

i wrote a fairly complex script in perl for scraping fanfiction off the internet, extracting data from it, and formatting that data into beautifully and consistently formatted epubs to read on my ereader.

have you considered a hand towel? they work equally well with feet.

yeah, that was my issue at the time, my shoes had finally completely fallen apart on me and i needed a new pair for something. they fortunately let me finish my task when i explained my predicament.

some barefooters like not washing their feet. personally, i don't get that. if my feet are dirty when i get home, i just wash them in the sink real quick. don't need any special tools; hands, water, a bit of soap, and maybe a washcloth will be plenty.

ugh, i hate that woo-woo "grounding" bullshit. gives the rest of the barefooters a bad name. honestly there's so many good reasons to go unshod without bringing in magical nonsense.

unless you're in a place where human shit flows freely, that is not much of a concern. stores are usually not such places.

it is!

my understanding is the the american discrimination against bare feet and the still shockingly common 'no shoes, no shirt, no service' signs, started as a way to more discreetly target black folk after the civil rights act, as they were more likely to be poor enough to not have shoes. barefootedness had already had an association with poverty for quite a while at that time, and thanks to the legacy of slavery, poverty has always had an association with black people in america.

the anti-barefoot crowd gained more steam through the sixties and seventies as a reaction by conservative business owners against the hippie movement.

so basically, the US's negative attitudes against bare feet have their roots in racism and reactionary anti-counterculture sentiments.

here's an article about this history i found, if you wanna read more.

i've been accosted and kicked out of places so many times for being barefoot: grocery stores, restaurants, a bar, book shops, even a shoe store. i've basically been bullied by society at this point into wearing shoes whenever i go out, despite my own preferences. it's not illegal, basically anywhere, but you've been quite lucky to not have gotten any shit anyways.

the ban on mixed fiber textiles was about banning practices common to competing religions in the local area during the bronze age. it makes sense as a way to increase group identity. you can easily see the same thing today, whenever Group A has an enemy, Group B, and vilifies things they see as emblematic of Group B, even if they're objectively pretty neutral.