103
votes
US Election Distractions Thread
Obsessively refreshing results is the most stressful way to follow an election, but it can be an easy trap to fall into. This thread is a place to try and consciously disengage with that process, and talk about or link to anything and everything: how a sports team is doing, your latest hyperfixation, a silly video you liked, wax poetic about an obscure hobby, do a small text based let's play for a game, or elucidate the proper usage of commonly misapplied Latin phrases. So long as it's not related to the election and you don't feel it warrants a topic all its own, throw it in.
Finally, my time has come.
Everyone knows I.E. and E.G. And almost everyone uses them interchangeably, which is wrong. It's so pedantic I usually keep it to myself, so hopefully this will temporarily distract my American friends.
E.g. is short for "exempli gratia", which is Latin for "for the sake of example". "E.g." is used to introduce examples and illustrate a statement. For example, "He roots for the local teams, e.g., the Raptors and the Blue Jays."
I.e. is short for "id est", which is Latin for "that is". "I.e." is used to clarify or specify a particular meaning. For example, "He's a Canuck, i.e., he's from Canada."
Way back in high school I tried to come up with an easy way to remember the difference. This is what stuck for me:
e.g. = egsamples
i.e. = “in effect”
My mnemonic for e.g. is "example given", but same for i.e.!
Yes! I'm don't feel so alone anymore for my mnemonic for e.g.!
...however, for i.e., I remember it as "in essence."
Always had that one as well
Seems like a good way to remember to me!
I think it's really funny that English language imported these Latin terms wholesale, but if you look at Spanish, e.g. is just ej., which are just the first two letters of ejemplo (example).
Many English speakers will also just use "ex." for the same reason. The latin gets used in law and business stuff and writing classes mostly.
And sometimes just to try to make oneself look smart. I say that to throw shade at myself here lol
What is the purpose of Latin if not to seem smart?
Quid pro lorem ipsum.
Quia Ego Sic Digo
Si Non Confectus, Non Reficiat
/GNU Terry Pratchett
You missed
FABRICATI DIEM, PVNK
I left out so many, but that one is excellent
absolutely valid! I just know that I only started using them to sound smart lol
If you want another way to use Latin to sound smart, type out "et alia" ("and others," gender neutral) and "et cetera" ("and the rest") instead of using the abbreviated versions "et al." and "etc."
Trust me, I don't need advice on how to sound more pretentious hahaha
Wait, is Saint Alia of the Knife literally "the other" in Latin? You sly dog Frank Herbert!
Yeah, while I am no expert I am always fascinated by how languages adapt words from other languages.
To paraphrase: When using the Latin abbreviation for "for example," i.e. e.g., don't conflate it with some other abbreviation, e.g. i.e. It's equally important to avoid mixing up the one that is "that is" — i.e. i.e. — with something altogether different — e.g. e.g. etc.
That should clear up any confusion.
You can affect affects by effecting effects on the affects.
Seems perfectly clear to me!
This should also help @DefinitelyNotAFae with her em dash issues—she has resigned herself to never understand them.
(┛ಸ_ಸ)┛彡┻━┻
I've tried to jam as many em dashes as possible into my comments when responding to you ever since we had that conversation God knows how long ago--it just makes sense.
LOOK IT IS NOT MY FAULT THEY'RE ALL DUMB AND DONT MAKE SENSE.
They're ALL DASHES. JUST DASHES.
ಠಗಠ
There is a rich variety of dashes! I don't know the discussion you and @updawg mentioned, so apologies if this is old news.
Clearly you're familiar with the Hyphen-Minus - and the Em Dash —
There's also the Hyphen ‐ and the Minus − which are reserved for typography and mathematics separately.
And the Soft Hyphen which is hidden, by default, unless the word falls at the end of a line of text. The word is split across the two lines and the hyphen appears only then. Similar to the Zero Width Space. There's a good example text to show this on Wikipedia. Try resizing the window to see how the text reflows.
Then there's the Non-Breaking Hyphen ‑, which is sort of the opposite of Soft Hyphen; it is never broken across lines, and keeps the words to either side together. Similar to the Non-Breaking Space.
If a Hyphen is too narrow but an Em Dash is too wide, there is also the En Dash –.
If Em Dash is too narrow, there's Two-Em Dash ⸺ and Three-Em Dash ⸻.
There's the Figure Dash ‒ which is specifically aligned to digits rather than letters; so for tabular data this is better as it preserves numerical alignments.
And of course there are many symbols used in typography for other languages! For example fullwidth dashes properly align with characters and direction of text for East Asian languages. Fullwidth Hyphen-Minus －, Wave Dash 〜, and Wavy Dash 〰 behave this way.
Note that Tilde ~ is NOT a dash, but Swung Dash ⁓ is.
Wikipedia also has a more-or-less complete list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Unicode
I love learning things, I really do identify as a life long learner. Except about dashes. Because they're all the same just different lengths. So they're all just one dash. And typography insisting otherwise is one of its deep deep flaws. - or -------- or — or – or · (very short)
Doesn't matter. All dashes.
I swear I'll step one world sideways until I Mandela effect myself into being the only one that remembers multiple dashes existing.
ತ_ʖತ
(My grumpiness on this is based on my own frustration with them and is meant only in good fun.)
I WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS SLANDER AND/OR LIBEL
sits down
You're right--it's not your fault whether or not they make sense.
Of course, I secretly blame everyone for everything they don't know. But publicly, nothing is anyone's fault and it all comes down to external factors.
Missed a great opportunity with that double dash at the end.
Upvoted simply out of appreciation for the excitement conveyed by that first sentence. Clearly someone who has kept this one pent up for just such a moment.
Also grateful to have such silly content to distract me so thank you.
Hah, you don't normally make friends by telling them about how they are using Latin wrong, so it's one of those interesting things that I am fully aware not everyone finds interesting.
Yep, and etc. = et cetera = and so forth.
Fun fact: in the old abbreviation for it, &c, the & is actually a ligature for et. Some fonts make this more clear and you can really see how it's just a fancy joined e and t.
I also like NB = nota bene = note well.
More fun facts! The ampersand was once considered the 27th letter of the alphabet, which is how you get the word ampersand: when reciting the alphabet, the last letter would have been &, read "and per se and".
Only because þey'd already booted the þorn out of the alphabet. Unjustly I might add.
þis is a þorn stan account. Never should have given it up as a letter!
þþþþþþ
What are your feelings on ð?
Words are better spelled wið þe "ð"
I could be swayed into just using one or þe oþer because I'm not 100% certain I'm using þem correctly but it seems like in English, þey're more interchangeable.
Pretty sure it would be 'ðem,' since the interdental fricative is voiced. It's the difference between "then" (ðen) and "thin" (þin).
Voicing is one of those fluid things in language though, so I'm sure there are plenty of counterexamples out there. The confusion is no doubt one of the reasons they were dropped.
So I thought it was the other way since "with" was the "eth" and "the" is a "thorn."
Also just saw it's often thorn up top and eth at the end.
still a þ stan account
Like I said, voicing is fluid. Which syllables a person voices is one of the things that determines accent. On top of that, it can change from one usage to the next owing to ease of articulation.
For example (par exemplum, exempli gratias, ex generis whatever), the 'th' in 'with' can often be voiced, especially when followed by a voiced consonant or a vowel, so maybe that pertains.
I dunno. Orthography is weird in the most logical languages, let alone in this weird bastard chimera that is Modern English.
I don't think anyone is not voicing "the" or "that," nor voicing "think."
Were those thorned or ethed?
I suppose I could just be confidently incorrect. Sure as hell wouldn't be the first time.
Þorn was used in the word "þe." When you see "ye olde," that is a reference to þorn because it was decided that y most closely resembled þ. This occurred because a lot of early English typesetting was done using fonts that were imported from the Netherlands, which did not contain þ.
In modern Icelandic, eð is voiced and þorn is not, but in English, they were used interchangeably at least as early the 900s. So no mistakes or errors per se, unless you count using modern Icelandic rules when writing in a language where such a rule literally did not matter at all, which seems especially pedantic...therefore, you have made horrible and unforgivable mistakes and errors.
I understand. I shall go commit pedant seppuku now.
I'm new to this whole saving face via suicide thing though. Are there refreshments after? I skipped lunch.
I've got sour gummy worms?
Is "ye Olde" ye the same as in town crier "hear ye hear ye"?
It is not. The one in “ye olde" is "the"; the one in "hear ye" is "y'all".
Were they pronounced differently?
Also folks in this thread might know: can you recommend a recording of the full Canterbury Tales read in middle English? Paid is okay but free is even better . Kid has been asking for a while now
I can't help you with that, but if you'd like to hear plenty of þs and ðs, let me highly recommend Benjamin Bagby's performance of the first part of Beowulf.
Wonderful thank you!
"Ye olde" was pronounced exactly the same as "the old." They simply didn't have a good font containing the right letter.
In Old English, fricatives (which included the "th" sounds as well as s, z, f, and v,) did not distinguish voicing phonemically -- that is, the difference between a voiced and unvoiced fricative by itself did not impact meaning. They would be unvoiced in most contexts, but would be voiced between vowels and voiced consonants. You can see lots of vestiges of this in English -- this is why "half" ends with "f" but the (standard) plural is "halves", not "halfs".
During Middle English (the process happened gradually over time), English started making a distinction between these sounds not just based on context. You eventually started having words with different meanings that differed only based on whether a fricative was voiced or unvoiced (this is called a "minimal pair" in linguistics). This means that these sounds had become phonemes -- the difference between them was now used to distinguish meaning.
Thorn was principally used in Old English, though, and had mostly fallen out of use in favor of "th" by the time that distinction became phonemic. By 1300, thorn was really only retained in common words and abbreviations. "y" in "ye olde" writing was used to represent thorn, because thorn was not included in printers' moveable types, which were imported from continental Europe, but it was already dying out by the time that was a factor anyway afaik. So at the time thorn was used, there really wasn't a clear distinction between those sounds as in modern English. And, after all, even in modern English we get by just fine with not distinguishing the two sounds in writing.
EDIT: changed the example to a better word
In Old English, eth and thorn were used interchangeably (and thorn was the longer-lived variant iirc).
Whelp, chalk up another win for Dunning-Kruger on my part, I guess.
eh, no worries, it's an easy thing to mix up. Especially since you were bang-on for Icelandic in the end!
I think my confusion came more from the IPA than Icelandic, though I'm aware that the latter is the primary justification for the former.
I studied English and rhetoric for years, and continue to have an interest in philology and historical linguistics, and even I forget how much more culturally fragmented Britain was in pre-modern times. They aren't exactly the picture of a monolithic culture today, even. That makes much sense of two interchangeable letters than assuming an anachronistic consistency in orthography that didn't actually arise until the 17th century and later.
Do you know offhand if eth persisted longer in the former Danelaw than the south? That would make a lot of sense, considering the timing of its abandonment.
Unfortunately I'm not super knowledgeable about regional differences in the history there -- I studied linguistics but focused mostly on synchronic stuff, so my knowledge of historical linguistics is limited to what I remember from a couple undergrad classes and what I can find through judicious googling. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case, but I don't know enough to have evidence either way.
When thorn was widely used, English did not have as clear a voicing distinction in fricatives (sounds like "s", "th", or "f") as it does now -- it was highly context-dependent. Fricatives would be voiced in certain contexts, particularly between vowels.
In modern IPA, /θ/ is used for voiceless "th" and /ð/ for the voiced version. When thorn was used, it represented both/either of these sounds. To my knowledge, there was never any point where these two sounds were consistently written differently in English. Even nowadays, where the distinction between the two is weakly phonemic and thus theoretically more salient than it was in Old or Middle English, we get by fine writing them both as "th".
Modern Icelandic is the only living language to still use thorn, and I think they broadly use thorn for the voiceless sound and eth for the voiced sound. However, this is never how it worked in English, and even in Icelandic afaik ð is pronounced voicelessly when before a voiceless consonant (though I'm far from an expert on Icelandic and have very little experience with the modern language, so grain of salt).
Fwiw I don't know which sound is "voiced" and which isn't.
s and f are the unvoiced versions of z and v, but obviously it's a bit harder to distinguish when they aren't written differently, as with "th". The "th" in "the" and "that" is pretty consistently voiced in modern English afaik, while the "th" in "thin" and "thing" is pretty consistently voiceless. "Thy" is voiced but "thigh" is voiceless. But there are definitely some words where it's a little more ambiguous so it can get complex -- for a practical way to distinguish, you can put your hand on your neck while making the sound and see if you can feel your vocal folds vibrate.
That makes sense. I think I categorized them mentally as thorn and eth are pronounced (to me) which seems to be the flip of what Icelandic uses for each
I only remember which one eth is because of the IPA using theta for the voiceless variant, which has a stronger association to me for some reason. Maybe just because theta is an actual word in English with a nice solid voiceless start but eth isn't an existing word and must be remembered separately.
I can't read IPA at all so yeah that would probably help lol
It can be useful to learn for specifically these discussions lol, but it's not strange not to know it. I just gotta get some use out of my linguistics degree hehehe.
I find it frustrating that I don't know it, but I have little capacity to add that kind of random knowledge. That's mostly useless but actually would require me to study something and learn it well enough to absorb it and integrate it. Not just know A fun fact or two
yeah that's absolutely fair
God, skimming this comment was a nightmare. The brain really does round that þ into a p.
I laughed as I was writing it. I think the font makes this particularly bad, as I've definitely had fewer P issues with the thorn in the past
I was in graduate school before I encountered a professor who used NB. I'm not sure why, but it seemed really "out there". I just use the warning emoji now⚠️
Also, there is etm./&m. for et merda, "and shit", for when your audience is a little more casual.
Hah! That's a new one to me. I'll have to remember that.
I've always remembered them by making up initialisms (or adopting them from somewhere? I don't remember; I've been doing this since I was a kid). i.e. is "in effect" and e.g. is "example given." They aren't perfect, but I've never confused the two.
That's actually exactly how my high school teacher taught me to remember them!
I thought it was just e.g. = "free example" and i.e. = "that is". Either way I think I've been using them correctly, even if my translation was wrong.
Let's talk about one of my favorite bits of weird linguistic trivia, licorne, the French word for unicorn.
In French, the indefinite article (English "a"/"an") is un or une. The singular definite article (English "the") is le or la. Before a vowel sound these become l', prefixed onto the word after it. It's like contractions in English, but mandatory, like if writing out "it is" was grammatically incorrect.
So Old French comes along, needs a word for unicorns, sees Latin unicornis, says "that'll do" (but in Old French), and adopts it into French as unicorne.
And then people who didn't know Latin etymology heard that and thought it was the two words une icorne. There isn't a thing called an icorne, but language changes. "The unicorn", therefore, was l'icorne.
And then the same thing happened again: people misheard this as the single word licorne.
So now "a unicorn" is une licorne, and "the unicorn" is la licorne.
Language is weird.
This is called "rebracketing" in linguistics, and it's actually super common, although the fact that it happened twice for one word here is particularly funny. Several English words have been rebracketed too! For some examples:
Quite a few words in English that used to start with "n" now start with a vowel. I think the most common of these is "apron", which used to be "napron". These were rebracketed because speakers started interpreting "a napron" as "an apron" instead! In addition to "apron", this also happened to "adder", "auger", "umpire", and "ought" (when it means zero, not the verb).
And in case you're wondering, the opposite has also happened! "Newt" was originally "an eute" and "nickname" was original "an eke name", but both were rebracketed as speakers interpreted those n's as part of the word.
My favorite example of rebracketing within English, however, is the invention of the word "pea". In Middle English, there was no singular word for "pea" -- you used a non-count noun "pease", which worked like other non-count nouns in English like "corn" or "wheat". However, because that final consonant sounded exactly like what the English plural marker would in that context, it was rebracketed as pea + -s and the word "pea" was born.
I'm curious what happens when the alternative bracketed word already exists. Like if apron and napron had both been two different things, would napron still get shortened to apron (and we'd just have two meanings for the same word) or would they have remained distinct?
I ask because in Portuguese, a good example of this would be the papaya fruit, called a 'mamão'. So 'one papaya' is 'um mamão'. But when you say that out loud it sounds exactly like you're saying 'uma mão' which is 'one hand'. I can't tell you how many times my dad (and my grandpa before him) have joked with me whenever I'd say something like 'hey could you give me a hand here' and they'd be like "I didn't know you were hungry" or "you sure you don't want an avocado instead?", or when I would say something like "I ate a papaya earlier" and they'd respond with something like "why not both?" or "whose hand?".
That's hilarious! What's delightful addition to the standard "need a hand?" "Yes" * applauds
I don't actually know of any examples of the top of my head where rebracketing occurred with a pre-existing form like that out there. Unfortunately for science, "pee" (which, fun fact, is etymologically an abbreviation of "piss") arose centuries after the word "pea". But I don't know every example through all time, so that doesn't mean it can't happen! Regardless of whether rebracketing ever happens, it's obviously fertile ground for puns and other language play.
I had no idea that this song was in Portuguese.
I was about to comment on an apparent German cognate "Natter", but it would appear those refer to taxonomically distinct snakes, so.... Maybe not actually.
They are indeed cognates! Both come from Proto-Germanic *naethro, which just meant "a snake." These words long predate modern taxonomy and it's not uncommon for cognates to end up referring to somewhat different things anyway, so I wouldn't worry too much about them referring to taxonomically different things nowadays.
This is wonderfully fascinating. A similar example is the Spanish name Isabel, which is a variant of Elizabeth. Since 'el' is a definite article in Spanish, the first syllable of Elizabeth was likely mistaken for it.
It's common in French creoles for nouns to have absorbed an article and become an intrinsic part of the stem. Compare Haitian Creole dlo and lalin with French de l'eau and la lune (meaning 'water' and 'moon' respectively).
Seems unlikely that they would associate a masculine article with a female name, though.
It is worth noting that this would've happened in the 12th century, so it would've been Old Spanish rather than modern Spanish. And, in any case, the rebracketing here involved removing the thing that looked like the masculine definite article.
Purely speculating, but the masculine article could have been part of the reason it was dropped. "A lady's name with a masculine article?! What a dummy, the name is clearly Isabel, get that 'el' nonsense out of here." (but you know, clearly said in Spanish)
In Old Spanish the feminine definite article was ela, which became la before most feminine nouns in modern Spanish but el before nouns beginning with a stressed a sound (e.g. el agua instead of la agua). As far as I'm aware, this use of el before feminine nouns today is stricter than it was in the past, where it appeared before any stressed vowel. In any case, Old Spanish speakers probably did perceive the first syllable of Elizabeth as being the feminine definite article.
I would say "lol that's stupid" but, like...so much of language is stupid so this actually sounds smart 😂
I love that! And hadn't gotten to a unicorn bit in LWW en français yet so it hasn't come up. So I'll feel very smart now!
I think about this a lot, and so does my nuncle.
You are like that butterfly from the cartoon.
"A FABULOUS animal resembling a horse!"
Here's a photo of my dog Chocolate. He's a Brazilian mutt. Hope this helps.
❤️❤️❤️
He looks so sweet!
Dogs always help! Thanks lou.
Please kiss him on the nose and tell him it was from me ❣️
Hello Chocolate, I love you.
It does help! I love him!
Aw what a good boy 😍 I love him
One day a Labrador's owner takes him to the park for a walk. While they are walking the lab sees a poodle that he knows. "Hey, how's it going?"
"Pretty good," she replies, "we were just at the dog park, and I saw two Brazilian dogs."
"Oh, that's amazing. How many is a Brazilian?"
He's so cute!
He's precious.
Tell him I said he's a good boy.
So my oldest son and I have a standing date for movie night every Friday. He just turned 13 this year, so it's a bit of a celebration that he can now watch the PG-13 movies that are too intense for his little brother. This last Friday we finished up The Hunger Games movies (the original set, not including the new one about young Snow). After we finished watching, I remembered a video that came out when the movies first released. I pulled it up, we laughed... it was a nice light endcap to a pretty intense fictional journey. Anyway, since I love that video and probably won't have a good reason to share it ever again, here you all go:
Katniss sure loves Pita
How to pronounce omicron
What I hear
Bwahahaha that's brilliant
I never really want to throw this in it’s own thread or shoehorn it into another, but seems like I can just dump it here:
I contribute code to https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com and just want to share in case there are any tildians that are into creating homebrew content for their TTRPGs (particularly but not exclusively dnd 5e).
It’s a markdown editor with live preview, rendered with a default css style sheet matching the PHB. It also features a few custom markdown extensions (as it seems every markdown editor ends up doing) and the ability to modify your css as well.
Anyway, that’s it. Maybe that’ll help with the distractions.
I'm visiting extended family and the dog stole my slipper and removed some decorative pieces. The slippers still work but they used to be cute.
Awwww it super sucks when cute things are no longer cute :( even after repairing it's hard to get it as cute again.
Can they be repaired? With hot glue or some thread?
Probably.
Thanks for asking. I love dogs but mine was better trained.
That's why I have cats. I'm no good at training animals and no one expects cats to be trained.
Very true, also why i like them.
If you do try a little bit of operant conditioning, you'd be amazed at what you can get a cat to do pretty easily. Seeing a cat do basic dog tricks just amuses the hell out of me. I had one I could get to hop on and off the 3ft scratching post like a circus act, it was delightful.
I thought I had the cat trained to come inside when I came to the back door because I keep treats there and would give him a couple whenever he came in. Then I thought a bit about it and realized he'd actually trained me to give him treats.
I have a cat that trained herself. She saw me giving treats to the dog after telling her to sit, and decided to get in on that action. So whenever I said sit to the dog, she would run over and sit next to her.
I love both cats and dogs. Sadly we have someone allergic to cats in the household.
I also had a lot of fun with a cockatiel in the past.
I'm sorry that you're going to have to get rid of that person 😢
We expect them potty trained though?
I've never had to train a cat to do that. Every kitten I've ever had just seeks out litter or sand when it's time to do their business.
What better way to avoid election coverage than to print some puzzles out and solve them on paper? Disconnect from screens, the internet, and social media! Go back to basics!
I will recommend two different things:
I know what you’re probably thinking: meh.
Word searches aren’t that fun, right?
Well, to say too much about this is to spoil it, but I’ll pique your interest by saying that the way I feel about 12 Word Searches is the way people often feel about The Witness or Outer Wilds.
There is more to this puzzle pack than you expect. It is genuinely difficult, but it also has genuine payoff.
It’s been a while since I’ve solved it, but I probably remember enough that I can give hints to people if they get stuck.
I don’t think there’s a teacher in the US that doesn’t know about this site. It has printable puzzles of every type you could possibly think of, as well as plenty you’ve probably never heard of before.
They’re all free and great quality.
I’ve always considered them to be like an offline version of Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection.
I'll have to wait until I get home, but 12 Word Searches sounds right up my alley. Outer Wilds is my favorite game of all time and I'm constantly seeking out any feeling similar like the dirty junkie I am. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
Without too many spoilers in case I do want to do them later would the 12 word searches be good for a friend who enjoys puzzles and wants a distraction from grief? (the death was just regular old person death so nothing particularly triggering regarding it but death always sucks)
As far as I can remember, there’s not anything thematic in them that would be triggering for someone grieving. And if they like puzzles, this is right up their alley.
The only possible thing I've encountered so far is that one of the clues is "cancer".
Oh man, i have to wait til i'm at work tomorrow to print the word searches and I think i'll need them. (Maybe more on Wednesday depending on things go, but I can tell I'll like it a lot. (Will ask if I get stuck)
Highly recommended when you print that you don’t even look at the later pages (either on the PDF or on paper). It’s best if you go in knowing nothing!
Thanks! I started the second one and got really annoyed at my laptop touchpad and decided I'd wait
I am really enjoying the 12 Word Searches - thank you!
I'm maybe 75% of the way through, and it's a lot more challenging and interesting than "word searches" suggests.
I'm playing on an iPad using GoodReader for PDF annotation in multiple colours, which seems pretty much perfect. I would be doing plenty of rubbing out if I was playing on paper.
Just finished 12 Word Searches. It was fun!
Massive spoilers for the whole game
I must say however, I was kinda expecting another layer at the end with how much you hyped it up. Perhaps I simply caught onto the leftovers messages too quickly (basically immediately after finishing the first puzzle). The only big thing I hadn’t realized was that of course half of them would be reversed, so for a long time it was just very ominous snippets, especially “puzzle remains do not”. Seing the message assemble itself in the end was very cool, but the ending fell a tad flat for me as I was just incredibly stupid and couldn’t figure out the last sentence for the longest time (of course it’s self-referential! what else would it be?), while already being able to tell that the hidden message in the last puzzle ends with “you have won”. My other complaint was that the cookie category needed more hints. I’ve never even heard of half these things (not american) and it seemed much less tightly selected than the other categories, where for the most part there wasn’t just a theme but also an order to it. But even so, I had a really great time and will be telling friends to play it.I did worry about overhyping it, but I also worried that if I didn’t give some sort of “hook” for why I think it’s so cool, people will just gloss over it thinking it’s standard word searches.
Nevertheless, I’m glad you enjoyed it! Also congrats on the completion. It’s not easy!
Just so you know, Simon Tatham's puzzle collection on browsers is actually a port of the PC games. You can get official builds for both Windows and Linux and an outdated but still pretty recent build for MacOS. There are also ports to other platforms but they aren't terribly good (the iPhone one in particular is pretty bad; the palm one is surprisingly decent but is very outdated and doesn't have the newer games).
Good to know!
In that case I consider them to be like an offline version of the online version of Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection. 😂
I don't even think I'm half way through 12 Word Searches, and I am certain that "Use pencil in case you make a mistake" is mocking me. 😂
I don't think I'll be able to finish this in one sitting. I love it though.
Ok I'm going through and just got to
spoilers
AAAAAAA
which tbf is how I feel
I'm doing well at playing the missing letter games, I think. but I'm well aware there's something else going on with all the stuff at the bottom of the screen. should I be figuring that out now? later? I'm cool just vibing
spoilers for everyone but DefinitelyNotAFae
I’m pretty sure the stuff at the bottom was one of the last things I figured out. There should be more you can figure out right now without those.
I just got to 0 so yeah I'm working on it
I frequently post shitty comments, then read them and immediately delete them while I redraft them to not be dogshit. If anyone sees a comment that immediately disappears, please just pretend you didn't see it.
Also, @deimos plz add a "delete and re-draft" button kthx.
If you edit your comment within a few minutes it won't show an "edited" mark; if you can fix it quickly you can just update it without deleting and reposting.
I'm so thankful for this feature. The number of times I've made a comment here or other places that do the same and have found a spelling error or better way to phrase what I'm saying immediately upon rereading after I hit the 'post' button is too damn high. At least this way, people don't automatically know that I'm a maroon.
Sup, fellow maroon.
I know I'm supposed to use the preview button before posting, to check for spelling or autocomplete errors, but I don't. Thank goodness for stealth edit time allotment.
Maroon #3 checking in.
I make great use of the preview button, but still manage to mess things up and/or have regrets and then go back for edits (sometimes multiple times). 🤷♂️
Is it bad that I thought you guys were talking about being University of Chicago alumni at first? Does that make me a maroon too?
I don't think it's an exclusive club, so... Welcome fellow maroon!
Genuine question: What's the stigma of the "edited" mark? I pretty frequently go back and reword my comments for clarity. I do try to "show" the edit by using strike-through or other means if I'm making any changes that significantly alter things. Is there some other angle I'm missing?
Though there is the time marked on the edit, if I see that a comment was edited (especially after there's a response to the comment) I wonder whether the person who replied saw what I'm seeing. It breaks the illusion of a conversation to not know for sure that you're actually experiencing a true back and forth between the people talking. If the edit includes an edit reason, that makes all the difference, in that I still can see what the early commenters saw.
For me it's pretty much what you say: if I edit it in time to clean up some typos or wording without the "edited" mark, I don't feel that I need to say that I changed anything. If I do it later, then I feel that the original was up long enough that I need to specify what I redid (although for minor typos/wording I think a strikethrough is too distracting, and I'll just note that I did minor cleaning at the end of the comment). It makes it a slightly bigger deal, is all.
By the way, your username is great. I adore The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
Yay, another Wrede fan in the wild! I love her books. They meant a lot to me growing up, and now that my kids are older they are enjoying them too. 🙂
Yes, but then people get mad about me "gaslighting" them "in response to what they say" (it isn't) or respond to the bad comment saying "that's a bad comment because XYZ" (I know).
The whole point of deleting it is that I'm not under time-pressure to write a decent comment in time.
Yeah, fair enough. I do those quick post-post edits on pretty much everything I say that's longer than a couple of sentences. There's always something I wish I had worded better, or mangled in trying to get my thoughts in order, or something. I can get the desire to not be under a time pressure to get things in order.
Sometimes, I just post shitty comments because I just enjoy shitposting to make myself laugh.
Getting banned in 3... 2..
I'll do something pretty similar, except with the redrafting part at the end. I'll regularly post a comment, then decide I don't actually like it all that much and just give up on it instead.
I've written so many comments that have never seen the light of day. I get halfway through a thought, give up completing it, and abandon.
The most important version is to get angry, type something, say "well, I got that out of me," and move on.
My son cannot say my name but I am proud to announce that I accidentally taught him how to bark.
Not too long ago you showed a picture of your dog. Are you sure you're not confusing the two? :P
Well, they both bark and walk on all fours. I'm doing my best! I sure hope my wife is not breastfeeding the dog right now!
Delightful!
I adopted a fresh kitten from a friend's backyard. She's about 10 weeks old and super friendly. Any advice on raising kittens? Also I would appreciate any tips on how to acclimate her and my dog (6 years old corgi).
I have some experience, but it will be nice to hear from others.
Honestly? Mess around with the kitten when she's too small to fight back. Get her used to being picked up, flipped on her back, having her tummy rubbed, her tail and paws (gently) pulled, and her teeth and mouth played and poked and prodded. Always follow the (again, gentle) abuse with whatever kind of pettings or cuddles the cat likes best, so they learn to quietly tolerate all of the slightly less than pleasant experiences in life.
Your vet at a bare minimum will thank you profusely.
Additional thoughts: if the cat starts biting or clawing you during playtime, yipe really loud and immediately end playtime, even if you're not actually injured at all. Cats understand pain; they'll learn not to use claws if using claws ends playtime.
Solid advice. Cats (and dogs for that matter) don't understand words or human facial expressions, but they understand vocalizations.
The ideal version of this is getting a puppy and a kitten at the same time and let them learn how to play while growing up with one another. I have a friend who did this with a dog who is about the same weight/size as the cat even though they're both full grown now. They will play-wrestle with such enthusiasm you'd think there would be blood and missing fur but no, they've learned such good self control. That cat has amazing claw control, I've never been scratched by him even when he's clearly distressed and wants to get away from me.
That sounds about right and similar to what I did with my dog when he was a fresh puppy. So far, I found that she is touch motivated, and she is much easier to handle than my old cat (who was an actually former feral cat, deemed too feral to be adopted). Although, she is still pretty young to tell.
She has an upcoming vet appointment on Saturday, but I already consulted with my second opinion vet in the meantime.
And don't forget to get that pussy wet!
A "fresh" kitten lol.
That is all. :P
Mine's pretty stale by now, covered with a fine mat of soft gray fuzz.
Right? Even at 10 weeks mine always smell kinda musty and weird.... It goes away as they ripen, but it would be nice to keep 'em fresher longer.
Pictures pretty please?
Is your dog pretty calm and or apathetic about cats? Much of acclamation will be about individual temperaments rather than species level: I've had a kitten foster who is chill with dogs but absolutely turns insane when she realises there's a cat nearby even in the next room; I've also had a foster cat that was so sweet and snuggly with everyone but couldn't stand the dog being snuggly with her. My current cat (a foster fail) bullied all the dogs at the other fosters and ate all their food.
Generic advice: keep them separate; let them smell and hear each other; show them empty room where the other recently occupied. For the first meeting, have lots of hiding places that are private and the other cannot be allowed to go into, and keep the meeting brief. Then supervised activities. Don't leave them home unattended for a long time. Dogs in general wag their tails and touch, but in general cats wag when in flux and don't want to touch.
I wish Captain's Calico the softest of beds and the most splendid of naps.
Here's some pictures: https://bsky.app/profile/lonelysockclub.bsky.social/post/3la7gt4ngls27
They have met briefly. My dog, Monty, is pretty chill, but he was leashed during their two brief encounter. He grew up with cats, so he was more anxious and nervous around juni. Juniper kept hissing, and hide until Monty laid down. The she would sneak around and try to sniff him. So far it wasnt too bad. Nothing out of the ordinary.
They're so dang cute!!!! /Screaming
Those soft baby bean toes!! I thought I had a lot of kitten pictures until she was no longer a kitten, and now I wish I had more kitten pictures
I think the question we all want answered is she calico, @Captain_calico ?
I think she is a clouded or tabby calico. She has grey and orange tabby colorings with white chest and booties.
My previous cat was a calico that inspired this username.
I've never had a dog, so I can't speak to how a cat and dog would interact.
But despite popular misconception, cats are solitary hunters but social creatures. If you have the resources, you might consider adopting a second kitten of similar age (does your friend have any more that litter?) to be her companion. Having another cat around may help her to learn to socialize, give her a playmate for when she wants to romp around at three in the morning, give her someone to wrestle with to learn the proper limits to nipping and clawing, and provide company when you're not around. They can also assist each other with mutual grooming.
The dog may help some with that, but as a settled adult may not have the energy to keep up with a young kitten.
(My current cats were adopted as kittens as a "bonded pair" and I couldn't imagine them any other way.)
We thought about getting a second pair. But both my husband and I are allergic to cats, so getting a second one might pushing our boundaries a little bit. Although, if her siblings are still free for adoption in a few weeks, we might take a second one in.
As a seasoned distraction connoisseur I too feel like this is my time to shine.
Feel like watching hour long videos about how the universe works?
https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryoftheUniverse is my favorite channel, works great as a sleep aid!
They also have channels about the history of the earth and mankind:
https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryofHumankind
https://www.youtube.com/@HistoryoftheEarth
If you're into charts and historic or fictional family trees you will love this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@UsefulCharts
Do you enjoy car tuning and would like to watch some boy from colorado start out by slapping an ebay turbo into his honda civic and end up building a world record (as of his last video) toyota mr2?
https://www.youtube.com/@boostedboiz will keep you covered for the rest of the year! Lots of positive energy and shenanigans.
Mad scientists:
https://www.youtube.com/@NileRed
https://www.youtube.com/@theCodyReeder
https://www.youtube.com/@mrgreenguy
https://www.youtube.com/@styropyro
The most enjoyable playthroughs of the elder scrolls and fallout series I have ever watched: https://www.youtube.com/@ManyATrueNerd
Multi hour long video essays about video games: https://www.youtube.com/@broadcaststsatic
An Aussie with a (female as it turned out) pet snake called frank with a love for shitty mp3 players, headphones, (shitty) cars, drumming and I forgot what else, he's got multiple channels but these are the ones I keep coming back for:
https://www.youtube.com/@DankPods
https://www.youtube.com/@GarbageTime420
Two blokes from Britain reinventing the mini one painstakingly overdone bracket at a time. Also reinventing the circuit board in their latest video because they were unhappy with the dashboard dials for sale: https://www.youtube.com/@BadObsessionMotorsport
Eastern European travel channels, mostly about abandoned places, train surfing and camping in unusual places:
https://www.youtube.com/@shiey
https://www.youtube.com/@ivantrainsLIVE
This twitch channel streams nothing but Bob Ross at indeterminate frequency but when it’s live it is nonstop for days. You can also just watch the vods.
https://twitch.tv/bobross
That's it for the moment, the list might grow as i recall more.
I will clean up the links later if i find the patience
Also please share your favorite YouTube channels or distraction troves of all kinds!
If you more of NileRed, then he does have a shitposting channel called NileBlue, where he does less serious stuff or ideas that really don't fit his main channel. The last video that he did was make homemade Pop Rocks, that may be a tee bit more dangerous that the stuff that you can get at the store.
If you want another person in NileRed's group in Canada, then the Thought Emporium is another great watch. He does more of mix the practical experiments that any one can do, like using potatoes as cameras. And the actual mad science stuff that Nigel (NileRed) does, but with more a bio science way of doing it, like getting neurons to play the original Doom and what did mummy's taste like.
I didn't know about the thought emporium, man made horrors within comprehension is right up my alley, thanks!
The neat thing about the Thought Emporium is that a lot of his experiments can be done by the average viewer. And he does say which ones a kid can do, like the videos about him experimenting with photography, which is always fun, the only thing that you would need is a camera that uses film. But the stuff that he grows the cells are ones that a average viewer can't do because of the highly specialized equipment that he uses.
I started with his oldest videos and from pulling satellite data with a broomstick antenna to implanting magnets in his fingers to curing his lactose intolerance with a self made virus was a rollercoaster. Happy to see there are still gold mines on YouTube for me to discover.
I love the Thought Emporium! I found them through their video on creating a single use instant hot dog, but subscribed after seeing the Mummification video.
I'll add a few of my other favorite channels here (in no particular order):
Alec Steele - High energy metal work.
Joe Scott - Interesting deep dives and rapid fire Q&A on a variety of subjects (mostly falling into science and engineering).
James Channel - Retro games, teardowns, and unhinged experiments. My favorite is the one where he modifies an NES cartridge to play NES cartridges.
Code Bullet - Funny Aussie that teaches AI to do things (mostly master games that he has to recreate from scratch in Python or Unity).
Steve Mould - Super chill and interesting science videos. Lots of deep dives into how things work. Steve is great.
Are hot dogs not generally considered single use? ಠಿ_ಠ
Ha, yeah the thumbnail wording is a bit awkward. I also considered using the term "emergency hot dog", but ultimately decided to leave it and let the video speak for itself. :)
Yeah it's fair and all in good fun, I don't have time to watch at the moment but suffice to say my interest is piqued
That one kind of bugs me because he could have made it a reusable instant hot dog if he decided to use electricity instead.
(Though to be fair it would have probably needed a pretty large battery for that)
That was delightful. IIRC the Thought Emporium video mentions that they considered cooking with electrical current but decided in favor of steam for reasons (maybe taste and consistency? It's been a while since I've watched it).
Side note: I'm always amazed at the lack of any sort of safety standards in some of these old appliances. Just straight mains power across some terminals. NBD. :D
I actually don't think that design was that dangerous, given that it required installing the cover to actually complete the circuit. But yeah, definately not the way a person should be cooking a hot dog.
(on the other hand, I would bet this is a whole lot more energy efficient than a hot plate!)
I missed how the lid acted as a disconnect. That's a pretty clever way to improve safety actually.
Yeah that was the first video that I had watched from him, and it was just a weird way of cooking hotdogs with thermite to heat up the water. But I really enjoyed the different ways to take a picture using the old film cameras, like recreating the microfilm that the CIA spies had used to pass on information. Another great one is him trying to find a better substitute for the cell growth fluid that he uses for the Doom videos, like Gatorade and the other sports drinks into it.
Huh. I recently abandoned NileRed because it got too uh, "unserious". The algorithm may have caught my lack of attention unawares.
Today is Guy Fawkes night. The night where the UK celebrates a guy named... Guy.
Guy completely failed to blow up the House of Lords in the gunpowder plot.
And Guy's failure to blow up part of UK's parliamentary system is celebrated with... fireworks.
They celebrate the complete lack of explosions in the UK parliament with... (checks notes)... explosions in the sky.
Remember, remember, the fifth of november.
I think they should just change it to Fireworks Night. Don't need Guy to be part of the celebration that obviously no longer has anything to do with the guy.
On the other hand it seems very normal to have culturally confusing things be just accepted? Such as Worcestershire being 3 syllables but aluminum be 4.
But what about those dope-ass masks? Get rid of the Guy-ness of 5 November and you abandon them totally to edgelord anons with a ninth-grader's understanding of political science and economics.
Edit: I'm beginning to think the Tildes user tag add-on was a bad idea. It's starting to feel like I don't respond to anyone but you.
Am I still terminally online gremlin?
Maybe you need to start tagging other terminally online members here like terminally online
faehuman and that /u/Captain_Calico has a fresh kittenAlternatively: it's okay those are all alts of this same account I really am the only other person here * Eerie music
Yes indeed you are.
The only other people I currently have tagged are @updawg as "microcosm writ large" and @Deimos as "Tildes Deity," though I plan to tag @DefinitelyNotAFae as "suspiciously fae-like human" as soon as I hit "Post comment."
Edit: @Captain_calico is now tagged "freshly bekittened" per your suggestion.
I don't see what is suspicious about being perfectly normally human shaped.
Just a vibe thing.
𓍊𓋼𓍊𓋼𓍊
You know, upon reflection it was terribly insensitive of me to tag you as "suspiciously fae-like human," not to mention embarrassingly gauche.
I've updated it to "suspiciously humanlike human" instead.
My sincerest apologies.
(◔‿◔)━☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ
?!?! There are tiny mushroom Unicode???!
Are there any other?! Is there...also a tiny house Unicode (not emoji)?!?
⌂ ⾕
✸𓂃𓂃⾕𓂃ᨏ𓂃
Wish I could tag people, but I don't use the desktop version enough--that means I have to just remember to use em dashes when talking to @DefinitelyNotAFae. At least now I know how you know to keep calling to me when you encounter that phrase!
I use the extension on Firefox mobile too, so I can check tags if I need to remember who's the jerk who keeps using dashes at me
/j
For when you do remember which jerk that is: the best revenge is misusing the phrase "writ large."
It's trickier to do than it sounds, because you have to figure out what the fuck it means in the first place.
"Writ large" writ large
This is actually not really too far off being accurate lol certainly not in a way that bothers me--and I think that's great!
I mostly use Tildes on mobile as well. I believe @chocobean and I use the same extension, Tildes ReExtended. I'm completely spacing on which Tildorino did the extension, but I bet the Terminally Online Tech Gremlin can enlighten us.
Edit: here's the git.
Surely you won't make me forsake @talklittle!
It's strange, because I also have Three Cheers installed, but for some reason I rarely use it. I think it's because the type is too small or something. It's all the weirder because I was a long-time RIF user in the beforetime, and @talklittle coming here was part of why I joined Tildes in the first place. I'm like a cat who would rather play in the box the scratching post came in, I guess.
Hey I'm just glad we have a bunch of users sticking around this community and continuing to make thoughtful contributions. You and @updawg included. It doesn't matter to me which app anyone chooses to use. Of course I'm happy when my apps are useful to people, but it's more done in service to the bigger goal of a community people want to stay around. Making it easier for some.
It's the reason I came here, too. One of three reddit users I was familiar with and recognize on Tildes. When the rif dude recommends a site made by the subreddit simulator dude, you listen.
The third guy's reddit account was apparently banned, so I won't name any names 😳
Whoa, I had no idea Deimos was responsible for subreddit simulator. That's awesome.
Yep, he's Deimorz.
I will accept this tag.
I went with Kitten Fresh because it made me laugh
Well that's a relief, because you haven't got a choice. Woulda really sucked if you hated it.
Writing prompt: protagonist finds a fun small online community. Little do they know that the whole community is one other person sock puppeting.
Terminally online gremlins assemble. ✨
Though I do hope to get out of my parents house sooner rather than later and actually manage to hatch my roots somewhere. Maybe I'll get less terminally online then.
...maybe.
Gremlin ✋ high five! 🎇
I moved to rural Canada wanting to be outside and touch grass more. :/ turns out I have a brown thumb and it's always too sunny or slightly too "outside" outside
As much as I want to move to a city, I do envy the wide open space you guys have there... though I could see the same happen to me if I would move to somewhere like that.
The guy is definitely part of the celebration.
You burn the guy after all the fireworks.
aluminium - I count 4-5 depending on how you diphthong.
Idk when you burn a man in effigy it feels like you're saying Fawke(s) that Guy in particular, ya know?
And you're going to tell me making bad historical puns isn't fae-like behavior?
That was an excellent pun, thank you very much. A very common human activity, or so I'm told, especially among "dads"
In my experience, dads are mythical beasts as well, so you're in the right ballpark.
There are a couple of light, fun youtube series I've been enjoying lately.
The first is Any Austin's Unemployment Reports. I found out about them through lou's post on his Morrowind Rivers video, and their unemployment reports series is a similar vein of humor of applying serious-ish analysis to minor things.
The second is Tom Walker's GTA 4 Fast Traffic Playthrough. The premise is simple; the cars are turned up to absurd speeds, and he tries to complete the missions. If you enjoy slapstick or watching people struggle with unfairly challenging games, give it a whirl.
I'll dump a few random YouTube things here then:
Recently I discovered the delightfully unhinged Doug and the Business Cats
I know I already posted a thing, but if we're talking about YouTube rabbit holes, I would be remiss if I didn't post Sonic Destruction:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Basically a table reading of a delightfully hallucinating AI generated film script set in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe. It really hits its stride in Ep2 IMO, but it's a great ride overall. Also a great way to burn through ~2.5 hrs. :)
I've always wanted to ask this meta question: how real are you guys about who you are on Tildes?
When I was growing up, internet privacy was considered a big deal. If a website asked your birthday, it was best to pretend you were 100+ years old. These days, it's not just privacy from individual sites, but there's also data aggregators. And maybe worst of all, if you put the wrong details, the right person could dox you. It's not always malicious, it could just be a friend who puts 2 and 2 together, then suddenly has access to posts you thought were (pseudo-)anonymous.
So some of us spend our time online paranoid that a comment reply could doom our anonymity. But I think that's probably an irrational fear, the internet is a big place! How do you guys handle it?
I personally view doxxing the same way I view home security. If someone really wants into my house, nothing I can feasibly do is going to stop them, or even really slow them down much. If someone really wants to dox me, it would not be difficult. I make a point not to share unnecessary information online, but OTOH I've been online since the last millennium so I have a fairly large digital footprint. Even after deleting almost all of my social media accounts 6+ years ago.
I share online the same opinions and level of personal detail I would share with coworkers or casual friends IRL. If eventually those opinions come back to "haunt" me, I feel fairly comfortable with the idea of either defending those opinions, or describing how I've changed since 1995.
More personal thought I limit to 1:1 chat messages, or I just don't comment. If I truly want to be anonymous for any particular reason, I'm going to use throwaway accounts in an incognito browser window.
I keep things vaguely fuzzy, but probably could be tracked down if absolutely necessary. Now tracking down a cough perfectly normal human, may have unpleasant side effects.
But mostly I am pretty genuine online and I don't really have any concerns about someone connecting the dots to my employer. Real life death threats would be a problem.
I create a new account every year or so.
That way I can mention stuff without worrying.
I am beginning to think my next account should be "definitely_totally_not_chocobean", to reassure folks that I am not one of the many @chocobean sock puppet accounts.
I tried being more reserved. I found it tiresome and unfulfilling. I will never say or show everything, of course. I don't do that in real life either.
I'm very real. But I am always careful to avoid giving personal information, especially in regards to where I live. I have told people that I live in California, and even that I live in the greater Los Angeles area.... but that area is huge, reaching over at least three counties and millions of people (LA county alone is the most populous county in the United States).
It might be possible to find out who I am from just my posts, but it would take a huge amount of effort. and there are much easier ways to accomplish that goal.
This is more or less what I attempt, too. I dont like being dishonest, but I do try to be vague about certain details.
I do my best to keep details fuzzy but I could probably do more to protect privacy.
I have no social media in my real name
Like others have said, I try to be as real as I can while not being specific about my actual identity. I know I leak small bits of information, so probably someone could spend time with my post history and figure out who I am. I don't believe anything online is truly anonymous. Because I have this thought in my head, I think helps me be more real. Basically, I think, "How would I feel if everyone I know saw this and knew it was me who posted it."
It's nice that Tildes is a place where that kind of openness can be met with interest and engagement instead of low-effort cruelty.
Every time I am on a new platform I try to stay aloof and stranger danger. Then I run my mouth and absolutely it would be easy to dox me. I think it's better to keep private details private, but I can't manage to do it.
Age sex location probably the most telling. Occupation too. Folks should probably not talk about specific anecdotes from work/life or mention specific names....some level of deniability.
But on another level insane people will do insane things and I can't both live online and be completely non-participating.
If you can't stop blabbing, like me, about some irl stuff one thing that can work is to sometimes throw in a defining detail that is just wrong. Having a sibling extra, or being born one town further away, something.
At the same time, I think this is also something as a society were still figuring out. It has never been easier to find information. And thats affecting so much.
I've thought about that kind of thing but I'll never be able to (1) remember the extra sibling or (2) not be embarrassed if by some chance that detail gets brought up at a later date
Some things I consistently fuzz though: throwaway phone numbers are VoIP / ancient + defunct, and throwaway birthdays are always an easily remembered holiday. If I need an American zip code it's almost always 90210 due to an ancient tv show having that in its title
I'm extremely open with my identity. It probably wouldn't take more than a few minutes of googling to find my real name. But it wouldn't be hard for anyone that I've met in real life to find my real name. I give it freely there, too. It wouldn't be hard for people online or in the real world to find my address. Why should I be more afraid of people online than in the real world?
That's a good point.....in real life we give out names and crazy people can look us up. Maybe it's sheer number online? I might only ever meet 5000 people who know my name in real life but if my post go viral I can hit 5 million over night.
And then real life people don't go as crazy as arm chair warriors too
This is what I forgot to include in my comment above. The real risk of doxxing isn't losing anonymity, it's losing your ability to hide while a violent mob is actively looking for you. In which case, there isn't really a whole lot one person can do to prevent that. Telling people to be "more careful" about sharing information online so that they don't get death threats is victim blaming.
Pragmatically there is absolutely a certain level of self-protection that is warranted. However once there's a literal mob after you, it's insane to tell people they should have been more careful so that they weren't in the path of the bloodthirsty mob. Mobs aren't rational (ask K from Men in Black).
It's because they'll typically have an actual face to associate with....and a healthy fear of having rocks chucked through their windows for bad behavior.
Sorry, watched someone nearly get run over on a crosswalk again.
To me it's about ephemerality. The words I say aloud in real life vanish into the air unless remembered by me or my interlocutor. Words I've written online are still around decades later. I don't really have to worry about someone digging through my history with the former.
That's true enough : even if I were to gossip about a neighbor, if I said them in words I can wiggle somewhat.
I've never hidden my real identity since I first started using the internet in the 90s. My online nickname is basically my real name, and I've done several things online to varying degrees of controversy and infamy all using my real name. I think I figured early on that if trying to remain anonymous could be exploited as a weakness by people who want to hurt you, you could neutralize that weakness by not trying to remain anonymous. It's never really come back to bite me, but it could be that I'm just extremely lucky and/or privileged (or it could just be a matter of time).
On the flip side, I do take a lot of steps to avoid my information and activity being gathered by data aggregators--I use a dumb phone, Linux, aggressive network-wide ad/tracker/social media blockers, leave as many devices as I can (TVs, appliances, car, etc.) entirely disconnected from the internet, stuff like that.
You can easily deduce who I am and almost everything about me from what I have posted here. I stand behind everything I say. So i guess I'm approximately 100% real with who I am and what I say here. I acted the same on reddit before this, with varying levels of regret about it, but mostly just okay with the fact that what you see is what you get with my online identity.
I have thought about obfuscating my identity more, but have the privilege of that not being particularly necessary for me.
I did actually try this with you recently, but nowhere near hard enough to actually doxx you. I posted a video from Alpha Phoenix. I then saw a comment from "aphoenix." I then checked to see if you were obviously the same dude. I didn't see anything immediately that fit that channel. I then immediately forgot what I did see.
Ha, that is a pleasing person to be mistaken for! I have linked directly to my personal blog a number of times, and actually retooled it for TiMaSoMo several years ago, so I'm not super private. When one picks an automatically doxxing username, I guess this is what happens...
Trying to disconnect meatspace from the internet is a lost cause in my case. There nothing really to dig up about me though. Some thoughts are reserved for close friends and family, but that's mostly work related.
I live by the older rules of obscurification while oversharing. Mothers become brothers and sisters become aunts. Birthday? March 14th, 1592.
Perhaps I’ll even straight copy/paste someone else’s personal anecdotes and clean the SPAG errors to launder them as mine to throw off behavior analysis. In some ways, I treat online reality as a human LLM agent. Or I’ll lie to you about which lies I tell.
Who I am is fairly real (I assure you more people know me by this username, which I've been using for over 25 years, than my real name), but I keep biometric (or other stuff that could be used for ID theft) and family information generally private. If pushed, I'll give a general range of values. And I'm ungoogleable.
I share personal anecdotes and stories, but try to keep things generally vague or at least, unspecific. Not exactly sure why, I don't feel that I have much to hide or gain from anyone figuring out who I am.
Just seems reasonable, I suppose?
Funny! I was born at the start of the Unix epoch: January 1, 1970. 🙃
I still make an effort with regards to anonymity, even though realistically I know it's a lost cause if anyone seriously looks. Even that regrettably flimsy shield can be liberating though. It can be a frightening experience to render yourself vulnerable online in a room full of strangers. A degree of anonymity can help with that: even if things do go poorly, you can always delete the account and move on, limiting the long term consequences.
With that in mind, you can share things you couldn't in real life, for whatever reason. The queer movement made a lot of progress with the rise of the internet, and I think one of the reasons for that is the anonymity. The internet provided a place that people could be open and honest about their sexuality and connect with others, while also providing a degree of protection from what would happen if they tried the same in the physical world.
I try to be fairly genuine, but I avoid talking about certain things that I don't want to have to discuss even though I don't really care if people know about. Things that are embarrassing because they feel out of character for me, not things that most other people would feel embarrassed by. This also means that I need to be more generic about other things so that people can't quickly and easily put the pieces together and ask me about the things that I don't want to discuss.
A few years ago, I volunteered at a hedgehog shelter. Since now is as good as time as any, have two pictures:
https://i.ibb.co/WK4JxXz/20171028-112251.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/JzhBwkJ/20170410-112853.jpg
Grew up working in a vet clinic, and hedgehogs are one of my favorites. Super cute. Holding one that is all thorned out is an amazing sensation that is hard to describe.
I'm intrigued by the rescue aspect. Why were there enough abandoned hedgehogs to merit a rescue?
I live in the Netherlands, so they're native, and endangered. :( Lots of traffic, low amount of actual natural nature, and high population density.
Fascinating. Now I'm imagining them like we have squirrels and chipmunks in the US. I think it would be lovely to see hedgehogs that way.
"why is there suffering in the world?"
"Don't know. But we also live in a universe where it's possible to volunteer at a hedgehog shelter"
They've so tiny and cute and so sweet and their lil spikes and soft pink skin and .... [Descends into incoherence]
Bless your soul, what cute little critters !
How was it ? What was the experience like ?
Being a lover of hedgehogs? ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC. Unfortunately time and movement constraints prevented me from going back. But its real precious to hold dem little spiky bois. It's really a lot of small tasks such as cleaning their temporary cages, weighing them, and sometimes assisting when they needed medication or otherwise needing to be treated.
Does it hurt to cuddle them?
You can hold them with your hand, but cuddling is more difficult. They aren't domesticated.
Do they cuddle together for warmth?
I don't think they do. We kept them seperate and they aren't super social creatures like say rats.
The visual image is adorable tho
Lately I've been entirely too fixated on getting quieter case fans for my PC, and I picked up a couple of inexpensive tips for anyone looking to do the same.
If your fan noise has a sort of pulsing quality to it, it likely has to do with beat frequency (see this video if you want more details). It's caused by the resonance of two of your fans at around the same RPM, so the fix is to slightly offset the RPM of as many fans as you can. 50 RPM is the interval I saw used.
You can also get some cheap silicone fan pins to use instead of screws, which are supposed to help reduce fan and case resonance/vibrations.
I've had the idea before of getting long enough cables (keyboard, mouse, monitors) so I can put the computer in another room, but still have the part that I really interact with on my desk. Of course, the "ultimate" version of my idea is that other room would be in a freezer or something, where I can not have to even really need the fans so much since the computer would be chilled down by default.
One can dream.
I do use case fans connected to a USB power plug mounted to the room's return vent (on the ceiling) to pull warm air out. And thus out of the room where I (and my computer) reside. Which works really well and is way, way, way quieter than a normal big box store fan. Those are always loud, even if you mount them on the ceiling.
Make the room the heat sink? Yowza that's a lot of energy!
But, well, at least you could do some serious overclocking.
Or just water cool basically everything.
Put it in a freezer and use the freezer as a refrigerator.
It hasn't occured to me before that this is basically my setup. I did it for VR (VR is not in the same room as the computer), but it would work just fine for separating myself from the computer (I'm good with my noctua fans though). I have cable trunking along the wall then a hole through the next wall for:
Then I just have an indoor unit of split AC positioned directly above my computer. This was by design since I had the AC installed before I moved here a couple years ago.
Do you find yourself distracted by the noise? Just wondering, as I do find myself easily distracted in instances where I'm trying to focus, but a humm from speakers or buzzing of case fans just fades into the background for me and I never notice those noises.
It's a very nice dream. I might actually give that vent fan thing a whirl; I hadn't really thought about optimizing the environment around the computer, so that's definitely something for me to consider going forward. Thanks!
Linus from Linus Tech Tips does something like you were thinking with the long cables. IIRC he uses an expensive fiber-optic thunderbolt cable from Corning combined with a powered dock to break out peripherals and monitor connections.
I always find it amazing that people find fan noises to be so annoying. Do you all keep your PCs next to your head? Are you using ancient fans? Right now I have my server in my room, which has four of the cheapest fans the case manufacturer could find spinning continuously, and it's generally too quiet for me to register even when I'm sitting right next to it.
I wonder if it's an age thing. I grew up in an era when every screen was accompanied with extremely loud coil whine, so the gentle white noise of fans don't bug me too much.
I think the age thing probably plays a role, but I'd throw in a few other factors as well. One is that computers these days have much higher power draw and with it need significantly more cooling. The other is that I think it's frequently a neurodivergence thing; some flavors of neurospicy can be easily distracted, or easily become fixated, or can be sensitive to sensory stimulus.
Oh, I never even thought it was a neurodivergence. I guess I should avoid calling people who are bothered by this crazy. ^_^;
Hooo, so I decided I should sell my BMW and got a Miata to replace it. Problem is, I got the Miata, and then the BMW's power steering blew a leak as I went to show it to someone. Oopsie fuckin poopsie! And it isn't an easy fix like the reservoir at the top of the engine. So now I need to figure out if I want to sell this Scheißhaufen as-is towed at a loss, or fix it / get it fixed and try to sell it again as a working car.
Then I drove the Miata around and saw the temp pegged. Thankfully I was close to home and I parked it, to find smoke billowing out... I got it off before there was any warped head or any damage as far as I can tell, thing runs and idles ok, but I found the coolant leak that caused the problem. It's a pipe notoriously called "the devil hose"... Basically the plug labeled "the bastard" here turned into a coolant pipe in the following engine, which snakes down to a connector above the blue oil filter on the bottom right. Except the vantage point of this picture is RIGHT up against the firewall, so that's ass to get out, and I've been trying to deal with the one above the oil filter for about a week with no success because it's buried under the intake with little room and zero visibility. Wondrous luck. Trying all sorts of fun pliers and doodads to get the world's worst hose clamp out without taking my entire intake manifold off.
Sorting these out while building my toddler's new room to make way for rapidly-approaching kid #2 in early December is fun. If anyone knows a good tool to get this awful hose clamp out, you'd be a savior...
If there's one thing I've learned in my years of automotive repair, it's that it's worth it just to take the pieces off that are in the way.
Rather than struggle, trying to save yourself and extra work and inevitably begin swearing, breaking shit and cutting up your arms and hands, just remove the parts in the way so you can get the work done. It's less work to take them off and put them back on than it is to to try and work around them (not to mention, figure out where the hell your dropped something while working around the thing in question.)
I sure as shit didn't want to remove my wiper assembly to do my plugs and wires (not to mention my struts), but it sure as shit saved me a lot of ass pain.
This.
I've been wrenching and building cars longer than some of the wonderful people on Tildes have been alive. There's a lot of steps in factory service manuals that can be skipped to get a job done, but my personal time limit is one hour. If the thing I'm trying to get to has taken more than an hour to get to because something else is in the way, then it's time to reassess and either 1: See if I can get to it from the other side (below the car if I've been above it or vice versa) or 2: take the thing that's in the way off.
It can sometimes be astounding how little effort has been made to make repairs easy to do in cars.
The last "repair" I had to do to a car personally was to replace a cabin air filter, which they had hidden in a compartment behind the glove box. All of the instructions I found to do the replacement said to pull up on the clip holding the glove box from falling too far out and put your hand through the roughly 4" gap between the sharp plastic edges and feel roughly two feet in for the filter compartment and do it blind.
It only took four or six screws to remove the glovebox, and doing so made it easy to get in and actually see what you're doing. Easier, faster, less risk of injury.
The other way is probably the key here, you can sometimes get it from the passenger wheel well... but it's parked on a hill in the street, so I'm trying to see if I can get hacky lol. The manifold also has the fuel rail, and while I've done it before when I had a garage I don't want to be spilling gas all over the place on the street in an HOA, so that's probably going to be my "fuck it, mechanic time" point, honestly.
I remember the previous conversation about getting a Miata. Which gen did you end up getting?
NA8! Imagine this, but caked in leaf dust while I can't go out and wash it and someone keeps walking by it and pointing scorn at it. (it's me, I'm the)
You may very well be able to sell the BMW to Carvana without a problem. It's a little unethical, perhaps, but you may be able to disconnect the battery to clear out any warnings in the car's computer and then the guy who checks it out probably won't run it long enough for the car to detect anything and won't really need to use the steering wheel to get it onto the tow truck, so......I guess it's on them for not doing a thorough check before paying you?
Is a top-level submission to Tildes called a “topic” or a “thread”?
I’ve been trying to be consistent about saying “topic” for top-level stuff, with “thread” being a specific conversation chain underneath that.
But when I made the Election Megathread, it didn’t feel right to call it the “Election Megatopic.” So are submissions “threads” just as comment chains are?
Am I overthinking this? Or is this the exact kind of bike-shedding conversation we should have to distract us right now?
Sound off in the comments downthread!
From the docs:
So a post is definitely a "topic" not a "thread". To me, "thread" means a series of comments in reply to each other. Like, my comment right here and your comment above (that I am replying to) are their own thread. @Mendanbar's sibling comment (to mine) also forms its own thread (with yours). However, I think you could also refer to all three of these comments, and future comments under them, as a "thread" as well. So "thread" has varying levels of specificity.
I think "chain" is also interchangeable with "thread", though some people might prefer if "chain" and "thread" meant different levels of specificity. For example, a comment "thread" might be all the comments replying to yours (like mine and @Mendanbar's are), and a comment "chain" might be a specific series of comments/replies in that larger collection.
So the thread might be:
why was that text diagram so hard to align plz halp
But a chain would only be:
Hope that makes sense.
Anyways, I've always thought of "megathread" as meaning "a compilation of what would otherwise be a bunch of individual topics and comments into a greater collection". So it sort of is a mega-thread, it's just also a mega-topic too, and we can only call it one or the other, and "megathread" sounds nicer I think.
Have I shedded enough bikes yet lamo
(yes, "shedded")
I really hope this ends up replacing the "beating a dead horse" phrase.
Yes.
also delighted to see someone use bike-shedding besides me, I delight in explaining this concept to students and coworkers
Oh, God. You've given me flashbacks to my current job! I'm not supposed to think about it when the work day is done!
I think in this case, Megathread == Topic, which is why Megatopic maybe sounded weird.
I like the idea that the top level is called something distinct, but beyond that I'm pretty flexible.
I considered using "topic", but it didn't quite feel right; this is kind of the opposite of a topic, in that it's discussion for everything except a specific subject. In the end, I went for the nostalgia comfort jargon of a thread.
Going forward, I'd vote for "topic" over "megathread"; "mega" implicitly raises the expected participation level, and Tildes gets a lot of small scale discussion.
So this is a a bit of a branch, but I just watched Twitter is not Elon's by hankschannel, and midway through the video he makes a very good case for being precise and not afraid of setting a specific name for something. In this instance he was making the case for not calling "tweets" "posts", because the word "post" is too general.
So I think I agree with @hungariantoast, and we should lean in to the specifics. :)
Coincidentally, I also think this approach is worth adopting with the sandwich debate we had elsewhere in this topic. Sometimes you need to call a hot dog a hot dog! ✊
Lmao that video was great. I need to get back into watching Hank and John's stuff. You should post that video to ~tech or else I will 😉
Done ;)
I'm always unsure about posting videos because I don't want to be that guy who spams videos. Thanks for the nudge.
This is the Bluesky argument. Technically it's posts.
I still prefer skeets.
One thing I've started to do is to work as an election judge. You are busy before polls open all the way through polls closing. Depending on your state and location you may not have a lot of down time and you're doing a very important job! I have also found it fulfilling to see the happy faces of people who have voted. This is the first time I'm on my phone during lunch break.
Fasten zip or zip fasten?
Definitely fasten zip, but the only thing I own with zippers are jeans/pants. I feel like it would be a different answer if I wore other kinds of zippered clothing, e.g. (@Wafik) dresses or boots.
I was so confused at first... But perfectly executed. No notes!
I'd kinda like to know if the answer to this question has a gender bias. Or physiological bias. Or really any other bias.
I just replied to the top comment, but I realised I do it differently depending on the type of clothing (trousers vs. Dresses/skirts)
Ha! Fair question!
I admit, I first heard it in a Babylon 5 episode ("Babylon Squared", I believe. Also grateful and amused that I still remember this. But then I adore B5. In geek code, I was 5+++. Also http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Tests/Geek_Code.html. But I digress...) between two men who had shared a bathroom experience a few hours earlier. But it works for all.
I love the responses that specify trousers and skirts separately!
Fasten zip for sure.
If this question is regarding pants/gown closures, my true preference would be fasten fasten fasten fasten . Those button up jeans in the early 2000s are still my favorite. And then on say, a wedding gown, the sight of the row of 50 white satin/silk buttons does something funny to me. There's also something beautiful about the pankou fasteners on an embroidered cheongsam dress.
I really, really want button jeans to come back in style. I have thrown out many pairs of jeans because the zippers had broken, and buttons are just so much more sturdy. They aren't terribly hard to button back up and they are actually not that much harder to unbutton quickly: depending on the fit you may be able to just tear them all off in one motion!
:3 some teenaged memory was awoken from that last sentence.
I've had the fortune to live near very affordable clothing fixing people ( is there a gender neutral seamstresses that isn't tailor which implies creating rather than minor fixing clothes?) - that seems a shame to throw away otherwise good pants.
Tailor implies alterations but I've seen "sewer" which has downsides.
Yeah, I have both delighted and frustrated a partner with button-front jeans. Depending on how cooperative the jeans wearer is feeling like being, they can be effortless or agonizingly slow to remove.
"Something funny"...
Kink it is then. Relatable.
But button up pants? Sometimes a man has to take a leak!
Fasten then forget to zip and wander around for several hours before realizing you've been wandering around with your fly down at work and nobody's said anything.
One of us!
😅
Fasten zip 99% of the time.
Interesting. What are you zip fastening that 1%?
Tighter pants. I do a lot of manual labor stuff, so relaxed fit is my standard dress, however I have dress clothes, suits, costumes, that aren't as loose and using the zipper first brings the claps closer together for fastening.
On jeans/trousers: fasten zip
On skirts/dresses: I think usually zip then fasten
Trousers: fasten zip 👍👍
I zip then fasten. If a zipper is held closed at the end point, it can be harder to get the zip started because it forces the zipper sides to bulge away from the start point. Admittedly this is not normally a problem with pants for me nowadays. I think it's only likely to happen if they're ill-fitting; I used to pay less attention to whether clothes fit me well or not.
Also though, it can be a problem with other zippers, and it's still a holdover habit from that. Purses, for instance. Cheap ones, especially, have difficulties with getting the zipper started because the endpoint is already closed. I greatly dislike purses and have used them as minimally as possible in my life, so that means I usually went with a cheap one.
Huh. If I may: male, female, other?
Female.
Ok! Makes sense.
If you've got a scientific background, but never really understood quantum physics, this video series is amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PL_UV-wQj1lvVxch-RPQIUOHX88eeNGzVH
I love it because it shows the evolution of ideas and the key experiments that led to the development of quantum mechanics. Also, the author is not shy of showing some math, which is often lacking in other similar vulgarization efforts.
Anyone else just insanely busy with work and using that as a distraction? I have so much to accomplish between now and EOY, and I just had another sensitive situation added to my plate that's monopolizing my time.
Technically yes, but I am using this as a distraction from work. :P
Really, I haven't been in a good mental state to focus on much of anything lately, let alone work.
I have been watching a lot of nature documentaries and uplifting videos on YouTube.
Nature allows me to escape, but see something “real” - like in this Hummingbird Documentary
Human resilience and talent - via, surprisingly, X’s Got Talent, and the like .
Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a hot dog a taco?
I'm curious to see where everyone stands on this debate. Also, feel free to suggest other food taxonomy quandaries.
You probably know the cube rule ?
I'm really glad that writeup included the sandwich alignment chart
But since this is a nonsense thread, here's my favorite alignment chart: bread closure alignment chart
Which brings us to further (useful) nonsense, the best way to close a bag of chips without a clip.
Chaotic Neutral is the most efficient and best method. Fight me.
This has changed my life. Thank you.
I like the spin and tuck, it's so satisfying
Who can turn down an invitation like that :) My problem with that method is that I have to supply my own rubber band and keep up with it. I am personally lawful neutral until the clip is lost (usually about 10 seconds after opening the bread), then I revert to chaotic neutral.
You're welcome!
I believe this is my actual stance as well, but the clip gets lost so fast around my house (kids) that I spend nearly all my time in chaotic neutral. I guess that makes me more of a lazy lawful neutral. :D
Edit: I also just discovered that my wife is a neutral evil bread bagger. She just made a sandwich and tucked the bag neatly under while the original clip was sitting right there in plain sight on the counter!
My wife and her family are all chaotic evil in this respect. I don't understand it all. Like, didn't you have bugs in your house growing up? Do you love stale bread and cereal? It's madness.
Does she come from a large family? Sometimes the bread doesn't last long enough to really get stale (and stale buns were always garlic bread fodder for us)
Not especially large. My (highly biased) opinion is that deep down they just love chaos.
Some people, world burn, yada yada
This is the kind of distraction I was hoping for! I have heard most of these arguments, but never so nicely (and entertainingly) collected.
I can't bring myself to classify a slice of pie (taco??) differently than a whole pie (calzone?) though.
Thanks for sharing. :)
I'll start. My personal belief is that hot dogs and tacos are different forms of "sandwich", and burrito is a completely separate thing. I don't believe something that is completely enclosed can be a sandwich anymore.
I'm with you on this: a sandwich is some kind of carb thing with things layered on top. Hotdogs and tacos are sandwiches. Because you start with flat/ flattened carb surfaces then you lay a hotdog Weiner or toppies on top.
Pizzas are a sort of open faced sandwich: flat carb with things laid on top. Even if on eats it rolled up it's a sandwich. Burgers are also sandwiches because the top bread is optional. Stuff on a cracker are sandwiches. Mini sandwiches if they're hors d'oeuvre.
Hmm....pies, tarts, quiches are not sandwiches though, but a cousin. The concave nature of the carb sets it apart: things are going in, not on top. It always makes me feel weird to hear people call non deep dish pizzas pies.
But there are burritos with opened ends....is that no longer completely enclosed? To me, burritos are a sort of "stuffed breads" and hence not a sandwich. They're in the same broad family as Chinese steamed buns and dumplings and cannoli pasta.
Whoa whoa whoa hold up. This is the first time I've seen this idea. I've seen burgers with top and bottom bun, burgers with top/middle/bottom bun, and bunless burgers, but I've never seen an open-faced burger. Where is this done? How do you eat it?
Personally I feel that open-faced sandwiches are barely in the category of sandwich, and they must specifically be a slice of bread with typical sandwich filling on top that you eat with fork and knife (typically heated, and also gravy or something is often poured over). Otherwise, a piece of load-bearing carb with stuff on it is a flatbread or something. Sandwiches must have a top layer that matches the bottom layer, normally.
Bunless burgers are an abomination unto nuggin....that's just a Pattie. ("Bun"-less lettuce burger okay.)
:/ big macs are triple breaded....if you're a poor child with a poor sibling then one gets two carbs and one gets an open faced burger/sandwich
If sandwiches need a matching carb for you , do Subs like Bahn mi count?
Usually if I see a "bunless burger" that just means it's wrapped in lettuce, which is ok by me (but no longer a sandwich). I've attempted a couple of times to eat a burger patty with burger toppings over a lettuce salad and you're right -- that's just sad.
Oh dear, I've never heard of this Big Mac sharing. :-(
Things on sub rolls and baguettes absolutely count, even though they're still attached on one side. I go back and forth on whether this means a hot dog also counts, but I think I've come down on a no for that -- and things like gyros just take it too far. I think the determining factor is if you say "hand me that sandwich" and the requestee either knows what you're talking about or goes "what are you talking about, there's just a hot dog there".
Yeah what about eggs benedict? I don't think I would call that a sandwich.
Biscuits and gravy? Also not a sandwich in my mind.
(And now I'm hungry for breakfast food...)
Yeah, see that's why burritos have to be separate to me. It's a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of other things and then next thing you know you are waking up to a world where Ravioli is a sandwich. Ridiculous!
Or worse yet, keep it consistent while defining pizza comes
I consider burritos and tacos to be their own, semi-related things. I can't back this up with any evidence or actual analysis, I'm just going completely off of vibes and how my Mexican in-laws treat them.
Clearly a burrito is a small donkey.
In all seriousness, though, I absolutely hate this arguement. Words have connotation as well as denotation and taxonomies are imaginary structures we use to make sense of things. To consider a burrito a sandwich is to force ideas that are not equivalent into a taxonomy to no benefit.
Here's some thoughts that might clarify what I mean. Is a tortilla bread? No. Is a tortilla a type of bread? Yes, in that it's a mixture of a grain and water that has been cooked to remove moisture. But tortllas are very different from bread; they are unleavened, so have very little air inside of them; they are made one by one and not as a loaf that gets cut apart. They also come from very different cultures with very different histories.
The most simple way to understand why a burrito is not a sandwich is the gimme test. If a person says "Gimme a sandwich" and you give them a burrito, they will be disappointed or upset. The same thing happens if they say "gimme bread" and you give them a tortilla.
Another way to think about the issue is by reducing the concepts to their essences. The thing that makes a burrito a burrito is that it's fillings wrapped in a tortilla, and the thing that makes a sandwich a sandwich is that it's fillings between bread. You cannot take burrito fillings and put it between bread and still call it a burrito, and you can't put sandwich fillings in a tortilla and call it a sandwich. Heck, I found it difficult to use the words "burrito" and "sandwich" in the correct order when writing that last sentence because it seemed so alien.
That being said... this is assuming a specific cultural-lingual understanding. Different parts of the world and different languages and cultures will have different ways to classify things.
I would say that if I asked for a sandwich but got a burrito, I would be neither disappointed or upset. The same would not be true the other direction, though.
I like the gimme test idea. As a corollary, If someone asked me if I wanted a sandwich when I was really craving a hot dog, I think I would say "no". So while I think my original assertion that hot dogs are in the sandwich "family" is still true, I can't really say that a hot dog is a sandwich. Or at least they aren't sufficiently closely related to be interchangeable in my mind. Interesting.
What about open-faced “sandwiches” aka one piece of bread “sandwiches” ? And if they are considered sandwiches, then what about pizza ?
How about “melts” vs. grilled cheese ?
Sort of related, toast and
“Bread” “sandwiches” ?
My friends and I plan to get together tonight and ignore the results by watching some punchy/kicky action movies to distract us. The results will be there in the morning.
Anyone have some good suggestions for recent action films?
Recent ? No. But if you’re taking suggestions:
Kung Fu Hustle - Stephen Chow
Ip Man(2008) - Wilson Yip
A lot of classic Jackie Chan films are actually quite good for action as well as old Jet Li.
Hope you find some respite in these films during these trying times.
Just watch any Stephen Chow movie. Most of them have a degree of action in them, even when they're not strictly action movies.
The Fall Guy was a great watch (if you haven't seen it yet).
I have been on a martial arts kick lately. I wrote about Blue Eyed Samurai here. and the Warrior series here. I think the Warrior series is older, but it is new to Netflix.
Not recent by any means, but if you want a serious disconnection from reality, I recommend Bloodsport.
Good & Recent:
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Good:
Riders of Justice (2020)
Recent:
The Last Stop in Yuma County (2023)
The Fall Guy (2024)
Knox Goes Away (2023)
Neither particularly good nor particularly recent, but worth a mention:
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)
The Suicide Squad (2021)
I would try looking into getting into foreign action movies! There are some pretty awesome films coming out of india (have you seen RRR? People were going crazy for it when it came out). I personally love myself some Hong Kong/Chinese action movies, AKA wuxia; they tend to be strong on the drama which makes them very fulfilling even when you're not specifically looking for action films. I really like most of the films by Zhang Yimou, but do yourself a favor and skip The Great Wall no matter how much you might like Matt Damon; it's very bad.
If you haven't started it yet, Blue Eye Samurai is a lush animated festival of bloody sword action.
This is something that would probably belong on the music thread, but for you Spotify users, what do you think your top song of the year is gonna be for wrapped?
I have it down to a few contenders:
Espresso - Sabrina Carpenter
Chihiro - Billie Eillish
Lunch - Billie Eillish
Guess - Charli XCX ft Billie Eillish
Aquamarine - Addison Rae
I'm not sure, but I think there's a good chance it will be something that I never deliberately played and it just forced onto playlists it generated.
Sadly, stats.fm appears to be down right now, so I can't check what it says.
Oh yeah I’ve had that happen. It’s quite annoying, happened to me last year when Tame Impala’s Borderline was my number 1. Although I would always listen to the song in full every time.
I was unaware of stats.fm so thanks for that!
My guess at my #1 was confirmed, it is:
There is a soaring vocal note at the end that just resonates so good, it will often trigger an ASMR with me.
Myles Kennedy is truly one of the greatest rock vocalists of our time.
My guess at my #1 was right, too, but I won't post it because it was one of Sufjan Stevens' more popular and accessible songs rather than one of his other ones 😭
But it also lists songs that I can't even remember listening all the way through ever--and it does the rankings by listening time--so I don't really know what's going on. My #2 song for October is one I only remember listening to once, not 9 times, so I'm just totally confused. It also says that I listened to a 25-minute song 13 times, which feels like a lot but could theoretically be accurate. Probably not in its entirety.
Edit: but now I see that it says I've listened to that song 8 times this week and apparently some other song I don't even recognize 4 times, so something is up.
So I've been listening to "Witchy" by KAYTRANADA ft. Childish Gambino, a bunch lately. But that's only in the last week or so. Suppose there's still time for it to be up on my top plays though. Same with "Shy Dancer - 2020" by Galimatias.
"Je pense a toi" or "Plaisir" both by Lewis OfMan are candidates. I think earlier in the year I listened to a bunch of "Feels Right" by Dune and Darius. And anything on Jungle's last album, "Volcano."
Links are because I think the MVs are great, too. Like, go watch every video on that Jungle album. The dancing is soooo good.
I use youtube music instead of spotify. Recently it told me I was a "top fan" of Meg Myers.
It would probably be Great Good Fine Ok's excellent cover of "I Belong In Your Arms" (originally by Chairlift) if only that were available on Spotify. :/
Does anyone want to talk about the college football rankings that come out this evening? They will be released about eight hours from when I made this comment, right as the first polls are closing for that other vote, so the timing will be good for a distraction.
I'm a programmer, and if work isn't enough I'm going to try to think about a little programming project. Current best candidate is a networked chess clock. Like one where two players play, but each of them is seeing their time on their own phone and tapping on their own phone, which stops their clock and starts their opponent's.
All my apps of the past year have largely been offline and native. I've been trying to avoid web dev after many years of doing it. But this seems like it might be a place that needs a little bit of tasteful server programming.
All my apps of the past year have been built on Lua and LÖVE without any additional frameworks and a jaundiced, skeptical eye towards every new library I'm tempted to depend on. And I've never built a server this way.
I guess the first question is what should the URLs look like? And that leads to the zeroth question of how much do I care to protect against cheating? I think the answer is not very, I'd just like to be robust to small amounts of network lag. Initial sketch:
/new?time=...&increment=...(should return a game id)/join?id=.../press?id=...&color=...&time=...(stops one clock and starts the other, applying any increments as needed)/time?id=...returns the current state of timeThis might suffice. And it'll leave open the option to try to estimate network lag (difference between time of receipt and current time on server) and adjust clocks based on it.
Maybe you could use something like serverless RTC to get the two browsers talking directly.
Interesting. I ended up playing with val.town for simple endpoints without any operational work that I can also share the code for in a way that anyone can trust is actually what is running on the server (since I'm not affiliated with val.town), and that anyone can easily spin up their own copies of.
Val.town looks neat. It's amazing what resources are just floating around are out there. If you end up wanting something else free and similar, you could look at Cloudflare workers and pages. If you set up the GitHub project with the wrangler.toml config then similarly anyone could run it by forking the repo and connecting it to their Cloudflare account, which has a nice free tier.
Trust is an interesting problem. If you assume the other client is malicious, I think you'd have to assume that they are gaming the latency estimation to mess with the timing as well.
But I think you would have to count the network delay against the player whose press is incoming. You can't give that time to the other player, so if you just credit it to the first player's remaining time (i.e. reduce the amount deducted from the first player by the estimated latency), it would artificially prolong the game.
I tried to find a timing spec for chess clocks and couldn't find anything beyond this in the FIDE rules:
One FIDE certified timer spec sheet said that it would lose no more than one second in an hour. If you're accumulating 100ms of delay over 80 turns, that would add 8 seconds to the game.
Actually the hardest thing might be determining the order of events when the buttons are pressed very close together as is the case at the end of a match.
Does any of this matter? (Give a massive shrug) Regardless, it's an interesting programming problem.
Well you aren't making an enterprise API but you can decide on a little more organization in your URLs and make it RESTful to take advantage of http verbs etc. Also I'm using path parameters instead of query parameters just because.
Any time you are starting a new game maybe you should use POST
And maybe you can use PUT if you need to update the time for a game
And maybe you can use GET to obtain the state of a game
And maybe DELETE to end a game if that makes sense.
This is a small one, but perhaps a nice distraction. I've never seen anyone as genuinely happy as Joe Lycett is when he makes this throw to Rachel Riley. The whole video is funny if you like 8 out of 10 cats, but if you're not familiar, probably easier to watch a whole episode for context.
I could listen to Richard Ayoade banter all day long. 😂
I
could losehave lost hours on YouTube watching clips from 8 out of 10 cats and Would I Lie to You?. I especially love the interactions between Bob Mortimer and David MitchellI've searched this a few times but can't really find an answer no matter how I try to reword it:
Is it feasible to radiate all heat from my computer out of my home through a window, whether by a custom loop or some rednecked duct venting solution, or is that incompatible with thermodynamics? I'm constantly using 100% of my system's resources and the warmth in the immediate vicinity makes me physically uncomfortable. It gets to the point where I consider moving my PC to the least used room in my home and running a 50-100ft active powered HDMI cable through the walls so I don't have to be near it.
I'm not an HVAC engineer, but I would think you could use the property of "hot air rising" to vent heat out the top of a case to a window at higher elevation. I'm not sure how that would play with condensation though. You wouldn't want to introduce too much moisture to your case ecosystem.
I suppose it's theoretically viable. Heat transfers due conduction, convection or radiation. Convection well, to go truly full redneck: effectively making a tent around your computer, and then using a fan to blow it outside of the window I suppose it could work. For reference, this is a shitty MS Paint sketch on how that'd look like:
https://i.ibb.co/jwwrwCx/Sketch-Computer-Tent.png
You would of course need to make sure that cables will go in and out, which I would do by wrapping them together so that they're guaranteed to come out of the same point - and using extension cords for power cable.
Make sure that the fan is covered by a fence or something so that the 'tent' or whatever it is you're using doesn't get wrapped upon it. You may also want to use something with a zipper to be able to reach for the power button and/or USB ports easily enough.
The only other form of heat transfer that's applicable here is conduction but that's more of your enemy. You'll want to have the outside material to be something that doesn't conduct heat well. Such as, you guessed it, the materials that tents often are made of.
This all said though, it is a rednecked solution so something more proper would obviously be better.
Edit: Also, keep in mind, you're also a furnace of 37 degrees Celcius. So another window open would still be important.
Does this solution potentially suffer from condensation from the outside as @Mendanbar mentioned, or does the outward air flow/pressure "counteract" that? That's my main issue with the obvious solutions and why I wonder if it would have to be an AIO / water cooled loop as opposed to a direct air funnel between my system and the outside environment.
It may, depending on the climate where you live. Also, if the air flows constantly and thus the temperature remains roughly equal it could prevent condensation but that'd be dependent on how effective it convects the hot air away. To which, I have no idea - you'd have to try it out in practice or talk to someone who tried this before.
If you have really no other choice you could try it but again, a more properly engineered system rather than something cooked up by a tired physicist and MS Paint would be the better alternative.
Yes you can do this with liquid cooling. All the hardware is available from different manufacturers, designing, routing, and installing it would be the challenges. I assume a GPU is a big part of your power draw? In my experience water cooling a graphics card is the riskiest aspect.
To avoid condensation/bugs coming in from the outside, you could try a physical break in the cooling system. Something like putting a chimney sort of thing on your computer (to get some stack effect going), that lets out next to a big window fan.
A couple little things that might help some, depending on your hardware, is undervolting or setting total power limits. IIRC, most chips these days can be undervolted, as they default to something that'll still work even on the shoddy chips. Setting some limits on total power draw can also have disproportionate results; IIRC I've heard that these days chip makers, having hit a wall on transistor size, have turned to aggressively running more power through the chips instead, to the point that sometimes you can actually get a small performance boost by reducing TDP as they're overheating themselves a bit.
You actually don't need to use liquid cooling (kinda-sorta). You could also do this with heat pipes!
In the dark ages of liquid computer cooling, it was actually relatively common to use circulators that were external to the case. That being said, it's not a terribly good idea to try to do this without a good amount of knowledge of fluid mechanics. Having a long loop means significantly more "head" - the amount of force the pump will need to overcome. That head will vary depending on the length, the number of angles the fluid will have to pass through, and the amount of gravity it will have to overcome, and you will have to match a pump to the amount of head to overcome. If you size it too weak it will not cool the PC, and if you size it too powerful you run the risk of having the pressure blow a fitting and ruining your PC.
Either way, you'll need to more-or-less keep your PC in one place permanantly. So it's kind of a bad idea to do that. It would be much simpler and more reliable to use the PC remotely if you can.
Does your room not have a window? Is it hot outside so you cant open the window? I guess you wouldn't need to expel said heat of it was cold outside since you'd save on heating energy.
Can you use a fan?
For the strategy gamers out there, Age of Wonders 4 is dropping another patch/dlc today. Even the base game has changed drastically since launch, and this one has a major rework to heroes as free content, so if you've already got the game I highly recommend checking it out.
Now that Chocolate is an international star he gets to be in my office with the AC!
Hello again Chocolate, I love you.