Random Dent

I’m up to Wyrd Sisters!

One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won’t open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)

Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:

The man = der mann (masculine)

The woman = die frau (feminine)

The boy = der junge (masculine)

The girl = das mädchen (neutral)

Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol

Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.

I’m working on that currently. I think I’m on book 6, so only about 40 more to go lol

Mine is Siamese Dream

I was looking at IVPN. I still have some research to do but I haven’t found anything sketchy on them so far.

Here’s a piece of the old knowledge: if you had a CRT monitor and a chair with rubber/insulated feet, you could lift your feet off the floor, spread one hand as wide as you could across the screen, turn the monitor off, and you could zap someone with an electric shock with your other hand.

You could also daisy-chain it across multiple people, so if you could rope 4-5 people into helping you then you could all hold hands and zap someone on the other side of the room if they weren’t paying attention.

That seems like a really good way to get sick lol

N o t i f i c a t i o n s .

My phone going ping because someone outside of work wants something. Slack going ping because someone at work wants something. Windows going ding because of some bullshit and I’m not allowed to use Linux for work. Some other thing going ping in the distance because it’s not connected to the internet, or it is connected to the internet and has an update.

Why did we build this world for ourselves

This makes me feel old lol. I used to pirate VHS tapes and games on floppy disk, where you’d also get a photocopy of the pages of the manual that had the random words that the copy protection asked for. Heck, when I was I kid I remember my dad having pirated Spectrum/Commodore games that were copied from an audio cassette.

Especially if you have one of those friends who invites you to do something, and then they “just have to do a thing real quick” and you end up going with them while they do a bunch of random chores in various places.

One time in high school I was supposed to go to a movie with a friend of mine, she was supposed to come to my place first and we’d leave from there. She never showed up (and it was the 90s so no texting) so I was just like “okay” and went about my day. Two days later she randomly showed up at my house and asked if I wanted to go. I said no because she was two entire days late and now I’m doing something else, and she got annoyed at me for not dropping everything and going.

I do not understand this.

One of the supermarkets near me did that for a while (in Canada) and it was great. I don’t think they do it anymore though.

I don’t have kids so this might not work for you, but for me getting a nice pair of noise cancelling headphones has been a real godsend. They were a little pricey but being able to just have a silent bubble you can turn on whenever you want is great. They also completely cancel out the background sound of being on a plane.

You can apparently 3D print a record, although it’s almost certainly not worth the effort.

Still a bigger pile of gold than I have now lol

If they’re worth about the same, I’ll still take the gold then. My logic being: 1. I’m not American. 2. I just think having a big pile of gold is cooler.

‘Jam’ can mean a fruit preserve, to play music, a stuck door, traffic, to cram something into something else, a tense situation, or to block a radio signal. All spelled and pronounced the same.

I also got mine refurbished, so that way Google presumably doesn’t get any money from me, at least not directly.