Also the British custom of asking if you’re alright which must adhere to the following script:
“Hiya, you alright?”
“Oh yeah not so bad. You?”
“Yeah not bad.”
You can deviate slightly (“can’t complain”) but under no circumstances must you discuss whether you’re actually alright or not. I’ve genuinely seen this exchange happen at a funeral, with the widower being like “Yeah not so bad…”
The word ‘dog’ is interesting because it essentially has no etymology. It has no known cognates in English/Germanic/other Indo-European languages. It first showed up in Old English as dogca, referring to some sort of mastiff, but other than that nobody really has any idea at all where it came from.
It’s such a shame because I really like Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, but yeah her whole era was so badly written. She’s doing Big Finish now though so hopefully she’ll get some good stuff to work with there.
The 15th Doctor era is… odd. No spoilers but RTD is back as lead writer but he makes some… decisions lol. Including putting one of the worst episodes the show has ever had right at the start of 15’s run. You’ll probably know it when it happens! But then inbetween the oddness there are some genuinely really good single episodes too IMO.
I live in Canada and about once a year Trump remembers we exist and talks about invading us. Quebec and Alberta both keep talking about separating. I don’t know where Canada will be in five years time, let alone myself.
The compensation thing drives me nuts too. It’s like if nothing in the store had a price on it and when you went up to the checkout they were like “What would you expect to pay for a can of peas?” Just tell me the number and I’ll either agree or not!
Doctor Who has a bunch of them!
One of the big recent ones was the Timeless Child plotline. For people unfamiliar with the show, the basic premise is that the main character, the Doctor, is an alien who’s species can regenerate themselves when they’re about to die which saves them but they become a physically different person. This was invented back in the 60s so they could change out the lead actor, William Hartnell, when he got too old to continue in the role and it’s become a core part of the show. We’re now on about the 15-16th Doctor, although that number is a bit contentious too for reasons I won’t go into here because that’s a whole other thing.
A few years back there was a plotline where it was revealed that the Doctor isn’t just a regular alien, they’re something called the Timeless Child that just appeared in our universe from somewhere unknown, and was the one that gave their whole species the ability to regenerate themselves. This was widely hated, as it not only changed the Doctor from a sort of wandering hobo into a Super Special Chosen One, but it also directly showed that William Hartnell wasn’t the first Doctor, there had been probably dozens of other ones before him that had just never been mentioned until now.
The internal debates that I’ve seen usually aren’t people debating whether this was a good idea or not, they’re mostly about the best way to retcon it away and never speak of it again lol.
I am team…
Nano
Arch
Systemd, I don’t see what the fuss is about that TBH
I don’t wanna even touch that one lol
I like the carousel kind of things like Karousel or Niri
Gecko (Librewolf, Floorp etc.)
Zsh
But yeah I agree, everyone should just do what they want. Having lots of options is one of my favourite things about Linux.
We had a little pirate movie ring going in college - this was in the UK in the 90s and there were certain films that were banned that you couldn’t get, like Clockwork Orange, The Exorcist, Reservoir Dogs etc. Someone somehow had access to Swedish satellite TV and so had shitty VHS copies of them with Swedish subtitles, so we had a counterfeit ring going that passed around 3rd-generation VHS copies of all these banned films.
Then DVD arrived and all these movies were just released on regular DVD so it destroyed our whole operation lol. The Exorcist was the first movie I bought on DVD.
We didn’t really have internet access when we were at school but we’d coordinate days where someone would bring in the floppy disks for something you wanted and you’d bring in a stack of blank disks and copy them on the school computers lol.
I have a 2TB external drive that I got for under $200 a couple of years ago, and the other day I saw the exact same drive in Staples for $650. It’s fucking wild out there.
My SO and I just call it “Useless Internet Day”, where there’s no point going online or reading the news because half of it is made up. Actually in reality it’s like 3-4 days, because sometimes things stick around in the feed/get reposted by people who fell for it etc.
I actually find it pretty helpful for tech support stuff. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s usually at least in the right general area and TBH it beats going through endless forums where the answer is buried among 8 pages of people bickering about nothing, or those ones where someone has your exact problem and then replies “nm I fixed it” and doesn’t say what they did.
I tried out a game/demo thing that was a tester for AI NPC dialogue. I asked an NPC to tell me about himself and he replied that he could not connect to server lol
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.
I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.
From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings –
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
We could make Sundress and Propeller Hat the standard summer outfit, but we have failed as a society.
The Magnificent 7 and A Fistful of Dollars are just Seven Samurai and Yojimbo but westerns.
Architecture is the other one that worries me. I don’t like the idea of unknowingly walking around in a building that was designed by AI. I work with AI and it can’t even be trusted to write a blog post correctly, let alone design a building that’s safe. And I know if I’m thinking of that now, it means someone else has already thought of and attempted it at least 6 months ago.
As someone with a degree in the arts, I’m pretty sure that almost all art as a career is under threat from AI. Sure, AI can’t match the human experience and expressiveness needed for really great art, but that’s not what most artists do to earn a living. And the vast majority of the people who traditionally pay for artists to make stuff for them really don’t care at all. Now they can get Grok to fart out a logo or a poster in 15 seconds and not have to talk to an artist, they’re all set.
I know someone whose dad used to work as an international courier, and at some point (I think in the late 70s/early 80s IIRC) he ended up in the situation where he was in Japan for a week, with nothing to do, and his hotel room paid for by his employers. He didn’t leave the hotel the entire week, just stayed inside the entire time ordering room service and… making a point of not seeing Japan, I guess.
I’m reasonably sure that’s what’s happening with resumes largely now. People get AI to write their resumes because it’s a boring task to do, and then employers are using AI to read the resumes they receive and provide summaries. So it’s pretty much just AIs talking to each other about who should get the job.
I use a yubikey on my laptop, but I use it to make it even harder to log in. It’s set to challenge-response so you have to have the key in and enter a password to unlock LUKS. Bit overkill but it was more just to see if I could do it lol