Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
Yeah, apparently he decided to go hard alt-right at some point. Apparently with nothing better to do now that he’s retired from Minecraft development, he amuses himself by posting racist, anti-LGBT, and QAnon horseshit.
So much so that Microsoft actually removed him from the credits.
Well, “Minecraft 2” was arguably Minecraft: Dungeons which as we all know categorically failed to set the world on fire.
Terraia and No Man’s Sky certainly leap to mind.
Water heaters are also stupidly easy to install.
For some reason, in my locale you have to apply for a permit to replace a water heater. I strongly suspect the compliance rate with this asinine scheme is very near to zero. (For anyone reading this, yes, I will totally pay the state for the privilege of installing my own water heater in my own home when I switch mine to hybrid. Scout’s honor.)
$0.50 per kWh is absurd. Where we are, the power company charges $0.1065 on peak and $0.1001 off. (As in, about a dime.)
Note that this is still about 33% more than at the start of the pandemic. We were around $0.07 per kWh prior to 2021.
The game was, you’d put one kid in the middle and then everybody else would do their level best to spin the damn thing so fast it would either drill into the Earth’s mantle or take off like a helicopter.
Ceramics are a broad class of materials with a wide spectrum of properties. There is no one singular material called “ceramic.” Ceramic materials can be made smooth and slippery or textured and grippy, and everywhere in between.
And for those of you not in the know…
Gradius, right? Konami’s many-sequeled, side scrolling shoot-'em-up game? They made a spin off series called Parodius (parody + Gradius, geddit?) and it was utterly bizarre.
I’ll just leave this here as an example:
This is the 2nd level boss from Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, one of the SNES incarnations. You are a cat wielding a loaf of bread as a shield, fighting not just a kaiju sized schoolgirl wearing bunny ears, but two of them, one standing on the other’s shoulders. Who attack you by throwing angry Moai heads at you riding on paper airplanes and stuff. This is after you fought your way through a shmup stage that’s a Japanese high school based on Konami’s visual novel property, Tokimeki Memorial.
In the first level you ultimately fight your way through a disco, blasting at, among other things, multicolored penguins who are wearing afro wigs. While a SNES chiptune rendition of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way I Like It” plays in the background. The boss of that stage is an opera singing panda. I promise you I am not making this up.
Just… Just look at this.
It did. That may have influenced the naming convention. The LaserDisc was actually originally conceived as the “DiscoVision.” And if that name isn’t a veritable time capsule of its era, I don’t know what is.
When deciding what to do, the order of trumps is legal, then prudent, then right. Do what is legal unless what is prudent is illegal, then do what is prudent. If doing what is right is neither prudent or legal, do it anyway because it’s right.
Never start fights with people. Always be prepared to finish a fight someone else starts with you, quickly, without posturing, hesitation, or mercy. Regardless of their size, shape, color, creed, or uniform, bullies can never be allowed to win.
When solving a problem, always start with the simplest possibility first.
Never lend anyone: Your truck, your pen, your chainsaw, or your wife. No matter what, they’re going to do something with them that you’re not going to like.
You can never have too many pens, flashlights, knives, or bullets.
“-Ette” is a common diminutive used to imply that something is a smaller version of something else. Like many things, we nicked it from the French.
Cigarette, a little cigar. Featurette, a short feature. Novelette, a miniature novel. Etc.
So, diskette, a little disk. Quite separate from the ones spinning in your company’s mainframe at the time. Those ones were two feet in diameter locked in a steel cabinet that weighs two tons. This one can fit in your shirt pocket. You get the idea.
But they’re still referred to as “drives” when arguably they aren’t that anymore, either. It’s really tough to ditch a moniker sometimes.
At its root this was originally a British vs. American English thing. However, the spelling of “disc” with a C has been used specifically as the trade name of various brands including both the throwable and optical media varieties, which have since become genericized trademarks.
For the optical media side of things, the name was coined by Phillips while they were consorting with Sony to develop the standard and named it the “Compact Disc” to compliment their already existing “Compact Cassette” product. They developed an official logo for the format which spelled it “disc.” That’s been with us ever since.
Volumes of computer storage are now colloquially referred to as “disks” because A) a significant majority of the early computer development milieu in general happened in America where we, or at least IBM, spell it with a K, and B) for a very long time, that’s exactly what they were. Tape and magnetic core memory and wire loop memory were all early developments that ultimately gave way to the longstanding popularity of magnetic platter/disk fixed storage… With some exception granted to tape, which hung around for a very long time but definitely was not a random access storage medium suitable for general purpose applications whereas disks were. It’s probably pure happenstance that the dominant non-fixed computer storage media also wound up being disk shaped, namely the various sizes and types of floppy disks. Computers handle linear tape based storage and random access disk based storage very differently, and nowadays random access permanent storage still has the “disk” moniker stuck to it even though it’s now likely to be solid state.
As a generalized descriptor of a flat circular object, either “disk” or “disc” is appropriate but which is preferred seems to be largely depending on which continent you’re from. The root of the word is indeed the Greek “discus,” as in the object yeeted across the playing field by Olympic contestants.
I guarantee you the bibles in question are provided by some local (private) fundamentalist organization. There’s no way the prison is spending its own money on that. So then you’ve got to look at who is the biggest group of religion-peddlers to find your most likely source.
In America at present, the various Christianity-adjacent sects are basically the only religious groups out proselytizing in any significant numbers. I suspect that compared to the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Aventists, and assorted Evangelical/Baptist types, everyone else is basically just a rounding error.
If experience is any judge, plenty of dudes go into prison and come out Muslim. So Allah must still find them somehow.
The Matrix was basically 2000’s. It’s a 90’s movie only a technicality; it was released to theaters in early 1999 and the home release was in May of '99. However, going into the 1999 -> 2000 holiday season the presence of that movie in particular on disc sold a lot of DVD players and Playstation 2’s.
Y2K or thereabouts is precisely when a lot of people experienced the first Matrix.
The way you’ve described it is basically how it would have to work.
Various ad-blocking detection technologies basically boil down to loading some element on the page and then querying for it during/after rendering to see if it’s still there. This could be combined with an AJAX call to load the actual content, which is how all those annoying sites work that pop a nag up in your face if you’re running uBlock or whatever. And even then you don’t get the content even if you subsequently block the nag notice.
A truly undetectable adblocker would still have to pull down and load all the ad content and render it somewhere (invisibly in the background, presumably) and then serve a second cut down version of that page with the ad elements not rendered.
Edit to add: This would be somewhat detrimental to the user, because it would by necessity not stop the types of tracking that are typically built into served ads. Current adblockers (like uBlock Origin) also by default also block various advertisers’ nonsense like cross-site tracking cookies and tracking pixels, etc.
Isn’t this basically just how World War Hulk started?
That certainly ended well.
I’m at 7 at the moment…
Matthew 24:36.
RTFM, noob.