Well, there is a ring involved and you could probably get aliens to come and do something with it, but it’s not the same thing at all.

So it has a name! If I knew that, I had long forgotten. Thank you!

But if you do decide to do this, and I should stress that this does not constitute a suggestion to do so, make sure to go out in clearly identifiable footwear and clothing and with no head or face coverings so that the camera can get a good look at you before it dies, you filthy, filthy vandal.

Is Cooper (I presume that’s the youngest) old enough to be past the “potato with arms and legs” stage?

For those that don’t know, basically there’s a stage where kids don’t draw bodies at all, because they don’t fully register the interactions with that part of their parent (or something like that), and so a portrait of a parent tends to end up a head with stick limbs.

I don’t specifically remember doing this myself, but I saw younger kids doing that when I was a child and have since learned that it’s a developmental phenomenon.

Anyway, Cooper might be advanced for his age. That is, assuming any of this is even relevant for anthropomorphic cartoon cats.

There was this one story that lives rent free in my head, which is terrifying when you realise. And this comment might pass it on, so read on at your peril.

It might be a Steven Baxter story. I know I read it in an anthology, but it could have been a different author.

The story is about a person who lives in a world where it’s illegal to not use augmented reality devices every moment of every day, to ensure that you’re seeing enough ads and behaving like a law-abiding citizen.

The protagonist is in charge of an investigation into people who deliberately live outside this system and seek to disrupt it. One of these people may or may not be the protagonist’s son.

The story meanders for a bit but the investigation is hampered by the very technology it seeks to enforce, so the protagonist insists that their augmented reality device temporarily disable everything.

It claims to have done so, but it soon becomes clear that augmentation is still going on.

So the protagonist invokes an override to turn it all off.

The speech bubble has “Every time I read a shitty dreadful news”.

There may be some confusion because I took out the adjectives, which don’t change the surrounding grammar at all. They change the semantics somewhat, but this is about grammar, not the meaning. This then reduces to “Every time I read a news”, and then further to the particle “a news”, which, again, does not change the original syntax of that fragment.

My point was that such usage is invalid in the standard varieties of English I’m aware of.

I are of understanding what the author intended, just like you understood the start of this sentence, but it doesn’t mean that it’s standard form. Which, ultimately, is why I asked if there’s a form of English where it is correct.

(Tangentially, I do need to work on softening the way I word my comments. That’s an ongoing struggle.)

Which dialect of English uses “news” as a discrete noun like this? “A news” is ungrammatical to me, so this is either wrong or an innovation I’m not aware of.

What is weird here, either way, is how “new” is generally an adjective, but “news” is a specific plural noun form of it, suggesting that “a new” ought to be grammatical, and indeed perhaps a conjugation for this comic, but that doesn’t sound right to me either.

“A news item” would be the most correct here, I think.

See also: goods.

Something somewhere was definitely doing the conversion for you, but it could have been your editor, the compiler or something in between like a C preprocessor directive getting loaded in by your configuration.

All things considered, I think I preferred “This kills the crab”.

So I have a few.

Staying in bed of a morning until I can’t bear to remain there. Usually my body craves getting up one way or another before my brain does on account of less than stellar mental health. (Which also explains why there aren’t any external reasons to get up. I can serve no masters in this state.)

Sugar on my otherwise relatively sugarless cereal. It’s the cheapest I can get and the laws here have taken most of the fun out of cereal anyway, so there’s not much to enjoy in them at all otherwise.

Even having cereal come to that since I’m rarely up what I consider early enough to have it.

Spending all day on the computer Edit: doing what I want, except for food and bathroom visits.

Going to bed at an hour that makes sense relative to my usual morning. Using the electric blanket.

You might ask if any of these are guilty, but yes, yes they are. There is constant pressure from society to be an early riser who works for someone else from 8 till 8, six days a week, then spends whatever’s left looking after house and home, and if you fail at any of that, you’re judged. And I feel every bit of it from without as well as within.

As a non-synaesthete, I dug around in my brain until the answer “white” came to me.

The reason: I am old and Control+E on a Commodore 64 (and some of its close relatives) would turn the cursor and text colour to white. It was the only Control+<letter> that affected a colour change too.

If you’re talking about applications that can be made to act how their namesake predecessors did 30 years ago, sure. The Unix mindset is all about that.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that anything on a modern Unix-like system hasn’t been modified, patched or rewritten from scratch at some point in the last 30 years. More than once. Even /bin/false has a changelog.

Cook? Never. Unless you count a) putting something ready-made into a microwave or b) pouring hot water on noodles. And both are somewhat rare in my diet due to poor cost to nutrition ratio.

Cold foods don’t seem to have the same repetition problem for me, so for those it’s all the prep I can muster before the despair sets in.

haha forking processes and killing children

wait

There are instances where a creditor will have a claim on the deceased’s estate. For example, mortgages and car loans generally aren’t written off when the named bill payer dies. (Edit: late correction. Payee is the creditor. Payer is the debtor. I think most people understood what I meant even with the wrong word. D’oh)

Other things will depend on how hard the creditor is willing to try to get the money they’d otherwise lose.

In a way we might hope that this man, placing rocks in an infinite desert for eternity, might notice if a false vacuum decays into true vacuum. The handful of misplaced rocks, perhaps, that entail an obvious, nullifying cascade such that more and more rock zeros appear in subsequent rows from the mistake, the true vacuum engulfing our reality at light speed from the apparent position of the error.

And he tuts. He spends aeons rewinding the rows like crochet or knitting after a mistake and then resumes forward again, across the desert.

Not his pet reality. Not if he can help it.

And then perhaps, one day, it occurs spontaneously anyway, as a result of the calculations. No mistake. Pure consequence. He has infinite time to think. Perhaps he can patch the simulation.

Maybe that’s all the control any creator god has.

There isn’t any point praying. Such a god can’t hear you. He’s just out there… shuffling rocks.

I assume “it’s not beautiful” because you’d have a wart sticking off the MacBook.

That raises the question: Do you really need instant access to everything that’s currently on the MacBook? Are you sure? Think on that for a bit.

Because it’s entirely possible the space you need is on the MacBook, you just need to move less necessary things off there onto the external storage to make room before you go travelling.

If it’s anything like my computer, that would be old photos, software downloads, duplicate data on a different drives or partitions from quick and dirty backups. I’ve never quite had the space for movies and/or video downloads from YouTube, Twitch, etc, but I suspect I’d probably have a few of those as well. I doubt I’d miss any of that on a short trip. And if I did, well then, I can pull the wart out of my bag and attach it, assuming I bothered to bring it with me.

My first thought was that if she wanted cats, she’d have to imitate an electric can opener.

But then, electric can openers won’t have been anywhere near as common or popular when this was published, so she’d just be making weirdly prescient grinding noises on a street corner for no reason, which doesn’t really work from any point of view.

Ah well.

More like Matrydroste

Still using Discord here. Never sent them a face photo. Can’t say either way for the other people I still talk to on there.

Prior to that I remember using TeamSpeak, which apparently still exists. Still proprietary and monolithic though, which might not be to your preference.