palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io

Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurg

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Without anyone around who would be sad if I ceased to exist, quite a lot of me would leave pretty quickly, if you catch my drift.

But then, there's also that all but one of me would be in my house, with my things. I'm a nigh-agoraphobic hoarder. Several billion of me would be a long, long way from home and my (our?) stuff, and several thousand would start heading to my house as fast as humanly possible.

There'd be a lot of road accidents. I don't drive.

Infrastructure would crumble immediately.

Anyone who didn't "leave" would starve in a few days.

This is not a good plan. Do not use.

Back in the day in the kids' comics I remember at least one occasion where the spade card suit was used for that purpose. (Britain, 1980s/1990s)

A character's speech bubble contained "I h♠te homework" or something similar. Might have been spinach instead of homework. Or school. Anything an irreverent protagonist might not like.

The artist was clearly using this as a counterpart to the more often seen "lo♥e", but as an adult thinking about it now, I have to wonder if the artist had forgotten about the potential racial connotation of using it, or if they hadn't but didn't think it was particularly important.

Either way, ♠ could be used as a symbol of hate if the context permits it. Maybe best avoided if you're looking for a generic one though.

Some kid in a shiny car and a hazmat suit turns up out of nowhere five seconds later and starts shouting and cursing into a bulky radio about having missed it to someone called "Doc".

Same reasons a bunch of Americans listen to the douchebag they elected President.

Farage is one of Putin's useful idiots, if not also a puppet. He played a big part in Brexit and he's vying to be the next PM. Populism is, unfortunately, a disturbingly easy route to do that.

Many of the rest of us wish that the helicopter crash he was in back in 2010 had made him give up politics one way or the other.

All the people saying she looks like Scully and her surname is pretty much the same as the actress who played that character? This idea practically fell into the laps of the people behind these photos.

Frankly, I would not be surprised if she had it as an office nickname before this even occurred to them.

Ironically: toilet paper.

It looks suspicious a.f., I grant you, but even when I had a desk job in an office, I'd have a toilet roll in easy reach on my desk for use on spillages - drink spillages - and for wiping my fingers and face if I was eating and needed to use the computer or to answer the phone. Also for blowing my nose, but I'd try to leave the room with enough in hand to do that so I wasn't subjecting people to that unmistakeable noise.

I buy the cheapest TP the supermarket sells. It's generally cheaper than most other paper products and works just as well.

Not terrible for it's original purpose either, but I prefer something slightly better quality for that.

Any conclusions drawn from a child's personality can't necessarily then be applied to a parent. Hannah Montana Linux was ultimately a Debian, but it was so far from stock Debian that the comparison makes no sense. The same, I assume, applies with the Arch-derivative that runs on Steam decks. We're not in Arch-kansas any more, Toto.

The closest to "Windows with nerdnip" is probably Linux Mint, but even then that's a fairly unkind comparison.

I use LMDE, btw.

Yeah, I used pods for a few years. Went back to plain old liquid because this would happen once in a while. Or else this stuff would start gumming up the seals or out of sight waiting for the next time I used the machine.

As for the cause(s) take your pick from: water too cold, not enough water, tangled item(s) creating temporary pockets that only open up late in the cycle (which could be caused by:), overloaded machine.

Out-crazy them. Turn up at 12:20 and be ready by 12:25. Shout at them for not being ready when you are. Then when they start turning up at that time, move back to 12:10. Then 12.

And then when they're turning up and ready at 12, go back to 12:35 and tell them you don't know what they're talking about, you've always started at that time, it says so in the official documents and you've never varied. Tell them they're crazy.

I mean, hey, if you're going to quit anyway, might as well have some fun before you do.

The people are free to do whatever Xi wants them to.

Will no one rid us of these turbulent shits?

.13

Well there's your problem.

(Not 13 specifically. Just the odd numbered sub-version in general. But 13 if you're superstitious, I guess.)

Schwa is a vowel, so it would be the long e, not schwa on "the".

A possible exception is when the following word begins with a long e, and people might actually break the rule to make it clear where one word ends and the other begins. Or rather they insert a glottal stop before the vowel sound - I believe this is called "hard attack" - and since a glottal stop is technically a consonant, that allows the rule-break.

That is, something like "the eel" could go either way, but there'd be a very obvious glottal stop before "eel" if the speaker chose the schwa version of "the", and they would have made that choice for clarity, to avoid sounding like they'd said "theel".

The vowel sound rule (or a related one) is also used for which vowel sound goes at the end of the definite article "the", that is, the sound the 'e' makes.

Usually the last vowel sound of "the" is a schwa, arguably the most common vowel sound in English, but before another vowel sound, it becomes "ee", or what other European languages might write "i".

There might even be an intrusive y (or j as used in Norse and Germanic languages) depending on the speaker. i.e. "The apple" may well be pronounced "thi(y)apple", and a fellow native speaker wouldn't notice. "The ball" has the usual schwa. As does "the usual schwa" for that matter.

Sound it out. The first sound is a vowel sound so "an elephant".

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he's fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he'd find out why we're really naming it after him and he'd try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

Ratio'd

That's about it. Mbin also provides a direct interface to the microblogging side of the Fediverse. Yes, you can already see posts from Lemmy on Mastodon and vice versa, but there's no way to actually microblog from Lemmy. Mbin has that.

I'm currently on fedia.io which is an Mbin, but the main reason I'm here and not on a Lemmy instance is personal preference. I wasn't keen on the Lemmy / tankie connection, and I liked the kbin/Mbin interface better anyway.

Unfortunately all the high traffic Fediverse groups (communities / magazines / what-have-you) have ended up on Lemmy instances, perhaps in part due to the problems the kbin creator had in his personal life and with the flagship instance, meaning people lacked confidence in spinning up their own instances and went Lemmy instead.

A true VHS versus Betamax moment.

I'm not so sure about that. A mind in a machine lacks the chemical soup in the blood and tissues which drives behaviours far more than we'd perhaps like to admit.

Emulating a personality means emulating the whole human or else what you'll get will be an approximation, and perhaps not even a very good one.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn't mean that the next ones will be. It's always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn't hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It's unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it's even less likely with the extra safeguard.