wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Now, admittedly I was born and raised in Florida, but Gatorade yellow, orange, and red have simply never been improved upon.

One of the more prescient (or maybe just well researched) parts of Neal Stephenson’s latest book (the uneven but very “Stephenson” Termination Shock) was the low intensity, gun-free warfare along the Indian-Chinese border, including younger types turning it into a flashy and stylized social media thing, not unlike some of the Ukrainian units today in their very real shooting war.

From the article: "A DMCA exemption would allow McDonald’s franchises to legally do repair work on their own machines."

A reasonable enough VESA mount or stand should be no more than $50 or $60. Looks like the linked display has VESA 200 mounting holes.

I can easily imagine it. You have words that the actor has never seen before, which have literally zero emotional resonance for them so they can't draw on any personal or cultural connections to use them, and they're tasked with spitting them out in a scene that calls for both intimate familiarity and stressful high stakes.

There's also a reason that the "legitimate nerds" in show business become such cult favorites. The overlap of (1) "people who look like professional actors" and (2) "people who are believable while acting" and (3) "people who legitimately get into the fake logic of technobabble" is vanishingly small. If you are on a Trek show and not in that intersection, pretending to be a 3 is going to be one of the biggest challenges in pulling off 2 to your expected standards.

To cross franchises for a moment, "you can write this shit George, but you can't say it."

I don't properly touch type. I have pretty good muscle memory for a standard qwerty, but typing is still very much a hand-eye coordination exercise for me. I can do the standard transcription typing tests at about 50 wpm, and compose or type from memory at maybe 70ish. I don't hate swiping, and it's much better than thumb-mushing for polysyllabic words, but I'm nowhere close to even my modest typing speeds on a proper keyboard.

I like the new, sweary, bantering, characters,

Seriously. They are a breath of fresh air in a show that, while good, is not great due in part to how self-serious it can be. Bel and his husband are not "fun" exactly, but they are recognizably human as well, which makes them good POV characters.

I haven't read the books, though I understand they're almost unfilmable at any kind of reasonable budget and Asimov's character work was kind of beside the point. Sounds like a faithful adaptation would be... inaccessible. There's always a spectrum on these things, but I reckon this skews way more towards Sci-Fantasy space opera than the books did. That's fine as far as it goes, but I do feel sympathy for those readers who dare to hope their beloved property will be the exception. Seems the only thing you can really do is pull an Expanse: write it as pot-boiling space opera to begin with, so your actual sci-fi ideas can be slipped in without scaring the suits too badly.

The show is fine, I guess. Its version of Psychohistory is basically magic; it's a plot device rather than a complex idea to be dug into. The show is more interested in exploring themes of legacy and what it means to be family and what it means when "family" betrays you, alongside of some court intrigue soapiness. There's a healthy dose of prestige-TV's obsession with the "drama of paranoia" that's not badly done, but I admit I'm kind of personally over it. Pointless secrets, poor communication, and obtuse scheming are as key to modern drama as they were to Seinfeld.

Anyway, the Gaal/Salvor/real(er) Harry plotline is still joyless and ponderous and the worst of the three despite being tasked with the heavy lifting of being presented as the "complete" one, but the other new characters actually bring some humanity and occasionally a hint of fun (is that allowed?). Poly, Constant, Hober, Bel, Glawen, Sareth, and Rue are all outshining the S1 cast, though Lee Pace finally gets to have some fun in E7.

wtf lol

SPELLCHECK! YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE! IT WAS SAID THAT YOU WOULD DESTROY THE TYPOS, NOT JOIN THEM!

It was a legitimate protest of a stupid law that uses a legacy of inconsistent thought and limited perception to do an end run around the first amendment, but the text of the law requires a poster per building, so if they have enough in English, there would be no "need" to accept or post them. Now, if a principal or administrator had some balls, I certainly don't see why they couldn't use one of these or to flank the posters they do post with lots of context or more diverse ideas.

LOL, please subscribe to /c/ obscure and specific pet peeves that an odd human has confused with universal annoyances @ wtf.lemmy.

Pneumatic tube system. Brass steampunk shit like in old banks and skyscrapers would be fine, as would clear plastic ones like drive through pharmacies.

Going off on a tangent here, but the chances that Shakespeare truly invented any words or more than a handful of distinguishable uses is vanishingly small. What Shakespeare did was (1) be a half-educated middle class rube, (2) get popular enough that his colleagues wanted to collect his plays and a printer wanted to publish them, and (3) retained his reputation through the generations so that volume of plays wasn't left to rot.

He was absolutely brilliant, don't get me wrong (most Anti-Stratfordians are a weird combination of classist and ignorant), but the brilliance lies in the ways he played with the forms of poetry and drama, how he found the humanity in so many of his characters (though not all), and how he corralled all of his influences, cultural, literary, personal, and historical, into wholes that were way beyond the sum of their parts. Given the rigidity of Tudor education and expectations of the upper classes, I'd argue a unique voice like his would almost have to come from an "upstart crow." From the perspective of linguistic novelty though, by and large his was just the first known use of words, which were likely in some degree of use in at least one of his various communities (actors, writers, Londoners, and Strafordians to name a few). The OED can only cite the earliest written sources its researchers have found. The fact that so many of "his" communities were poorly documented in the historical and literary record probably explains most of the words ascribed to him.

I haven't watched it since the original version. Frankly, it was barely okay as it was, but the structure was one of the things that made the obvious scheduling issues bearable. If you don't structure around it and sort of hang a lampshade for those who were following the production, then yeah, you just get a remarkably weak season of Arrested Development. Never bothered with 5.

Sometimes a staff has moved on and a moment has passed. Looking at YOU, various Covid reunion shows.

I'm more or less in your boat. My chin grows in a bit more, though still too scraggly to amount to anything, and otherwise I'm going on two decades of having a 15yo boy's "beard". While it's annoying to have certain aesthetic options off the table, it's kind of nice to have an easy routine that doesn't even need to be daily.

Shaving cream is mostly pointless, so I don't bother getting any. Shave dry if the old electric is charged, change blades once a year. If it's not, or I'm travelling, or I am feeling like I want to be pretty, then while the whiskers are still fairly soft after showering, use a Harry's 4-blade disposable (maybe ten-fifteen shaves before changing the cartridge).

I don't use it much anymore, but I also have a safety razor, and I'd change those blades after five or six uses. I can count on one hands the number of times I've had any sort of razor burn I could feel after twenty minutes, and other than the first couple of times I used the safety, I've never had more than two nicks at a time in my life, including when I was a 15yo boy. In the end, the safety is still a lot less safe than a modern disposable, requires a more consistent angle, and is just a lot of ritual and futzing that never felt particularly satisfying for me. I'm there to scrape the scraggly garbage off my face once I start looking like a patchy hobo, not to pamper myself. If doing it "wrong" came with any sort of realistic consequences like razor burn, ingrown hairs, tons of cuts, or a 5 o'clock shadow at 2:30, then I'd probably be all-in on the hobby side, but for my face it just doesn't matter. Anyway, I have fountain pens, woodworking, and mech keyboards to scratch my gleeful luddite itch.

Like yours though, it never went anywhere and was literally just a simple framework with nothing to run in it.

Why are you talking about the QBasic sprite-based RPG "engine" I wrote in 1999? I was very proud that you could move the selection box with the arrow keys.

Of course, I was also in college and not a tween, so maybe English was the right degree path for me after all.

My "completed" QB projects were (1) a text-based "RPG" set in the era of the historical Macbeth, with (IIRC) five scripted encounters, and (2) a single-player Star Wars "Sabacc" card game based on 90% of the rules listed in the old West End Games sourcebook. The "AI" was a set formula not unlike the newbie blackjack rules posted everywhere. I think. Maybe that was planned for v2 though. I was fairly proud of the graphics engine that imported text files and assigned colors to pixels based on which ASCII character you'd used.

These days, I don't do anything more complex than editing keyboard configurations in KMK.

They think the three seashells are for babies!

I know the Romans used a sponge on a stick which, while gross to my modern germ-theory-knowing mind, is perfectly sensible from a technique point of view. I'm struggling intellectually to figure out how the ostraca could have been used in way that was both effective and safe, and I'm struggling emotionally with why I care. 🤣

I'm a simple man. I see stuff about the systematic organization of ancient international trade, I upvote.

For amphorae in particular, I love that they were semi-standardized, and I love that shards were repurposed for anything useful.