Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • My first thought when accidents happen is always “How do I make it so that this didn’t happen?”

    I know this is an irrational thought, but you asked. It’s probably from using computers where “undo” is commonplace. (And much missed, often with horror, when it isn’t).

    For dry foods, anything that didn’t touch the floor is examined closely and then put back on a fresh plate. Or the same plate after a quick rinse and paper towel dry. The rest would be tossed with heavy heart.

    Wetter foods get similar treatment, but there’s more floor cleaning required. That would be done immediately, and any rescued hot food that had cooled in the meantime would get a quick re-warming in the microwave.

    Either way, I would be cursing silently the whole time, and I wouldn’t enjoy my meal, but I’d still eat what, if anything, I saved.

    … sometimes I will eat escaped dry cereal when pouring from box to bowl just to spite it, even if it ends up on the floor, but it has to look immaculate for me to do that. Anything vaguely oily or sticky doesn’t qualify for this, even if it looks fine.


  • Depends how Picard ended up in that situation. Are we talking the “natural ageing and eventual death” kind of entropy or are we talking “somehow invulnerable except at the quantum level in an infinite void of nothing, awaiting quantum decay”?

    In the former, Q would only save Picard temporarily to make a point or for one last adventure. Q won’t help indefinitely and entropy wins.

    In the latter, Q’s probably the reason Picard is in that situation in the first place. There’d be some jape or point (“now you know what it’s like to be bored as a Q” or somesuch whiny nonsense), but Picard would eventually be back in his regular time stream, at which point we’re back to the first scenario.







  • This could all depend on where you’re living. I get the impression you’re in a country that may have been or may currently be an enemy of Russia (or thought of as a threat by those running Russia right now). If that’s the case, could your folks be Russian ops in some form?

    They would have stopped having those sorts of conversations around you as you got older and they’d deny that they said anything of the sort for those you did remember.

    The phrase “we won’t wait (for) when the war starts” could mean that they’re going to do whatever they need to do even if there’s no actual guns, bombs and fighting going on. You know. Cold war things.

    There’s that phrase that Khrushchev allegedly said about the US, for example. Putin has revived all of that. Assuming it ever went away.




  • Wait until you learn that postfix conditionals are syntactic sugar and the compiler* turns that line into the equivalent of $debug and print(debug message), putting the conditional in first place, a lot like the ternary operator.

    * Perl compiles to bytecode before running.

    The ternary operator itself isn’t implemented in terms of and (and or) but it could be.