palordrolap

Someone needs to yarn-bomb this thing. Perhaps something like a headband that falls to googly-eye level maybe. Perhaps, you know, with eyes on it.

Either way, I’d be tempted to put up a sign next to it that says “Help! I’ve gone blind!”

The solutions:

For the individual: Don’t start in the first place, which is what the Maldives are hoping to help people achieve.

For governments: Copy whatever local legislation applies to heroin and make it apply to nicotine as well. The article doesn’t say what the Maldives intend to do to underage smokers and those who’d sell to them, but I’d be making it unnecessarily draconian just so people get the message.

For people who are already smokers: Nicotine patches of decreasing strength over time and some sort of media teaching pen-flipping or other legal hand-based hobby. Having something for the hands to do is a big part of it. If these can be prescribed by medical or psychological practitioners, all the better.

It’s hard to be sure on the genetics front. There’s evidence to suggest there might be some weaknesses there, but then most of my ancestors and relatives who have had severe problems have all been smokers, and I’m not.

Sounds like someone has butted heads with an HOA or enforcement of some other covenant on look and feel.

Some people apparently have unseemly feelings about everything fitting to a certain design plan.

At the other end of the scale, there’s painting your house neon yellow. A house is not a tennis ball. It should not cause road accidents.

My weakest gums are weak precisely because I floss there more often.

Those locations happen to be where there’s a natural gap between teeth, they’re the first place food gets stuck and the first place I have to take a toothpick or floss to. Gentle as I am, that still takes a toll on the gum between them.

There’s also been a feedback loop of food getting stuck there making those gaps wider over time, meaning larger food getting stuck and more flossing. Over the course of a few decades, tiny movements add up.

The dentists I’ve seen are clueless what to suggest; suggesting I floss less would make their heads explode.

Came here to say something similar. And also to point out that this opinion is a perfectly sound argument in and of itself, thus making it somewhat paradoxical in context.

Unexpected mention of Allie Brosh in the thanks at the end. Genuinely nice to be able to confirm she’s still out there, alive and kicking, doing whatever it is she’s doing now.

Proof: You could create that potaturd as a plush and someone would buy it.

There are so many. Perhaps because I occasionally go back and watch a compilation or two for the nostalgia - even though I missed the whole phenomenon when they were new - and weep not only for what was lost, but also for how the world was back then.

Here’s just a handful:

Look at all those chickens.

Oh my God, they were roommates.

Five feet apart because they’re not gay.

Fre Shavocado

Stahp! I nearly dropped my croissant!

Road work ahead? Boy, I sure hope it does!

The Kermit singing one. And the fact there’s an extended cut which is probably the origin not the Vine. Also the fact there at least two more Kermit clips from the same car that are super hard to find.

There’s only one thing worse than a r-pist… A child!

Someone already mentioned T-T-T-T-Target

Shalissa is not Beyonce. (And the fact there’s at least one return of Shalissa in the super-rare Vines.)

There’s a bunch of others, but I think I might be dredging them up now because I’m thinking about them rather than ones that come to me randomly.

General advice follows. I may be preaching to the choir. Apologies in advance.

Did take a backup before running the update? If not, now would be an excellent time to reboot to externally hosted media and get what you can off the storage before proceeding any further.

If you have a backup, be ready to format and install the new OS from scratch then repopulate necessary files from that. You might not need to if you’re lucky and a reboot and retry all goes to plan, but still something to bear in mind if it hangs again. And maybe a third time.

Also be ready to have to reinstall the old OS if this is a case where the new OS and the old hardware refuse to get along.

Old man ramble: Back in the old days, it used to be possible to tell if a computer was doing something because the HDD would make noise, but with SSDs that’s all but impossible to do. HDD/SSD lights on the case sometimes give strong hints that something is happening, but, in my limited experience, they didn’t always match up one-to-one with what a HDD was doing, so I assume the same is true with SSDs. Onion on belt, etc.

There are stories that contain devices that can create realities, so even if the top level can’t be a story you create yourself, deeper levels can be anything you like.

The hard part would be convincing someone in the top level to let you, a mysterious interloper, use such a device.

And the next hard part would be readjusting to mundane reality and trying to pick up where you left off when you finally come home.

… just ask anyone who has “returned” to what ought to be a familiar computer game world after an extended break in the real world and/or other games. Or even other worlds in the same game.

… politics is a hugely partisan-tribal affair with a lot of drama

This is a problem everywhere. In fact it may well be the definition of politics.

I know this isn’t particularly helpful in terms of this specific discussion (China, Taiwan, etc.), but that phrase leapt out at me and I had to call attention to it.

In before someone wants to reboot a server and the hypervisor is unresponsive.

YouTube’s algorithm seems to think that if someone watches one video by a creator they’ve never watched before, that their feed of recommendations should immediately be filled by everything that creator ever made, so unless someone at YouTube made a conscious decision for it to do that, it would suggest that people generally go nuts and watch everything.

The fact I noticed and was annoyed by it suggests I’m the exception rather than the rule.

Can’t mention Anton Yelchin without mentioning Grant Imahara. Both gone far too soon.

Whoever’s writing this reality really pulled a GRR Martin there.

Various factors have caused this to spring to mind over everything else and it wasn’t technically part of the cartoon:

Way back when I was a kid, a friend had invited me over to his house and somehow we ended up watching a VHS of The Real Ghostbusters. The episode centred around a baseball match between good and evil. Good had to play fair and Evil could cheat.

At one point, the batter for the evil side, some kind of demon, rather than hitting the ball, chose to swallow it and spit it back out at high speed.

The funny part is that my friend happened to hit freeze-frame with the ball just about to enter the demon’s mouth. I forget why he did that. Maybe we got distracted and wanted to watch it again. Rewind, stop/freeze-frame, play or something like that.

Anyway, because of animation smearing, the way the demon was drawn for that one frame was goofy as hell. The demon looked stupid enough already in a baseball uniform and cap, stretching suspension of disbelief. That goofy frame pushed it right over the edge. We fell about laughing.

I don’t think this is a British thing. I’m also British and had never seen the -y spelling until today.

I mean, I suppose it’s rare enough that it’s possible I’ve only ever seen American English instances of it, but I would have thought it would have come up at some point well before now.

Off-topic linguistic rambling follows:

TIL “eery” is a valid spelling for “eerie”.

Google Ngrams suggests that “eerie” is a whopping 109 times more common, but nonetheless, “eery” is there. Even my browser’s spellchecker isn’t highlighting it.

I tried going down the rabbit hole of why that word has kept an older “-ie” ending but I’ve come away more confused more than I went in. I’m going to guess that an -e at the end balances with those e’s at the start has a lot to do with it.

I’ve bounced a few ideas off the limited models currently provided for free online by DuckDuckGo, but I don’t think I have the space or RAM to be able to run anything remotely as grand on my own computer.

Also, by the by, I find that the lies that LLMs tell can be incredibly subtle, so I tend to avoid asking them about anything I know nothing about, so that when they lie about the things I do know about, I can gauge how wrong they might be about other things.

Relevant 4 minute story