Random Dent

Yeah I have the Kobo eBook reader that’s also an e-ink tablet and that’s the same, good as a little sketchbook but it only has like 4 colours on it.

Same here, but I also want to try and figure out how to get one anonymously. I’m not up to anything, I just want to play around with it, but I also don’t want to end up on some list if and when they do get banned.

I had a phone that did that! The feature was called ‘IR Blaster’ IIRC, and there was an app that had all the frequencies for different brands of TV on it. I don’t think they put those in smart phones anymore lol

I like the M Plus Code Font personally.

One time I was out walking and as I turned a corner a pug was running at me full speed, which is a sight to behold - every part of their face and body seems to be moving in a different direction at once. I was still doubled over laughing when the owner walked past me and she gave me a dirty look lol.

I wonder if consent ends with the sale of the house? And if so, could you banish an already-invited vampire by selling the house to someone else for like $1 and then immediately buying it back off them?

Also if a vampire owns an apartment building, can they go into tenant’s suites without permission? Would buzzing a vampire in at the lobby allow them to go where they want, or only a specific suite?

I have a disaster recovery plan, but part of my disaster recovery plan involves not posting the details of my disaster recovery plan on the internet.

I would say:

The Force Awakens: Not bad, basically a knock-off of A New Hope story-wise but it feels like Star Wars and is pretty harmless fun.

Rogue One: Probably the best of the Disney Star Wars movies IMO, although it does have a couple of dodgy “bringing back an old actor as CGI” scenes.

The Last Jedi: Lots of people hate this one, I’m slightly more forgiving. I think it tried to do something a bit weird and different, and it didn’t really work. But I do appreciate the effort of not just playing it safe.

Solo: A Star Wars Story: Another one that seems to get a lot of heat, but I thought it was pretty inoffensive. Although my brain did kind of delete most of it as soon as it was over lol.

The Rise of Skywalker: Legitimately one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I can’t even call it a bad movie, because it’s essentially just a random series of Star Wars-themed sounds and images that batter you for what feels to be about a year and a half before it mercifully ends, taking with it any good will towards the franchise you might have had left.

Same here, I bought Strawberries for 50% off at H-Mart, they didn’t even last the night lol.

My first thought was to set up a bunch of long-term investments, since you can reasonably assume that you’ll live a long life. But then also, being rich might increase the odds of you being kidnapped or killed, so it might just tank whatever you choose to invest in.

Maybe you could somehow get a job testing roller coasters. Once you’re in there you have no power to decide anything, so perhaps the universe will make the builders construct the safest possible roller coaster. OR, you could be a food taster for someone rich and powerful. The universe wouldn’t let you eat anything that’s poisoned, or it would just ensure that no food gets poisoned in the first place!

Here in Canada, the general sentiment among people I’ve talked to is definitely that the US has fucked up it’s relationship with us in a very long-term way, if not permanently. Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, there’s still the issue that Trump threatened Canada’s sovereignty, which people here are not taking lightly at all.

I’ve heard people say that even if Trump went away, there’s no guarantee some other dickhead won’t take over and start the same nonsense, or we’ll just be back here again in 4 years. Even the new Prime Minister said that the relationship we used to have with the US is over now.

I wonder if some sort of “Dead Man’s Switch” might be an appropriate solution for something like this? IIRC there are services that will send out messages to certain people if you don’t log in for a set amount of time, so maybe something like that could be set up to email friends/family/a lawyer/the consulate of your home country or whoever in case you get snatched?

It probably won’t be able to tell them where you are or what exactly happened obviously, but it could at least let people know something’s up.

I feel like the “getting into privacy” journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.

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The full moon does something to people’s brains and makes them act weirder than usual.

There’s been more than one time when I’ve been out and thought people were driving crazier than usual or people on the bus were being more psycho than they normally are, and I’ve looked it up and it’s been within like 2 days of the full moon on either side.

People are ~70% water and the moon does move the entire ocean around, so maybe it’s something to do with that?

It’s the XCOM principle lol.

A shot with a 99% chance to hit will miss far more often than you think.

A shot with a 1% chance to hit will miss pretty much exactly as much as you think.

I think it’s like… in terms of time we’re kind of ‘2D’. Like if you picture a dot on a sheet of paper, it can only move around the directions on that flat plane. That’s time and velocity for us. if you go further up the X axis, you go less far along the Y axis, which is why time slows down the faster you go.

If you were somehow ‘3D’ in time, it’s be like if you lifted the pen off the paper, you could hop around all over the place or maybe even to a different sheet of paper entirely.

Yeah that was my first thought too! I think Steven Moffat summed up the appeal pretty well:

It’s hard to talk about the importance of an imaginary hero. But heroes ARE important: Heroes tell us something about ourselves. History tells us who we used to be, documentaries tell us who we are now; but heroes tell us who we WANT to be. And a lot of our heroes depress me.

But when they made this particular hero, they didn’t give him a gun–they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn’t give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter–they gave him a box from which you can call for help. And they didn’t give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat-ray–they gave him an extra HEART. They gave him two hearts! And that’s an extraordinary thing.

There will never come a time when we don’t need a hero like the Doctor.

Interestingly, Steven Moffat nicked part of that line from Bertrand Russell!

Maybe not… nutrition and general health care are a lot better these days, as is education and general access to information so if you took say, a 40-year old from 1875 and introduced them to a 40-year old from 2025, they might see someone who’s bigger than them, has perfect teeth, looks half their age, and has a pretty broad general knowledge about all sorts of things they’d know nothing about.

A bit like if a 40-year old from today met someone from the year 2175 who looked about 20, was insanely fit and a foot taller than them and could casually describe how the cure for cancer, AGI, quantum computers and fusion power worked. Could be pretty intimidating!