palordrolap

At one workplace secret Santa (which I always declined to participate in), one recipient got an empty spherical clamshell with cardboard retainer on which was printed the word “Nothing”, visible through the clamshell. The joke being that it was supposed to be “I didn’t know what to get you, so I got you nothing.”

This was not intended as an insult by the secret Santa, but was taken as one by the recipient who must have spent significantly more on whatever their recipient got.

Only you can judge how your recipient would take such a gift, but if this seems like a good idea to you you can probably find them on sale somewhere. (NB: I accept no responsibility if you choose this course of action.)

If I remember correctly, one of the recipients of a better gift thought it was funny so swapped their gift with it to cheer up the unhappy recipient. I am not sure if the swapper was their secret Santa or not.

There had been much offence, pouting and sulking… from a grown man.

Sounds familiar. Keeping things vague, but I know a US cop. Out and proud about voting for the convicted felon rather than the district attorney, not that he could possibly think of it that way.

His kids are grown and I’ve seen evidence they don’t share his views. At least one of those kids is a woman. I take solace in the fact that their votes cancelled his out, even if things have gone his way.

I wouldn’t say he’s a friend, but he’s definitely friend of a friend territory and I’ve “spoken” with him a few times. Carefully. It’s been almost pleasant. Even the ones with their heads on wrong can be personable. Until you get on their bad side.

Because of mutual friends, I can’t avoid him all the time, but if I can, I do.

The consensus seems to have fallen on vehicle license plates / registration tags / whatever they’re called wherever you might be, and it was also my first guess, even though I’m not from the US. That said, I do watch a few things on YouTube that might have primed me to think of those first and not any other kind of plate.

TL;DR: OP’s probably not talking about crockery.

I’d argue it’s the other way around: Science has no place in space fantasy. That’s why fans were so annoyed by the midichlorian nonsense - it sought to explain the magic through science.

That sounds like a preference that would be added by whoever configured the server rather than anything else. I’ve definitely seen situations where a third-level domain has been under the control of (or sold to) a third party and so it wouldn’t make sense to block the second-level, or other third-levels branched off from it if only one third-level misbehaved. Edit: And I don’t just mean countries that treat second-level as top-level for some uses, like, say .co.uk.

I have no idea what the defaults are for various automatic spam blockers, since both arguments have merit.

There ought to be no limitation with, say, email.facebook.com. Sure, have the domain facebookemail to prevent bad actors grabbing it, but only use it as a redirection.

I don’t think there’s mail server software in existence that would choke on a subdomain like that. There might be a few mail admins too easily confused to be able to set it up, but I doubt there are any of those at Facebook.

That said, most people aren’t going know that a subdomain is safer than a legitimate looking alternative, so maybe it’s all moot.

Tangentially, it seems that someone has squatted on facebook-email.com (note the hyphen), so I expect that Zuck’s lawyers are crawling all over whoever’s done that.

UK here. I don’t remember ever getting “the talk” from either parent. There might have been a late attempt that was shut down with “ugh, we learned it all at school already.”

Those classes, at some point between 9 and 13, might have cleared up a few school-yard rumours, but I’m really not sure what I knew, what I thought I knew, and what I learned (and unlearned) at that time. It might even have been a year-long, once a week class, but it was a very long time ago now. I don’t even remember what the lessons were called, because it wasn’t “sex ed”. Might have been “Health Studies” or something similarly vague.

As for the subversion of expectation in the OP text, I’m pretty sure we had some lessons on WWII, but I don’t think we got into that much detail before I chose to stop studying History. My parents and grandparents certainly talked about the wars, but that was more about them and people they knew during that time rather than the geopolitical and ethical aspects of things. Perhaps a mention of Nazi propaganda from Lord Haw-Haw being on the radio.

The first thing that sprung to mind would be a maker / sculptor kind of deal: A realistic-looking duck except for the fact that it’s made from strips of old car tyre.

But I guess OP could imagine and draw that without someone actually making it.

Hey, back in the late 90s I bought a laptop from a reputable seller and had literally no idea who the manufacturer was. Was a pretty good laptop for the era too. The badge on the back of the monitor said “Notebook”.

I had to put the product ID code on the bottom into an online search engine - possibly very early Google - to find out it was made by Taiwanese company called Kapok.

Kind of wish I still had it, but I donated it to a good cause years ago.

I should probably use it to telefrag one of the active, living war criminals or one of their influential lackeys, but it’s kind of hard to choose.

Decades ago I used to work in a parcel shipping department and we got all sorts of names going through there. Never met any of those people though, and I’m pretty sure some of them were fake.

The only one I can call to mind right now was “N. K. Stitt”, which I assume was someone (or their parents) riffing on the phrase “encased it” for some reason.

I’ve also had a few colleagues with names unusual for Britain, but were perfectly normal for their ethnic background. One guy was Sikh / Punjabi and went by the first (English) letter of his name for simplicity’s sake, for example.

This thread started with a question in Spanish. When read as Spanish, “La puta” translates as … something not very nice.

When an rm parameter has a /, always think “danger!”.

This should be the foremost thought of any sensible shell user.

This is more programmer humour than a Linux meme, but I’ll bite.

Over a decade ago I worked for a company where I was in customer support, and very much not on the dev team. A customer suggested a feature be added to one of the online tools the company provided. I figured it could be done with a simple bit of HTML and JavaScript, and mocked something up to send to the dev team as an example of what such a feature might look like and how it might work.

My crappy code was copy-pasted wholesale into the site. I have no idea if it’s still there as, for obvious reasons, I don’t have access to that system, but at least one of their other interfaces - one where I retain an account - hasn’t changed visibly since I worked there, so it’s definitely possible.

Spelling DOS as DoS is either a cunning joke or one heck of a Freudian slip.

Whenever I question myself, which isn’t often, it’s very easy to check with the Internet, if you catch my drift, but as yet, I very much do not want to see any of that. My preference is clearly the opposite.

But then, for some people, including me, images and real people are very different things. I think I could be somewhere close to demisexual or demiromantic, for example. My instinct is to try to get to know someone really well if I find them even slightly attractive. In older-school phrasing, you might say I’m not the sort of person who is interested in one-night stands.

Your specific situation is one I’ve heard of before and have considered if I could find myself, unexpectedly, with another guy, whatever he might look like. Stranger things have happened, but it’s hard to imagine.

When I was double-checking sexuality definitions just now, I found this page: https://rainbowandco.uk/blogs/what-were-saying/sexuality-definitions which happens to list “finsexual” which fits pretty well with your description. Something to think about, maybe.

But whatever’s going on with your good friend there, I wish you the best, whatever that might mean.

Small cakes baked in greaseproof paper cups are called buns in some parts of the country, but they’re about a quarter of the size of the US-style muffin. They’re also known as fairy cakes, party buns and possibly a handful of other names to avoid confusion with other baked goods that may also be called buns.

The person who said that many of us here think of the US-style muffin when muffins are mentioned is telling the truth. (Edit: clarification)

Now if you want a local delicacy (I use the term loosely) that has a well-known name and origin within England, with widespread appeal and no doubt large consumption, look no further than Yorkshire puddings. I ate one myself earlier today as part of a meal.

Instagram and Facebook feeds already work a lot like this. They throw in a few random posts between the ones you’re actually subscribed to see and after a while you’ll realise the random ones are more of the sort you lingered on for longer and there aren’t so many of the others.

The problem, for both the viewer and the content server, is that this technique gets stuck in local maxima, that is, after a while it tends to serve exclusively one kind of unsubscribed content and stands little chance of broadening into the viewer’s other interests, assuming there are any.

From an outside perspective, this is a good thing in a way because it gets that viewer out of the clutches of the content server for a while once the viewer is sufficiently bored, but it’s a bad thing if you’re a viewer hungry for content, and especially bad for the content server who is desperate for that viewer to stay, eyes glued to the site, where they will see more of the advertisements that pay for everything.

We like Linux, but not to the point we’re aping Steve Ballmer.

(If this is lost on you, search up “Developers developers developers” along with his name.)

Mine eyes!

Don’t know about mobile, but on desktop, that website is an unnecessarily bright yellow.

But I guess the tune was kind of catchy.