umbraroze

I assume they're trying to out-do the old Soviet joke.

Preface to a new sex education schoolbook:
"Dear children. There are three kinds of love. First, there is the love between parents and children. We're sure all of you are already familiar with that, so there is no need to discuss it here. Second, there is the love between two adults. Some suggest it might be too early to tell you anything about that yet. And third, there's the love the People feel toward the Party, and that is what we shall discuss for the rest of this book..."

There's a movie plot hook buried there. About a kid on spectrum whose robot buddy gets killed by the uncaring business. They go "oh no, I'll have to fix my robot buddy" and go on to become a tech genius. One day, they become a tech millionaire, and the story's antagonist, the shady businesses partner, goes "look, we're bankrupt, we have no choice, we have to shut down all of the robot buddies". And the protagonist remembers the saddest moment of their childhood and are like "no, we can't do that".

I don't know if there's some way to override/customise the notification sounds on Android on per-app basis. At one point in history I wanted Twitter to go [random bird noises] and Reddit to go "Le." but since I don't use either of them anymore I really didn't investigate this further.

LimeWire was based on Gnutella protocol, which was actually the first major P2P file sharing protocol. The file discovery was completely decentralised. But yes, way simpler and less robust than BitTorrent.

There was some 1990s documentary about fractals, narrated by Arthur C. Clarke (I think), where he said something along the lines of "I've not tried this myself, but I've been told there's certain illegal chemicals that can cause hallucinations that look like fractals".

(I have this on VHS tape somewhere. Should probably digitise it.)

I'm a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren't gendered in Finnish either, so that's not weird.

Things that do trip me up:

• Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one "you") and gendered third person)
• Articles (Finnish doesn't have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
• so freaking many irregular verbs etc
• seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can't be said of the pronunciation)

Actually, I'm learning French right now and gendered nouns aren't even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.

For those who don't need cloud access, I just put all of my photos on a NAS and use a digital asset manager software. digiKam is great if you want an open source solution. I use ACDSee because it's faster and has better usability in my humble opinion. But since both of the software packages store the metadata in image files and XMP sidecars and basically only use local app-specific database for caching, if digiKam ever gets a couple of quantum leaps ahead, switching back to it isn't that big of a deal. (As usual, don't use Adobe Lightroom or you're screwed in that regard. Or so I've been told.)

I have them on CD-ROM.

I also think I have the final patches for them on floppies that I stuffed in the boxes. Not sure if they're readable (or in fact the final patches)

Yup. Hasbro-WotC has already dragged their name in the mud, and they're really busy digging their own grave with the recent push for digital-first/virtual-tabletops-first stuff and micro(macro)transactions. Meanwhile, they forgot that tabletop RPG rules have always been flexible and homebrewy (and the old OGL reflected that ethos perfectly), and you can't hyper-monetise them the same way as video games.

They're making the same mistakes TSR did. (Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, yadda yadda yadda.) Except in TSR's case, they got bought by WotC who pulled an extremely community-supportive, business-ecosystem-building move by introducing OGL. Even if Elon bought out WotC I doubt he is actually going to be interested in fixing whatever's actually ailing them right now, dude's too busy fighting woke demons than actually doing sound business/pro-community moves.

Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now

Which is kind of my point. Over the years our public transport has been proudly advertising their use of biodiesels and bio gas, CNG and LNG. And apparently battery-electric buses are coming too. (Sorry, Adam Something. Apparently our city cannot into trams, as fucking awesome as it would be! But apparently the Green Party is proposing TRAINS)

cash certainly lives here

Yeah, and that was kind of a pointed example on my part. I don't think cash is going away entirely. That said, vast majority of our public transport is already apparently either going on prepaid cards or debit so, eh.

And are these people who masturbate in the corner or who are creeping up your skirt in the room right now? (Not seen 'em here is what I'm saying.)

Over here we already have plenty of memes based on "What if Breaking Bad happened in Europe? It'd been very underwhelming because we have public healthcare." But I'm glad Albuquerque can at least say "well we could maybe have mitigated some of the car shenanigans in the series now."