palordrolap

@palordrolap@fedia.io

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Without saying "Cynic" or "Nihlist" what the perfect term to describe someone who views both Woke and Anti-Woke as completely flagrant pompous?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Curmudgeon, perhaps. Or at least curmudgeonly.

  Or choose from something here: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/curmudgeon

  Among those, "crank" stands out. This is usually someone who holds a (often provably) wrong, unconventional or unpopular opinion and insists that their way is the right way and that everyone else is wrong.

  Cranks can be right, which a crank will hold onto dearly and use in their arguments, even if the considerable majority of cranks turn out to have been wrong.

  On the other hand, cranks tend to beat their metaphorical drum a lot more than someone who simply refuses to pick a side and keeps their trap shut.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who came up with the phrase "coming out of the closet" to describe homosexuals admitting they are gay? Why not coming out of the kitchen or coming out of the bedroom?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If you combine it with the mechanism from one of those novelty dancing flowers, you'll have a heck of a talking point when you put the music on.

  Or maybe a really good time if you're on your own.

  (For legal reasons, I accept no responsibility for injury or death from enacting any part of this comment, kthx.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What was the first thing "pirated" on the net? What was the first thing to be pirated off the net in the modern age?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So you could play tapes back-to-back of course. Any decent system could pause the second deck until the tape in the first got to the end, auto-stopped and auto-unpaused the other side. That was an almighty kaCHUNK noise when it happened though so you wouldn't want to be a light sleeper trying to sleep to music with it.

  There were also logistical problems with how you chose to play tapes, especially if part 2 of an album was on the other side of a tape.

  Or you spent an absolute fortune on a deck that could play the other side without needing to take the tape out. They didn't make many of those.

  But yeah, I get your point, one side of those double decks could also record from the radio or the other tape. Which is why in some countries taxes were levied on blank tape media to "reimburse" the poor, struggling music industry for the rampant piracy, where curiously, literally none of that went to the artists. Hmmmm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When Coyote vs ACME got resurrected after it was completed , why not Batgirl movie be resurrected?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If I was to learn that the "they're not going to release it" hype around Coyote vs. ACME was, at the root, a deliberate, well guided marketing campaign, I would not be the least bit surprised.

  The same may not be true of Batgirl because that was shelved first, and merely provided the powers that be the idea for marketing the ACME movie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do all scam extensions hijack the default search engine to Yahoo?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe experiment with making the extensions directory read-only so they can't be uninstalled, but that might not prevent merely disabling them.

  Your situation might actually be a use-case for Firefox Enterprise as and when that comes out. It's likely to cost money though. Assuming they don't make the feature set available for regular Firefox sysadmins for free anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My possibly degenerating brain and typing comments: Does font make a difference? Can I change this site's font?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Someone else mentioned a browser add-on that lets you modify fonts on a per-site basis, but there are other add-ons in the same niche that don't require stylesheet knowledge if that puts you off at all.

  As for errors, I'll sometimes not completely revise a sentence if I decide to rewrite for tense or aspect, and end up with words missing or in weird grammatical places. And then I'll not see it after three or four checks. Including when coming back to check whether people liked my comment or not.

  And then bam, fifth visit, I can't parse what I've written because cabbage there's a wrong word in the middle of a sentence or I've one out entirely. (I did that for effect, but I can't vouch for the previous two paragraphs. Yet.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can you tell the native language of the people from these clips?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first speaker had a couple of vowels that gave away he isn't a native speaker, but he's walking the line between uncanny and mastery, so it was hard to pick out enough to guess what his native language might be.

  The second I'm not allowed to watch without a Vimeo account, probably because I'm in Britain. I won't be setting one up today.

  For the third there was a lot more unusual vowel articulation, especially 'a', that made me think Slavic, but I couldn't be any more specific than that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you able to tell which language is which by looking?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.

  Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.

  You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you'd be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you able to tell which language is which by looking?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The kana aren't alphabets either. They're syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U... aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they're allowed to be used.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is probably anecdotal / subjective on my part, so take this under advisement, but I feel like that usage is more clearly a slur.

  The bit about not knowing the etymology for the "cause to complain" version was me at one point, and I think I might have guessed the origin of the given verb without necessarily connecting it to the noun, despite the similarity.

  FWIW, in my dialect there's also a verb "to gip", hard g, which is imitative (and so nothing to do with slurs) and means "to dry retch or feel one might be about to", which is almost never used in the past tense. Hearing it in the past tense, even with a soft g, would make me question everything, which may be another reason why I feel this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I had to go check, because I've heard a YouTuber use "gin up" a lot and they're not the sort to use slurs.

  At time of writing [Wiktionary's entry on "gin up"] doesn't list it as a slur either, so I'm inclined to believe it isn't one.

  What I think your employers / colleagues may have heard, or confused it with is "gip" / "gyp" (also soft 'g'), which is an abbreviation of "gypsy" and is generally used to mean "pain" or "a cause to complain", hence being a slur for travelling folk.

  It's such a weak, ridiculous slur that many people don't even know its etymology and use it by imitation. It was very common on British TV up to the '90s, for example, and older British folk may still occasionally use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[NSQ Friday] Is this a stupid question?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  No. Self-references are interesting from a philosophical standpoint, and are often the cause of apparent paradoxes in logic.

  "Is this a stupid question?" is an example of self-reference and can thus lead into exploration of the topic if only as a way to avoid any difficulties its apparent lack of information otherwise presents.

  ... which is what I'm doing in this comment.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to make myself read my curriculum books?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Who are they to defy the will of their god?

  For all you know... for all I know, these words I'm writing and that you're about to read are the word of that god, through me, through the Internet and to you.

  That's the funny thing about gods. There's never any way to know for sure.

  Alternatively, you can stare at your books until you learn something or you go insane. Your choice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to make myself read my curriculum books?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah. You're in a country where religion is king.

  Become a monk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to make myself read my curriculum books?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Can't really help you. I could never make myself do homework or do the required reading. It's a miracle I got a diploma out of it. I sure as heck didn't get the degree.

  My mental health was in the toilet (metaphorically) and I didn't really recognise or understand that at the time. I'm still unofficially diagnosed for attention span disorders, but I claim "pretty fricking obvious" on that.

  The depression was a side effect of the pressure of being unable to do what as needed and basically started shutting down what I could still do.

  I spent a lot of time telling myself the odds that I was somehow magically going to make it through, but I didn't.

  In the end, rather than struggle on for another year, I went and got a job instead. In today's job market, I'm not sure I would have got one, but at the time it was somewhat easier. Nevertheless, it was not a well-paid job. But it served as a stepping stone to a better one.

  I never did fully address my mental health though, and that bit me quite severely a decade and a half down the line.

  Hint, hint.

  You may need help other than "How do I force myself to read these books?"

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is gravity called gravity? Why not newton-vity or something else like leroy jenkins-vity?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  OP, let me introduce you to Wiktionary, where you can look up all sorts of words, "gravity" included.

  It can be a little shaky around the fringes (obscure words; rare or slang usages) and with languages not closely related to English, but it's an excellent resource for when you want to know why a word is the way it is. Or at least to find out that we don't know for sure where some words come from. Gravity isn't one of those, though.

  You may also like to know that there is a metric physical unit named after Newton, so his name does get used in gravity-related concepts. At time of writing, the Wikipedia article for the Gravity of Earth mentions the unit in the first couple of paragraphs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the m-word a slur for people with dwarfism? If so, what are more appropriate terms to use other than dwarf?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The R word as a verb has a different emphasis than does the (adjectival) noun that is taboo. The emphasis difference is common among identically spelled pairs of verb/nouns. The noun almost always has emphasis on first syllable, e.g. [a] record (noun) versus [to] record (verb).

  But yeah, some people are going to avoid it anyway, not least because it's indistinguishable in text form, and I wouldn't blame them.

  I note that the M word (to belatedly drag myself back on topic) doesn't work as a verb.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How hard/fast would a baseball have to go to completely pass through a pitcher? Like leave a hole through flesh?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Waterjet Channel used to do things like this. They'd launch stuff out of an air cannon at a torso made of ballistics gel on what seemed like a regular basis.

  And I daresay The Slow Mo Guys, if not also the OG Mythbusters must have done something similar at some point, not that I can call anything specific to mind right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Canadian. I know that it's only supposed to be product labelling, not recipes, that has to be bilingual, and the inclusion of gram measurements did make me uncertain, but the sugar is what tipped the balance.

  I could be wrong and it's Canadian or I've missed something about another Anglophone country also putting sugar in bread.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is the easiest way to calculate the calories in this bread machine recipe?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  English language with no French, cups as measurement and extra sugar in a bread recipe all point at this being a US recipe book.

  They love extra sugar in bread over there. At some point the sugar lobby got in bed with the big breadmakers and since it's addictive, it's now an expectation and a self-fulfilling cycle.

  So yeah, US bread is closer to cake than, say, European bread.

  And that milk powder isn't helping the case much either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would be a biological equivalent to an EMP?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Came here to say something like this, except I learned it from the (rather dark) joke "The neutron bomb was invented by an architect with no friends."

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are North Koreans who escape to the South integrate, like what do they do for work, home, etc?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Quick test: Say something unkind about Kim Jong Un.

  I'm English. Our king has fat sausage fingers. Your turn.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My 1TB hard drive took a crap reformatted it, lost all my info, and it works now. How do I use a cloud or drive online to backup my stuff so I am not relying just on physical and can dl anywhere?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tangential reply: The manner in which your 1TB drive "took a crap" might be cause for concern depending on the precise nature of the failure.

  If the hardware is fine, you might be able to recover files on it. This possibility is diminished if you've reformatted and put new files onto it, and practically nil if you did a full drive wipe beforehand (or the failure, whatever that was, did something similar.), but the possibility might have been there and may still be there.

  If the hardware is not fine, you probably shouldn't use it for anything important, if at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a website that can tell you the new names to I guess "classify" people? Like the R word, or the N word or skin color or nationaility? For ex. Is African American still acceptable and so forth⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the sake of ethnic origin, white South Africans are European, but I grant you that things are getting to the point of being somewhat complicated there too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there a website that can tell you the new names to I guess "classify" people? Like the R word, or the N word or skin color or nationaility? For ex. Is African American still acceptable and so forth⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Black for Sub-Saharan African descent, sure. Things get a bit more difficult if you want to talk about north Africans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To hazard a guess (don't know for sure, not even for my own country), it's for future historians to be able to build up a picture of who was where and when.

  What might seem obvious and common knowledge now might not be in 100 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meal Replacement Drink Suggestions?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's not clear whether you're replacing some or all of the sugar with an artificial sweetener or not. Some don't work for some people and some may be unsuitable for medical reasons, but there might be one or two that work.

  FWIW, I've been putting saccharin in my tea for years now. Not dead yet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I theoretically grind up one of those pink salt lamps and use it to season my food?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Your smiley needs a nose. Is it a sad face with a hat or a demon with an evil little smile?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lemmy or Piefed?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are dozens of us! Dozens!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What’s a reasonable tip for a barber? (America)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  "Customers should leave your purview with the hair on their head, and possibly face, styled, trimmed or even extended, as close to their preference as possible."