palordrolap
@palordrolap@fedia.io
Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn't brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
- Comment on Is there an anti- sleep-paralysis device? 5 days ago:
Try to take deep breaths. If it's low blood oxygen as others say, that could help.
Alternative if your brain/body won't allow it: Try holding your breath. You might have control over that. The aim is to hold long enough trigger a gasp reflex which will, hopefully, shake you awake.
The hard part is finding the presence of mind to remember things to try when you're in an altered state of consciousness.
- Comment on Do deaf people know they have a deaf accent when speaking? 1 week ago:
Deaf people will almost unavoidably copy the mouth shapes they've seen when other people have spoken. This means that how they sound will be at least somewhat informed by any hearing people they observe as well as indirectly through other deaf people who have also learned from hearing folks.
So yes, aspects of voice accent do carry over to deaf people.
There's also the concept of "accent" within sign language too. How people move between signs, carry themselves and act when expressing an emotion, which is usually exaggerated for the sake of clear communication, can vary from community to community, even if the base sign language is the same.
- Comment on Aight. Let's be honest. How many of you dress for yourselves, and how many dress for others? 1 week ago:
If I'm going out, I change from cosy indoor clothing to tidier clothing so that I don't look like I'm wandering around in public in my pyjamas, so I guess I'm fitting to a societal expectation, and thus dressing for other people in that regard.
That said, I wouldn't want to sully my indoor clothing with the outdoors anyway, and I don't like going out as a rule, so I think I prefer to be dressed for myself.
- Comment on For a while Microsoft was the King of PC stuff. How come they didn't just cozy up to the PC but had to do the XBOX and pretty much lose their ass with all the cash grabs? 1 week ago:
Xbox was an indication of what Microsoft have always really wanted to do, what Apple have always done, and what Microsoft have tried to do with the Win 11 roll out:
A narrowing of the technical specification and focus in order to minimise support and required testing. That costs money.
Cost bad. CEO mad.
Each Xbox release has been a release of a bunch of clones. Yes, they are based on PC hardware, but it's one set of identical hardware to support across tens of thousands of instances, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of actual PCs, barely any two alike.
Then note that many people don't want to use a computer at home. Computers remind them of work. They want to play games and goof off in their spare time. A games console is ideal.
And if that console happens to be based on PC hardware, the games can eventually be ported to the myriad actual PC options. But they can get the game out and running quickly on that one well-supported platform and cash in quick.
- Comment on Do boycotts work? 2 weeks ago:
Ouch. AMD and Intel are both US based. Intel was easy enough, but I'd have to do a lot of soul searching and research to give up AMD, their graphics cards and the x86 architecture.
And this is from someone in Britain, where ARM - probably the next best alternative - is based. (As in located, not the new sense of based. Though they might actually be that too.)
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Warm freshly baked white bread is 10/10 for a bread lover.*
Supermarket own-brand plain white sliced loaf is generally ordinary, basic and inexpensive, but nonetheless acceptable. 5/10.
This knowledge may raise more questions than answers, but it may help narrow the scope.
* Scale may extend past 10 for sufficiently exotic bread. Ask the continental Europeans offended by that 10/10 rating.
- Comment on I get texting and driving being a danger. But back in my day you could eat drink change radio stations etc. Why weren't laws implemented back then? 4 weeks ago:
In some countries there's definitely a catch-all law for this. It's called Driving without due care and attention where I live.
I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn't quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn't exist. Assuming that it's true that no such law exists, anyway.
- Comment on If you had to buy a new TV, what brand would you get? 5 weeks ago:
There's at least one supplier here in the UK that still sells free-to-air-only dumb TVs. Digital of course, because we turned off analogue TV signals years ago, but no smarter than that. Definitely no Internet connectivity.
If I decided I was going to become a regular TV watcher again, I'd probably get one of those.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.
Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.
Making repeated efforts to ruin a person's day is harassment.
Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I'm not either of those but it seems like there's a strong case here.
- Comment on What's the Bechdel test equivalent for images? 1 month ago:
I'm not sure that counts, considering which subset of the population is the largest consumer of it. That in and of itself doesn't make it fail*, but the fact that the makers of it know this and thus might be tailoring it for that audience does kind of make the the whole thing about men.
Basically, we're just swapping one meaning of intercourse for another.
* in the same way a group of men watching a regular movie that passes the test wouldn't change that fact.
- Comment on what does it mean being nice to your coworkers to you? 1 month ago:
I think they're going for "What does 'being nice to your coworkers' mean to you?"
As someone who is also neurodivergent, to me this meant leaving them the heck alone unless they were only person who could help me with something, which is also how I expected to be treated in return.
Neurotypicals might ask others about their day, make hot drinks for others, or even do out-of-work favours, but I never had the urge to do that, even if it might have been be appreciated. There are probably other things that they do that I was and might still be oblivious to.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Dennis is one of those (fictional) people who I clearly remember being much younger than, briefly being the same age as, and now being much older than. The two main others are Gordon Freeman (27) and Homer Simpson (under 40).
Now if only my mental age had kept up...
- Comment on What's the thing video players do after lag where they speed up the footage to catch up to the current frame before playing as normal? 1 month ago:
"Rubber-banding" maybe?
- Comment on Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word? 1 month ago:
The adjectival form is "felicitous". (fe-LI-si-tus)
- Comment on Where did the word and concept of "derpy" come from and where is it going? 1 month ago:
It's the onomatopoeia associated with a stupid person trying to think with an emphasis generating -p suffix, in the manner of well → welp and no → nope, then modified further into an adjective with a further -y suffix. Der + -p + -y.
Wiktionary doesn't currently talk about the -p snap suffix at derp, but it does at welp. While I don't quite have the gall to edit it into derp myself, I'm convinced it's the same thing.
(One definition of "herp" is, of course, derived in the same way, doubly emphatic due to the unnecessary aspiration on a hesitation noise. h- + er + -p. Thus was born phrases like "herp-a-derp" for someone acting with a ridiculous lack of care.)
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
In before OP finds a similarly curious lesbian and the next thing you know they're married with three kids.
- Comment on Is This Social Media? 1 month ago:
When I was able to work, I liked to pretend that Reddit - which was still reasonable back then - wasn't social media to get around the rule that social media wasn't allowed. I had intended to explain that I thought Facebook, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter were social. Since I didn't have friends or follows on Reddit, and since I was anonymous, clearly it didn't count.
I was never called out on it.
But I definitely thought, and still think, that there's definitely a social element to it. I mean, what's happening right now?
This isn't Reddit, of course, but it amounts to the same thing. I'm responding to something written by a human who might actually read it. Conversations happen in the comments. As far as Internet goes, that's social.
- Comment on Do you read analog clocks to the exact minute? How do you do this quickly? 2 months ago:
Eventually you learn to recognise the hand positions almost like they're symbols in their own right. You can tell the difference between an apostrophe and a comma, right? And in certain typefaces they're identical symbols other than their position.
For the same reason, you can tell the difference between an hour hand just past the 12 and an hour hand just past the 6. Then you learn what the other positions look like.
Then you can read the minute hand to whatever precision you need.
After that it's just practise, practise, practise. Your read times will tumble and before long you'll be completely used to it and be just as fast as with digital.