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 Can you tell the native language of the people from these clips? 3 days 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? 4 days 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? 4 days 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] 1 week 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] 1 week 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? 3 weeks 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? 4 weeks 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? 4 weeks ago:
Ah. You're in a country where religion is king.
Become a monk.
- Comment on How to make myself read my curriculum books? 4 weeks 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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? 1 month 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 1 month 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 1 month 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) 2 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."
- Comment on What was a bad TV show season renewal you've seen? 2 months ago:
Anyone remember Due South? It was a comedy crime drama about a Canadian Mountie trying to track down his father's killer.
It got cancelled, but the fans protested and it was rescued at the last minute. The problem was there were a couple of significant changes to the characters and the whole thing felt off, like it was in an alternative universe... except they quite clearly implied that it was the same one and they wrote at least one of the changes into the plot, contributing to the discomfort. They never explained the wolf clearly being different though.
A similar thing happened between seasons with a more obscure show called WPC 56 about a policewoman in 1950s England, but that was clearly due to budget cuts rather than outright cancellation.
Then there's Red Dwarf series VII, which proved that more money is not always a good thing. It was a hard left turn that upset a lot of fans.
... and I'm sure a lot of people will say the same about what's happened to and in Doctor Who over the decades the show's been running.
- Comment on Why do older files tend to have file extensions in all caps? 2 months ago:
Technically it's a *FAT filesystem thing, and it still carries over into default Windows behaviour today. If I remember correctly, you have to explicitly tell Windows to distinguish between case in filenames, even on NTFS, which otherwise supports it... and then hope that something in the system wasn't relying on case-insensitivity, which is now broken.
I have a few exFAT-formatted USB thumb drives and I find that Linux (an OS that has been case sensitive, or at least, its filesystems have, since the outset) complains that the filename is already in use when renaming files to lower case versions of themselves on those drives. I generally have to rename to something different (maybe add a letter) and then rename back. The case can be changed at either stage, but the intermediate name has to be different.
- Comment on If Vampire's are semi dead, then how come a steak thru the heart kills them if they are dead already? Do they still pump their own blood? 2 months ago:
Did you hear about the wooden car with wooden wheels, wooden mechanicals and a wooden engine?
It wooden go.
- Comment on Hypothetically if I found a suitcase of money by the side of the road, is there a legal way to claim it on my taxes? 2 months ago:
Depending on local laws, income and other assets obtained by a benefactor within a certain amount of time (perhaps up to a decade) before death may be subject to inheritance tax or higher inheritance tax rates before being passed to beneficiaries.
And if the parents don't declare it, then the benefactor will have the same "bag of cash" problem but a few years down the line, because the government has no idea where it came from.
- Comment on How come not all people are organ donors? It's not like they will need them where ever they go. 3 months ago:
They switched from opt-in to opt-out a while back here in the UK. They figured that most people don't care either way, but that most people couldn't be bothered to sign up for a Donor Card.
I'm kind of in the opposite boat. I have enough self-loathing and lack of desire to continue living on this planet any longer than I have to that I'm not sure I want any part of me to continue existing after brain death.
I didn't opt-in before, and I feel bad about forcibly opting out, which is, I suppose, what the organ harvesters are counting on, so I haven't.
Yet.
- Comment on If I stick my head out a car window or a gust of wind hits my face it's like my throat closes and I can't breathe. How come motorcycle riders without helmets don't seem to have this problem? 3 months ago:
Observation: When you stick your head out of a car window at speed, you're going from almost no wind to a lot of it very quickly, and that's bound to take your senses by surprise, regardless of whether you're consciously expecting it or not.
Helmet-less motorcycle riders - inadvisable as their choice may be - have the advantage of being able to ease into it from standing to moving at whatever their cruising speed is over the course of a reasonable acceleration.
... though I note that other posters have given reasons why it's still not entirely pleasant for the motorcyclist.