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 How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 4 days ago:
Yeah, you're right, the downvote was a bit harsh considering that I didn't do a deep dive on the matter.
I can't undo the bandwagon, but I can undo mine.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 5 days ago:
Well for whatever it's worth, you're welcome.
That "feeling adrift" sounds a little bit how depersonalisation and/or derealisation were described to me when I was trying to get diagnoses. I didn't feel like they fit my experience of mental illness at all (everything feels real enough (maybe too much), and I've never felt adrift), and I'm not a doctor so I'd be the last person to try to diagnose either in someone else, but they might be things for you to look into.
- Comment on Why are non-binary and asexual flags Wario and Waluigi colored, respectively? 6 days ago:
I don't think this is sexuality, it's politics. Wario is clearly a UKIP supporter and Waluigi is UKIP / Tory coded.
(all in jest of course. Or is it?)
- Comment on How does "DNS" work on the dark web? 6 days ago:
The NSA and GCHQ have both run their own TOR nodes and presumably already have an excellent understanding of how it works, so there's bound to be at least one person, if not an entire department, at the FBI who already understands TOR better than most of the people reading this comment.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 6 days ago:
I can't say they improved my mood much, so there wasn't a great deal to notice, but I have noticed a distinct lack in extreme lows since I started taking it.
The trouble with mood-altering and mood-stabilising medications (and behaviours if you count things like exercise) is that they can affect perception not only in the present, but about past thoughts and behaviours too, so spotting any obvious change might require some effort.
Case in point, it took me a long while to notice that I haven't been having the crushing lows, and part of me still believes that it's not the Vitamin D that's responsible.
- Comment on How long after starting Vitamin D supplements should you notice results? 6 days ago:
Best as I can tell there's no evidence that Vitamin D and kidney stones have anything to do with each other, and in fact, there may even be scientific papers in existence that suggest the opposite is true, i.e. Vitamin D may help reduce the risk of kidney stones.
Caveat: This was based on a quick web search, not deep research, and everyone's biology is different. If you're getting kidney stones, check with an actual doctor.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Hey man, the line's gotta be somewhere, right? :p
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
we're 9 billion people
Either you're a time traveller, you like heavy rounding up or you know something the easily accessible parts of the Internet don't. Averaging the first three sites* that turned up in a search puts it around 8.25 billion at the time of writing
* Worldometer ~8.26b, The World Counts ~8.11b and Country Meters ~8.34b
- Comment on Why do languages sometimes have letters which don't have consistent pronunciations? 2 weeks ago:
There's a reason kids in Spelling Bee competitions are allowed to ask for the language of origin of a word.
It can often give a hint that a certain sound is spelled an unusual way. The "Ch" of "Chemistry" comes through Greek where it's spelled with their letter "chi", which for reasons I won't get into, looks like our X.
Kids in a spelling bee wouldn't need to ask about "Chemistry", of course, but there may be other examples where that would be useful.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
OP seemed to suggest that these dreams are, or quickly get to being, beyond their control. Nonetheless, even daydreaming at the wrong time can be perilous.
I say this as someone who has never had good attention control.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Frankly, I'm torn on this one. I have a few fantasies that I like to pretend are real because I think they prevent me from falling off the edge into the chasm of complete insanity, while at the same time recognising that it's not strictly sane to maintain the fantasy in the first place.
But this is something I consciously maintain. There are no elements completely beyond my control like visual hallucination.
The closest I get is the occasional flash of something I've been doing for a while if I close my eyes (basically the Tetris effect ), and maybe the occasional auditory equivalent if it goes quiet.
And yet, in my dreams I've had full blown conversations with people where I haven't expected what they're going to say next, so I suppose if all the above combined into one, I might have a similar experience to you, OP... but then I'd have to strongly considering contacting a medical or psychological professional.
Lapsing uncontrolled into a dream - however comforting that dream might be - when out in the world, could be dangerous for you or people around you. Imagine if you're driving. Or controlling some other form of machinery. Or heck, even pushing a shopping cart.
- Comment on Native Americans? 2 weeks ago:
You're confusing two things.
The aboriginal peoples of North and South America (the continents) are descendents of Asiatic people who crossed the Bering Strait from Asia during the last ice age. That was over 10,000 years ago.
These include, but aren't limited to, the Canadian First Nations - both inland and Inuit, many nations of Native Americans in North America, and in South America, the peoples of the Amazon, the Maya (who still exist), the Incas, Aztecs and so on.
Then, from roughly 500 years ago and then for a century or three, there was a significant amount of admixture both genetically and culturally with Hispanic colonists that came over the Atlantic from Europe.
- Comment on what is the best fruit to leave in a fridge? 3 weeks ago:
Left field answer: Any dried or dessicated fruit, e.g. sultanas, raisins, currants, cranberries, candied peel, etc.
... I did not intend those to be in reverse alphabetical order, but that's how they came out.
Wasteful consumer answer: Tinned (in juice) or those fruit cup things.
- Comment on If animals could speak English in what foreign accent do you think that a certain species would certainly have ? 4 weeks ago:
Ask the British (and apparently Australians too) about that and we might say meerkats are Russian on account of a very popular set of insurance TV advertisements.
That said, I haven't watched TV in earnest for a few years at this point, specifically before Russia fell from favour, so I'm not sure whether that's affected their popularity or not.
And I have no idea what we might have said prior to the ad campaign.
- Comment on Is it weird to simultaneously feel love and hatred towards parents? 5 weeks ago:
As I have said at least a couple of times in the past, I love my parents but I can't live with them. Small doses are fine, even pleasant. Heck, I visit most weeks, but long term? Nope.
- Comment on Is there an anti- sleep-paralysis device? 1 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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? 1 month 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] 1 month 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? 2 months 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? 2 months 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] 2 months 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? 2 months 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? 2 months 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] 2 months 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? 3 months ago:
"Rubber-banding" maybe?
- Comment on Is there a word for the happiness in finding the exact right word? 3 months 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? 3 months 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.)