dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Decades of the Catholic church demonizing birth control methods and claiming condoms cause AIDS will do that do a continent.

No points for guessing. The Irish and the Spanish have already been considered “not white” at points in recent history. So have the Italians.

Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.

It sounds stereotypical, but it’s true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.

Anyway, I don’t answer my phone for anyone who isn’t on my contacts list anymore. If I don’t know you, you don’t need to be calling me.

I’ve posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.

Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.

Relatedly, never abuse your pizza delivery driver. He has unsupervised access to your food, and he knows where you live.

when a calculator from the 80s can do the same thing.

1970’s! The little blighters are even older than most people think.

Which is why I find it extra hilarious / extra infuriating that we’ve gone through all of these contortions and huge wastes of computing power and electricity to ultimately just make a computer worse at math.

Math is the one thing that computers are inherently good at. It’s what they’re for. Trying to use LLM’s to perform it halfassedly is a completely braindead endeavor.

In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, to alleviate the effects of the…Anyone? Anyone? The Great Depression passed the, anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.

I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.

Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.

It’s all pipes, Jerry!

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.

I’m not sure pissing off Miyazaki is a great move. He’s an old Japanese man who is famously so bitter that when he chain smokes he gives the cigarettes cancer, communicates largely in contemplative one-liners, and is known to own precisely one sword. And he has a beard. We’ve all seen this movie; we know how that kind of thing ends.

Is it our complete lack of originality and obsessive wholesale rehashing and incessant rebooting and remaking of already existing movies that’s to blame?

No, it’s the children who are out of touch.

Precisely, and this is why I’ve never trusted online “free” converters since day one. Who the fuck knows what they’re actually doing with your file, and I always assumed that most of them were fronts to steal data and IP from users who are stupid enough to upload corporate and business stuff to them.

Anyway, there’s vanishingly little I haven’t been able to do over the years with ffmpeg or Imagemagick, their byzantine command line structures notwithstanding.

No you don’t. I have one shower in my house with a window in it, and it’s an extra special pain in the ass. Window frames and windowsills are full of nooks and crannies and accumulate mildew like you wouldn’t believe, and require 600% more cleaning effort than is appropriate to prevent them from doing so.

That, and good luck finding any window treatments that are suitable for use while being constantly soaked. I resorted to making a “curtain” out of a modified shower curtain.

This is what I get for my house being a 1920’s redneck abomination where everything is an addition, and what is now the ground floor bathroom is in the spot where the original kitchen was in the 1930’s, with the window that used to be over the kitchen sink now directly in the center of the bathtub.

The final verse really drives the nail home just in case anyone in the audience somehow didn’t get it:

Blame Canada
Shame on Canada
For the smut we must stop, the trash we must smash
The laughter and fun must all be undone
We must blame them and cause a fuss
Before somebody thinks of blaming us!