palordrolap

Eigengrau. It’s what the brain fills in anyway when there’s no visual input, so it wouldn’t be a distraction if that’s all I could see.

I’d have plenty of extra problems, but that, at least, ought not be one of them.

French makes me wonder how well those movies could have worked with Jean Reno or JCVD in the role.

What accent did you imagine him having?

I was about to trot out the old “English needs diacritics argument” but then realised that “reade”, “readd”, “leade” and “leadd” would solve the problem the ways we usually do it.

because some languages allow you to write statements  
    that wrap over multiple lines
        in order to space things out that would
            otherwise be crammed onto one line,
    so for the compiler to know when the statement ends
        a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line
            is part of the previous;
statement number 2 goes here

Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read “previous statement” which makes sense at first, until the words that follow.

Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own.

And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read.

Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.

The closest is probably " ʇʇo "

Fun “can’t unsee” fact: The word " off " looks like someone doing the Thriller dance.

It varies. Right now Crazy by Patsy Cline (technically Willie Nelson, but Patsy made it famous) is what springs immediately to mind. Although I’d prefer an instrumental version because the lyrics don’t quite fit.

On another day, I might pick the Gnarls Barkley song by the same name.

Like many others here, you’re getting my upvote because you’ve expressed a valid opinion, even if I happen to quite like the drink in question.

You get this comment because a bunch of people either don’t get the distinction, or are put off by the profanity. Not really sure which.

Was confused for a second, because I don’t generally think of peanuts as having a shell, but then realised that you must mean the outer pod / husk that they’re sometimes sold in. We call the whole things “monkey nuts” here.

… but despite the fact we have a name for the whole thing, we only eat the peanuts inside.

Someone who was 18-25 in 1976 is 68-75 now. I’m not sure how many of them are here in the Fediverse, but I guess if I’m here, who was born around that time, maybe there’s a couple of them lurking.

There have been dreams that have been made of perfectly sensible things, but have been so ludicrous in combination that I have woken up laughing.

… but usually I enjoy looking at signs with writing on them because they never stay the same when I look away and look back.

I once took down a production server with a script that was an unintentional resource thief. The “oh sh-t” was watching the script grind to a halt… and then the phone started ringing.

Borderline on the non-destructive there because the server recovered fine after a reboot and nothing was lost except uptime. Sometimes a server would choke anyway, and the company assumed it was that, but that time it was my fault.

I had to answer more than the one call regarding that, feeling sick to my stomach, so I didn’t escape unpunished.

It is worth noting that the same metric is the exact reason that web browser version numbers are so ridiculous.

What’s that saying? Something about the moment a metric is used to measure performance, it ceases to be a good metric.

That’s what’s happening here. In one of the stupidest ways possible.

They say the brain stops developing around 25-30. I figure that’s probably why people don’t feel much older than that mentally despite their chronological age being up to three or four times that.

I’m starting to think the deterioration of the body and the constant reminders that brings is how people gauge their age beyond that point.

Source: I now need glasses for distance and can no longer hear CRT TVs. I don’t heal as quick as I used to either.

Seems like we’re pretty similar.

When I used to pack a lunch it was always a sandwich, a piece of fruit and usually something chocolate like a KitKat or a Twix (or some off-brand equivalent).

Sandwich often had some kind of lettuce, meat slice and maybe some other salad vegetable. Bread varied. Wholemeal some days, white others, depending on what loaf I was working through at home.

Fruit was generally apple, Gala preferred, although the rare ones that tasted amazing got more and more rare towards when I eventually gave up apples due to digestive issues. Occasionally easy-peel oranges of some variety. Satsumas or tangerines.

The sandwich went in a plastic, self-sealing sandwich bag to stop it falling apart. Everything then went into a plastic sandwich box to prevent things getting squashed in my backpack.

If I was going somewhere without drink making facilities, which was almost never, I would pack a flask of tea. Hot with milk pre-added. Can’t remember when I sweetened it, it’s been so long.

When this was for work, I already had my own tea-bags and sugar at my desk because the company-provided stuff was always terrible and/or contaminated somehow. Some filthy animal always put their tea or coffee-soaked spoon into the sugar bowl, because f–k everyone else, I guess. Anyway, I mention this because it might count as part of the packed lunch, since I brought it, even if it wasn’t strictly brought every day along with the main items.

Edit to add: I sometimes used to pack a re-used 500ml plastic pop bottle with diluted squash in it as an alternative to tea. That would have been during summer.

Additional #2: I went through a phase of buying lunch at a local shop every day to save time preparing food in a morning, and realised with horror that it was costing me a four figure sum per year to do that. That gave me more impetus to make my own darn lunch!

Semi-serious answer: Sometimes your PC has only two working monitor ports, and you choose to solve the “need more monitor space” problem by getting bigger monitors.

The way I have my two monitors set up is fairly similar to that single curved display, so I could see this being a natural upgrade path for me.

I like to think that if they were unhappy with their situations, some of them would do something about it, considering how the toys got revenge on Sid for mistreatment.

The alternatives are all extremely dark and I wouldn’t want to diminish what actual humans go through with abusive partners by digging into it.

That’s what I thought.

I remember being that age, and you still have a lot of growing up to do, even if the very idea feels like an insult.

The advice still stands.

If you’re of traditional university age and not mature students, you’re all still kids. You might be of legal age and thus qualify as “mature” by some standards, but in 20 years you’ll look back and realise that, yeah, you were all still basically kids.

This explains their juvenile behaviour and why it feels right that you need to retaliate and win.

Avoid these people as much as you can. Have nothing to do with them. The best revenge here is to do well with your studies and get better grades than they do. And if you don’t, at least you can say you tried your best.

If they begin to attack you physically or steal things from you, the situation is different than back at school, because you can have them cautioned, thrown off the course or even arrested. As long as you have evidence.

So if you really must do something, start making a record of who said what to you and when. And don’t be anywhere alone with them.