palordrolap

Well, I’m not going to downvote, but something in my brain is screaming “lossy compression!” and so you might say I’m at least wary.

There was a The Real Ghostbusters comic back in the day that featured an alien ghost. It wasn’t a clown pirate at the same time, but it did look kind of funny.

The proton packs didn’t work on it and, my memory is more hazy at this point, I think Egon said something about it registering as living matter, like somehow protoplasm and ectoplasm were reversed wherever it came from. I do remember that it figured out enough English to be able to spell out “SNED ME OME” (sic?), which I presume they managed to do. I don’t remember exactly how.

I realise this is only tangentially related to the comic, but this has lived rent free in my head for nearly four decades, so it’s cathartic to give it an airing.

“Desert” can also mean “deserted”, which is what the word in “desert island” means. It’s basically a fossilised older usage of the word that no-one uses on its own any more.

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.

Candy bar wrapper from the counter top after the owner forgot to put it in the garbage. Forbidden chocolate flavour with very little danger of poisoning.

Which is not to say the dog knows this. It would have had the candy bar too given half a chance.

I still think Win2K was the true peak. Everything since has been clown shoes and bloat.

… but I have to admit that my Mint Cinnamon customisation looks a whole lot more 7 than it does 2K.

Mimi, I hate to tell you, but this is a sign of getting old.

As far as I know, from all the way over here on the other side of the planet, it’s not actually the large ones you have to be afraid of.

Huntsmans, like the pictured spider, are relatively harmless, maybe a little bit stupid, and the biggest danger is the chaos you’ll cause freaking out about the size of the thing and then trying to relocate it elsewhere.

It’s the small ones like the redback that you have to watch out for. I have heard that they like hiding under toilet seats and in shoes.

That sounds more like a protection racket than good advice.

… which will be fed into the next generation of LLMs in order to stop sounding quite so much like LLMs.

That’s a tricky one. I’m a big fan of Bourbons, but since they’re not restricted by copyright or branding, every UK supermarket and many other confectionery companies each make their own and the quality can vary quite a bit.

There are also two common form factors. The original is roughly 2:1 (as pictured in the above article) and the other, which is less common, is closer to 3:2 to match the common form factor of the Custard cream.

The supermarket own-brand I usually get (2:1) has the bonus of being dairy-free, which is not always the case.

Sometimes I catch myself involuntarily doing a little happy dance on biting into one, so the quality of that particular brand has yet to drop beyond that threshold for me.

“Be nice to your mother. It’s bad enough being a wereunderbedmonster without all the insults.”

Some have aged like wine. Others, milk.

Some are still in use that ought to have been dropped years ago. Others have been forgotten and need to make a comeback, or at least get a remake.

And in a large number of cases, people will disagree about which memes fall into which category.

Also a lot of the newer memes have completely passed me by or else are so niche I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to have seen them or not. This revelation largely stems from a recent visit to KnowYourMeme to look for an old meme and all the recent posts were completely opaque and bewildering to me.

I guess this means I’m old, but I already knew that.

Binface could easily do better than Farage has. I mean, it’s not exactly a high bar.

Farage barely shows his face there and almost never in Parliament.

You can guarantee that Binface would be more than willing to show up in both places frequently. He might even go so far as to represent Clacton properly. Perish the thought!

(I can imagine that if he won they wouldn’t let him into the Commons due to not being dressed sensibly and then refusing to recognise him if he does so, because that’s the sort of dirty trickery I’d expect from Parliament. So I’d be very interested to see what he does in order to comply with both directives at the same time.)

Some of these people are so out of touch that they’d have to spend a decade in the trenches before they might even begin to get an inkling that something is up.

Case in point: Bezos went to space and wasn’t humbled by the overviewer effect because his ego is literally larger than the planet he lives on.

Chances are that they didn’t have anywhere near enough space to give everyone the full terabyte and they were gambling on not everyone needing all their allocated space.

I mean, it’s not hard to throw 64TB of drives into a server, set up RAID with some level of redundancy (let’s say something that gives 16TB apparent) and get it hosted in a data centre somewhere. If you’ve a thousand users all taking up no more than a few gigabytes each, you might not even fill it.

And if they bought those drives prior to the recent price hikes on all things storage, it might not even have cost them much. (I mean, the initial outlay even now wouldn’t break $10k.)

This is all catastrophically bad planning, yes, but businesses do this sort of thing all the time, even long after the start-up period where something so basic might make sense.

(And thus we see a likely reason why they’ve suddenly shrunk the free tier to a slightly more sensible value.)

Insufficient demand means insufficient return on investment, so of course prices need to go up to make up the shortfall.

And in another story on my feed, we have a trillionaire with the opposite problem, where there’s too much demand, so of course, prices need to go up to reduce demand.

I was going to say “at least it’s not wasps”, but then, the wasps would survive and be able to sting over and over, and the bees would each likely die horribly after their first attempt. If I’m going to die by being stung by a swarm of something, maybe I wouldn’t want the deaths of hundreds of bees on my conscience.

On the other hand, the secret panel would likely involve something less nice if it had been wasps.

Local historical societies and any locations that still exist from those photos maybe ought to be given the option to save them if you don’t want to keep them.

If you can identify people and locations all the better. Since you have scans you can provide a physical thumbnail sheet with what’s going on in each one. Or do what they did in the old days and write on the back of them.

It is a reference to a certain 20th Century leader who went deep into politics after his art wasn’t considered good enough to get him accolades or qualifications at it.

(You’ll have heard of him. Shouty and German. Funny little moustache.)