palordrolap

Apologies for what could well be a dumb suggestion: Herbal / nicotine free cigs exist. They might be an avenue of escape if you haven’t tried that already.

Smoking isn’t just the nicotine fix, it’s the whole ritual of getting away and doing something else for a while. Scratching that itch might work.

Of course there are other ways to get away and do something else for a while, but those are for later.

Obligatory impractical / intangible: Four decades of excellent, indefatigable mental health.

Outlandish: The double glazing is overdue for replacing. (Follow-up: Someone to clean up the inevitable mess that would make.)

Practical: Cotton boxers. I asked for slippers instead. (If this startles you from some kind of reverie, and the double glazing thing wasn’t a hint, I am British and middle aged. Slippers are a necessity.)

we fall in love

Missing specifier. You each fall in love with other people.

get married

Missing specifier. You each marry neither your perfect matches nor the other people you each fell in love with.

live happily

Mental illness can provide happiness. This seems almost good, and yet…

ever after

Insufficiently specific. You both die in the same mass road accident, travelling in separate vehicles with your respective spouses, not long after you’re each married.

Tried it. Have had at least four therapists at this point, and I’ve reached the limit of what I’m entitled to.

As for the other one, someone once told me to avoid it because “[I’m] already paranoid enough.”, with which I agreed.

So I don’t get to the cinema much, but I got to see The Muppets when it came out (over a decade ago, good grief), and Kermit singing Pictures In My Head totally broke me.

Dunno whether it will work for anyone else, but like many of a certain age, I grew up with the original Muppet Show on TV and it hit too damn hard.

The ability to deal with the rush and then persistence of negative feeling whenever anything bad happens, my routine is thrown off, or even I have to do something I’d rather not, because I do not cope well with any of those, and it causes me to shut down.

The usual advice is to “bury it”, “hold it” or “suck it up” for some unspecified later time, but that was basically my old coping mechanism and It Does Not Work™ any more.

So I’d like the upgraded version of that. Whatever it is. Preferably a version that won’t break or occasionally malfunction (we call those “Warning signs”, kids) like the original one did.

They’re insulated from a lot of the bad things that happen under either form of government, so all they see is a “grass is greener on the other side” situation. They haven’t lived under a dictatorship and they think they can influence the transition and running of it to be in their favour, so they push for the change because they think it will make things better for them.

Whether it will or not is entirely dependent on various unspecified factors, some of which may or be outside human control, or even human reckoning without the benefit of foresight.

I’m fairly certain this means that in a world full of dictatorships - and by the gods, we’re trying to do that like the silly little idiots we are - the billionaires might well push for a democratic society for exactly the same reason.

But only if they’re not in the dictator’s inner circle, which is why dictators like to have the rich people on their side.

Well, horses (and most other herbivores) are actually opportunistic carnivores, so they’re only a few generations away from switching from opportunistic to actively hunting some of their food.

And by opportunistic carnivore, I mean they’ll chomp an unsuspecting small mammal or bird if the mood takes them.

Yeah, they’re trying new things again. Gotta squeeze that stone for all the blood that’s in it.

One of my accounts has been getting a long delay before the video starts. Pre-roll ads are trying to load and play but the add-ons I have installed are still stopping them from completely succeeding. For now.

I also have auto-play turned off, and I wonder if that has anything to do with it.

Pretty sure the systems at their side think that I’m seeing the ads because I’ve had pop-ups during the delay offering free Premium.

Been there done that.

A few years back I went back to an old Internet haunt that I hadn’t been to in more years still.

People were there, chatting, including at least one person I knew who’d been there previously. I should have taken the hint when he joked that he “didn’t spend a lot of time there, honest” (paraphrase), but I basically picked up where I’d left off years before rather than feel out the new vibe. There were about twenty or so people there at first, and I only really noticed when there were ten or so left and they weren’t saying much.

I left. Haven’t had the nerve to go back. If I do, I’ll try to feel out the vibe first.

In the meantime, I’ve found other places to hang out and different people. But I still try to reel myself in occasionally, just in case.

My brain makes some dumb connections. This is basically Dom Joly with his enormous mobile phone, shouting INCREDIBLY LOUDLY into it.

I can only speak to the topics I followed on another account, but it provided plenty of reading for those topics. Whether it covered all possible posts and whether it works well for all topics, I couldn’t say.

It does kind of rely on people tagging things properly, which people might not do if they’re on a Mastodon instance specific to that topic. But then, they ought to know that those posts wouldn’t Federate well, and indeed, might not want them to.

Mastodon is microblogging. As others have said, it’s similar to Twitter. Lemmy is a link aggregator with a comments/conversation section per link, like Slashdot, Digg or Reddit.

I think the thing that people forget to do with Mastodon is to follow hashtags. The feature wasn’t there early on but it’s been there for probably a year or more now. Then you block or mute the accounts you don’t want to see that post under those tags.

It’s a useful substitute for following accounts when you have no idea which accounts to follow. You can then curate and actually follow accounts whose content outside those hashtags also catches your eye.

On the link aggregators there are the groups which don’t exist on Mastodon, but that’s what hashtags are for, right? Marking the topic.

The only hard part about it for me is feeling bad about blocking innocent accounts.

Also worth mentioning is that Mbin instances exist, and that software is basically both Lemmy and Mastodon rolled into one site. The posts aren’t fully integrated though. You have to click something to view the microblog side of things and click something to go back.

It is if you count your profit in terms of percentage of global profit, and then, should that break down, in terms of global wealth.

Similar to how it’s impossible to reach the speed of light, it’s not possible to reach 100% of global wealth unless you’re the only sentient being left alive, but you can get arbitrarily close. And getting closer requires more and more human suffering, as reaching light speed requires more and more energy.

Only time will tell whether the rich will (publicly) switch to this metric because so far, “Newtonian” measurements of profit have been sufficient, and fractions of global wealth generation look piddly by comparison.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Charles Babbage with regard to his difference engine (or some other calculation machine of his invention) which goes: “On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

Apprehension is right, Mr. Babbage. You were lucky to find yourself talking to those who, in some unconscious way, suspected that something might be wrong in their thinking, leading them to at least enquire. There are those whose ideas are so confused, or even so completely lacking, that they will assume that no matter what is put into the machine, the right answers will come out.

It might be relevant to point out that what constitutes a Mars bar differs depending on country. The US and UK are different, for example: Simple picture demonstration

The picture doesn’t show what’s in a US Mars bar, but apparently it has almonds in it, as though it’s a Snickers just with a different kind of nut(?).

I’d never heard of it either, but a web search finds a Wikipedia article, a few pictures and the implication that it’s not sold in the UK.

Also, calling Cadbury “British” these days is a bit of a stretch. Yes, they were founded here and are still headquartered here, but they’re now a multinational corporation owned by an American corporation.

And despite that American corporation being run by a Belgian, the quality has definitely gone in the American direction.

This has already been a thing, but with one important twist: When sugar was first imported to Europe, only rich people could afford it, and as such, their teeth went rotten far more quickly than those of poor people.

Having black or rotten teeth was a status symbol for quite a while.

This would undoubtedly backfire just like that TikTok “hack” that happened a while ago. (If you’re out of the loop, it boiled down to writing yourself a bad cheque for a ridiculous amount, and then spending the money that appeared in your account before it bounced. Presto! Cheque fraud! Bad things are coming to you soon!)

“We’re sorry to inform you that you have spent money wrongly credited to your account. You now owe us all that money back and we’ve slapped on a 100% interest rate for good measure. You could fight this in court, but we have more money than Croesus, so you’ll lose. Sincerely YourBank Inc.”

Minecraft Bedrock is written in and compiled from C++ and is completely closed-source.

The original Java version is technically also closed-source, but Java bytecode is relatively easy to decompile to a high level and Mojang (and surprisingly, even Microsoft*) tend to look the other way when people do that.

It seems like this was written for the Java version, but I’m not completely sure whether it’s simply a protocol conversion, in which case, the protocols are already well known, and converting it to work with Bedrock might not be too difficult.

Yes, there are open-source alternatives, but nowhere near as many people play those as play Minecraft, which is probably why that was the target platform and not one of the others.

*For now.