palordrolap

This year marks three for me. Also still learning.

I’d quote Abe Simpson about being “with it” until they change what “it” is, but that doesn’t quite apply online. You’re always going to be a couple of steps behind with something as niche things crawl out of the darkness, ever mutating as they turn mainstream.

And to think, when I started on the Internet, I was already technically an adult, but I didn’t act like one, that’s for sure. Some lessons were hard learned.

Some of it is immortalised if you know where to look. I’ve changed my pseudonym a handful of times as a result.

So does JPEG. It doesn’t mean that people (will) use it for that.

You make a valid point, but the root word is Latin which obeys specific, much simpler rules about pronunciation.

These are unavoidably mangled by passing into post-GVS English, sure, but nonetheless, this is, uh, clearly a case where the spelling does reflect an intended pronunciation.

If it was to be pronounced “nucular”, it would have been spelled that way. The spelling indicates that “nuclear” derives from the already corrupted term and should be pronounced as such.

If you really want to be etymologically correct, nuclear and nucular are both wrong and it should be nuculear (new-queue-le-ar), which is similar to and indeed also, a bit peculiar.

Markdown varies a little from instance to instance, but you ought to be able to get away with a backslash before a problematic character (like that dot) or else backticks around something to get monospace text.

edit\.com → edit.com `EDIT.COM` → EDIT.COM

Try not to twist your brain on how I managed to get the left hand sides of those arrows.

You know America is well down the pan when people almost certainly in the pocket of the CCP are actually talking sense about it.

But then, this does make a convenient distraction from the similarly atrocious things they’re doing, and planning to do, in their own back yard.

Well, yes, but actually no. It’s more like MS-DOS’s EDIT.COM since it runs in a command line / “DOS” window.

In fact, since EDIT.COM went through a couple of distinct variants back in the day, you could say that this is the third variant of it.

The other two being 1) the BASIC-deactivated side of QBASIC.EXE which was an editor and programming language in one, and then 2) a stand-alone, from the ground up, version (with no BASIC to disable) which came along with Win9x / MS-DOS 7.

I keep a copy of the latter in my DOSBox config. It’s only 70kB.

There’s part of an area in Half Life: Opposing Force that has something like this. You later end up using the cannon yourself to open up the path forward.

You could also be thinking about a couple of parts of the original Half-Life as there are a couple of times with mortar fire (including the ability to use them yourself at one point), and there’s definitely at least one rocket launch silo in the game.

Depending on how strong your recollection or how muddled your memories these could be a match.

Microsoft tried to add VBScript to Internet Explorer in 1996, and the ghost of it lurked around in IE until it was old enough to drive. It never caught on.

Brave of you to assume that humanity will exist in 600 years.

Actually, we might be, but the better-off ones will be back at sticks and stones and huddling around wood fires and the like.

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.

I think at some point in the future, after the main storyline ends, maybe a thousand years hence, humanity gets flung back into the dark ages, meaning we have to re-learn how to be a technological race without assistance from the elder races. It has been a long, long time since I watched it and I might have misunderstood/misremembered what was going on though.

This could be what they’re talking about anyway.

That’s just a symptom of moral prescriptivism, which in turn is a symptom of otherwise impotent desire for control over a weird and scary world.

That doesn’t mean they’re making good choices, but it does explain why they’re making them.

Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.

The former is British, the latter is American. Noah Webster eliminated letter doubles in words where he thought the extra one didn’t add anything useful. Another word that did the same thing is “level(l)ing”.

I was going to suggest putting something in the water that would discourage swimming, but I guess it needs to be worse than whatever’s already in there… and not kill the wildlife. That’s a fine line if it exists at all.

When that happens often enough, the supermarket installs something that locks the wheels when the trolleys go out of range.

You can still get the trolley away by other means, sure, but I imagine it’s a pain to have to do that when there are wheels right there.

Wait. Tiny Batman head?! How often do they deviate from the standard format like this?! Part of the gag is that it’s exactly the same six panels with different text each time. Now there’s Batman?!

bind 'set completion-ignore-case on' might be your friend in Bash. It won’t help in scripts and GUIs though, so you’d still have to deal with that.

There are ways to write functions that pick the right option intelligently, but that’s asking for trouble. One day something will create a better match for your guess and then things will go wrong, e.g. your script intelligently turns downloads into Downloads but then something actually goes and creates downloads. Your script chooses the impostor because it’s a better match. Oops.

And then there’s always ln -s Downloads downloads. That might be enough to confuse that helpful thing that would otherwise create downloads. It’s already there, ready for use. And it works in custom scripts and things too. Until you move your script to a different user or machine, anyway.

Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

(The people who monitor and ensure the good behaviour of (i.e. “police” as a verb) law enforcement (the police) are called the “police police”. The people who do the same for the police police must therefore be the police police police. The original phrasing structure is “2 verb 1. 3 verb 2.”)