ChickenLadyLovesLife

I'm waiting for Melon to ruin "Butlerian jihad".

I'll give it a try, but ... jeez.

I make bread and pizza dough with honey or molasses instead of sugar and it's fantastic. Honey is always better than sugar -- except in coffee.

Just a reminder that ICE vans do have catalytic converters.

Q: What’s the capital of South Sudan?

A: Not a whole lot!

I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB's `On Error Resume Next` "solution" to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about `On Error Resume`, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn't actually have to use `On Error Resume Next`, you could do `On Error Goto errorHandler` and then put the `errorHandler` label at the bottom of your routine (after an `Exit Sub`) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.

It couldn’t possibly be rich parents.

A rule of thumb is that a corporate employee costs their company roughly twice their salary. Probably not very many Oracle employees are making just $37,000 a year.

Well, the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) was never seen blinking because he (almost) always had shades on. The T-1000 never blinked because the actor Robert Patrick spent weeks practicing shooting without blinking.

And doesn’t blink when shooting!

I didn’t realize this scene was in Mexico.

Acid lasts a lot longer than mushrooms, but for me mushrooms always included a brief bout of severe paranoia. I loved both of them, but now I would fight to avoid having to take either one. I’m just too old – psychedelics are for young, invincible people IMHO.

I'm gonna go patent Marxism lol. Maybe I'll patent irony at the same time.

It’s not that strange an idea given the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry essentially bribes doctors to prescribe their drugs, or the frequency with which health care organizations defraud Medicare and insurance companies, fraud which often takes the form of unnecessary medical procedures. Blindly trusting any professional is the strange idea (I agree that constant distrust is probably unhelpful).

One time I was scrambling to finish my tax return on April 15th before midnight (they kept the post office drive-thru open until midnight back then) and couldn’t find my W-2s anywhere. I had also been without weed for weeks so I was pretty irritable. Finally I opened up the bottom drawer of one of my filing cabinets and found not only the W-2s but also a big bag of weed that I knew I had put in the top drawer but which had fallen down to the bottom drawer at some point. I naturally got baked as hell while finishing my return and then drove to the post office. I was so fucking high that I drove right past the dude who was collecting the returns by the front door with a “what the fuck are you lookin’ at?” expression on my face. I had to go around the loop again and the dude just smirked at me.

My mother does two things whenever I take her to a doctor’s appointment:


Complain to everyone if she has to wait even a few minutes for her appointment to start
Endlessly ask the doctor pointless questions, repeat herself over and over again with the preface “and as I said”, and generally babble so her own appointment goes long past its scheduled length

> seeing how delicately the mortuary handled the event

I sure wish I'd had this experience with the funeral home I picked out when my dad died. I called them to arrange to pick up his body, and the answering service was AI and obviously so. I gave them his name and the voice read it back to me to confirm it as "Robert common name R-O-B-E-R-T, Smith common name S-M-I-T-H". Then the owner ghosted me for more than a week and only delivered the urn with the ashes in the night before the internment at 8:00, left it outside and split before I could talk to him. 8 grand well spent.

A Vietnamese takeout place just opened near me and I gave it a shot. Went in to pick up the food and it was all white people and I knew it wasn’t going to work out. I was not disappointed in my negativity. It was like these people had watched a single TikTok video on Vietnamese cuisine and decided to open a restaurant. Probably just a front for laundering drug money.

i’m in california



This reminds me that we should also be grateful to Mexico for giving us so much of our land.

No, I gave different advice. Contracting your shin muscles doesn't relieve the calf cramp because it stretches the calf muscle. Contracting your shin muscles sends a signal to your calf muscles to relax. This is how your body prevents opposing muscle groups from contracting at the same time.

That can trigger the muscle to contract even more, making the cramp worse. The thing to do is to contract the muscle group opposite of the muscle that is contracting, which forces the cramping muscle to relax. So for a calf cramp, try to raise your foot using the muscles on your shin.

I’m a school bus driver and my district bans the use of phones on the buses. I don’t say a fucking thing about it. It keeps the kids occupied and out of doing worse things on the bus, and it’s not like 15 minutes less screen time per day is going to make the slightest difference in their lives.

aerodynamic efficiency



For internal door handles?

I think a better opinion is "they are fucking his corpse and not giving him the courtesy of a reacharound."

Holy fraudulent ads Batman



Eh, as long as the laptops break within one year, it’s not fraud.

Or go talk to the other person out in the middle of a field somewhere without your phones. And I'm not even 100% sure anymore that that would work. Like, maybe the lanternflies are bugged (pun intended).

That's obvious. I'm pointing out that your logic doesn't support your opinion.

Reminds me of asking operations to help me move furniture in my office: “ya wanna move something, ya gotta move it with yer mind!”

My girlfriend once asked me how I knew she liked me when we first met. I told her it was because she would lightly touch my arm when we were talking. She said she didn’t remember doing that, and also that she didn’t actually like me when we first met.

Back when battleships were armed with torpedoes in the WWI era, they were launched from underwater tubes. You really don't want torpedoes on deck when people are shooting at you.

Back when battleships carried torpedoes (WWI era) they were generally launched from underwater tubes. TBF arming battleships with torpedoes was easily one of the worst ideas in military history. It accomplished absolutely nothing (as best I can remember, the only time battleships ever hit another ship with torpedoes was when the already-crippled *Bismarck* was being demolished by *Rodney*) and just added large, indivisible spaces prone to asymmetrical flooding as well as more stuff to explode when you're hit yourself.

> The US already spends more per-person than most states with socialized medical care.

The US spends more than *twice as much* per capita on healthcare than *every other nation on Earth.* You don't have to water this down with "most".

Tales from the Crypt

It would have been cool if they’d renamed themselves “Calloway”.

run our design past a focus group before implementing it




once you’ve built something, you’re not asking users for whether it’s perfect

Which one is Eggy Mule?

I once ran afoul of our UX guy for suggesting that we run our design past a focus group before implementing it. Dude literally said “users don’t know what they want”.

I had a job like that back in the day (circa 2000). I remember one stretch where for a solid month around 50 developers did nothing but call in to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? to try to become a contestant. Ironically, one web app I wrote for them (with Visual Basic and “Classic” ASP) is still in use today – and it was a front end for a mainframe system that dated to the 1980s, which means that’s still up and running as well.

Every cybertruck I see where I live has some company logo or wrap on it. It’s great advertising – it lets me know never to hire that company for anything.


The most hilarious one is for a company that does waterproofing. Like yes, I’m going to hire a waterproofing company that just spent $100K on a vehicle that can’t go through a car wash.

The Nuer (a pastoralist people in the Sudan) put milk in a gourd, add in some bull urine, stop it up and leave it out in the sun for a few months. We should really be more appreciative of yogurt.

> The search order would end up finding your shortcut first.

Sure, but in my case "Notepad" was a shortcut to actual Notepad.exe. It still should have worked.

Back in the year 2000 I was writing intranet apps for a big corporation, using Visual Basic and classic ASP (lol) and IE6 (lolol) for the UI. A very handy if not indispensable tool for this sort of work is the ability to View Source on the generated pages, which popped up the HTML in Notepad. One day for me this simply stopped worked entirely -- hitting View Source did nothing and I couldn't fix the problem on my computer no matter what I did (other people's computers still worked fine). I even switched to a different computer, set up all my tools and programs as normal, and got the same problem with View Source not working at all. I went like this for six months, and it was a real challenge to debug problems.

Eventually I discovered the problem from a forum post: I had a shortcut to Notepad on my desktop. For no reason I can possibly imagine, this prevented View Source from doing anything at all. It didn't even have to be a shortcut to Notepad proper; any shortcut that happened to be named "Notepad" would cause the break even if it was a shortcut to some other program. Renaming my shortcut to "NotepadX" fixed the problem. I would LOVE to have some old MS engineer explain to me what the living fuck was going on here.

Well, I surprised myself by making it through the first video, at least. It was interesting to hear the guy ripping on the "hide the menus" concept as hard as I've always done. That shit drove me berserk when it came out.

You didn't even mention the ribbon lol.

I wrote mobile apps from 2005 to 2019, first on WinCE/Windows Mobile and then iOS. Briefly in 2010 I wrote a TV Guide-type app for Blackberry. Up to that point I had had nothing but contempt for Blackberry but that experience really changed my mind almost instantly. The keyboards on those devices were just so incredibly good, and even though the screens were tiny, the trackball was a fantastic pointing device that allowed pinpoint precision even on that tiny screen (cleaning the trackball was definitely disgusting but you didn't have to do it all *that* often). Under the hood those devices were really impressive as well; I don't think anybody appreciated how much memory they actually had and how fast the processors really were.

A minor weakness was that RIM chose 16-bit color for the displays early on, which gave a crappy look especially for videos (which were really too tiny to watch anyway). Halving your video RAM requirements maybe made sense in 2000 but it was a terrible decision just 18 months later (according to Moore, anyway). The major weakness, though, was the shitty development environment. The built-in controls provided by the framework were terrible, but the worst part was that any time you attempted to compile your app, each module incorporated into it had to be independently signed by RIM's servers. On a good day, the signing process would take 10-15 minutes, while on a slow day it would take upwards of an hour or maybe never happen at all. And this was even if you'd made a one-line change to your code.

RIP RIM, but I'd like to see the keyboards coming back. Also the trackwheels.

A red traffic light only means stop sometimes, but sometimes you can go if you’re turning right.



It always means stop. You can turn right on red (in most places) but only after you stop first and you must yield to crossing traffic. Unfortunately, not everyone knows this - I’ve met many people who think “right on red” means you can treat it like a green light as long as you’re turning right.


What really gets me pissed is the signs that say “right turn on red after complete stop” which implies that isn’t the case fucking everywhere, when it is the case.

Monty Python used to be my favorite comedy group. Now it’s the Cleveland Browns.