Zompist Bboard Again

I did this. Twice. I returned for undergrad at age 37 full time due to being laid off. It was through a combination of savings, my wife's income, and occasional contract engineering work I did. I then went back for my master at age 47 part time. A combination of my wages and my company's tuition rei...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu May 11, 2023 4:09 pmsomeone I knew in high school and college became an Episcopalian priest and is married with a kid to another Episcopalian priest (they met at their seminary).

I wish I had thought of this in my 20s. Hooking up would have been much easier.

Honestly, I think the question of whether a character is tokenistic or not is irrelevant when a series has such gaping plot holes as these: https://acoup.blog/2022/12/16/collections-why-rings-of-powers-middle-earth-feels-flat/ . (Which, incidentally, is why I have no desire to watch it.) Yes, all I...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 11:53 am The key thing is that trolls' modus operandi is precisely to get a rise out of people, and then to exploit that. As they used to always say, "don't feed the trolls".

Doxing, rape threats, & death threats are not simple trolling.

Does anyone here know enough about US law to tell us what happens if a defendant at an arraignment says neither "guilty" nor "not guilty", because they're too busy shouting about the evils of witch hunts? I assume he would be restrained or removed if needed, and his lawyers woul...

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 8:39 am mid-naughties

Best term I've heard/seen yet for that decade!

Generally it'd be nice if politics wasn't a full-time job. Term limits are a start, but I also think something should be done at the party level. We live in a complicated world, with division of labour as a general principle. Some part of politics will always be professionalised. Call me cynical, b...

More generally, that was a really unevenly distributed kind of disaster. Very much so. I joke that I've had the best pandemic ever. I've been working at home for almost 3 full years now and love it. I had a 1 hour commute each way, so without that or a lunch hour I now have 15 more hours in my week...

English is mostly uninflected, so are I would say all programming languages: and it's not like you couldn't have built inflection into proglangs either: is this cause of technical reasons or simply because the first programmers were english speakers and we all sort of went along? I'd say technical....

alice wrote: ↑Sat Jan 07, 2023 4:38 am Look on the bright side: at least The Truth About Hunter Biden's Laptop will Finally Be Revealed!

And Fauci will be held accountable for his reign of biological terror!

I hear all of the combinations here. My own usage: "John and I are talking tomorrow." "He's talking to me and John tomorrow." (This feels more natural than the below for some reason.) "He's talking to John and me tomorrow." I frequently hear "Me and John are talkin...

(Technically there is no House GOP leadership right now— there's no Speaker and if I'm not mistaken, none of the other leadership positions are filled till there is one.) No one is technically "in office" until sworn in, and they can't be sworn in until there is a speaker. There are Middl...

My wife is from Canada, and early in our relationship I remember her pronouncing dollar as /dələr/, whereas now she says it properly ( :lol: ): /ˈdälər/. Back then, I had a hard time hearing a Midwest accent, in particular the flattening of vowels such as economy as /iˈkænəmi/, and she had a hard ti...

I just read an interesting article on sound change from the BBC, centered on Queen Elizabeth and recordings of her over the decades. We think of sound change as happening slowly over generations, but that might only be only an "average" changing for large groups. What happens on a small sc...

How are our North American members coping with all the weather-related unpleasantness I hear so much about on the news? The weird thing is, when your thermostat is at 68 degrees, its freezing cold in your house by day, but boiling at night. I hope everyone else is doing better than I am. SE Michiga...

Man in Space wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:59 amThe other night I spent like six hours conlanging. I haven't done that in YEARS.

Better conlanging through chemistry!

This weekend I completed my first Python script for a 3D software I use in my production work. I've done MEL scripting prior (a language specific to Autodesk Maya), but this was a new ballgame since it's object oriented. I did some tutorials for Python with Maya back in September & October, so t...

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Dec 04, 2022 9:53 pm Write a horror story about the ZBB.

Spooky ZBB stuff...

Think I'll take today off and look into getting legal control of those movie rights. This is the next summer blockbuster!

On the subject of software UX, I get the feeling that many developers don’t want their software to be user-unfriendly at all; quite the reverse! Either they’re just bad designers and don’t realise what they’re doing wrong, or changes to the worse are imposed from above and the design is not under t...

We just got back from getting a real tree for Christmas for the 1st time. We've always used an artificial tree before. Looking forward to pine smells and vacuuming!