PhobosAnomaly

Get on. Love it. I’m pretty sure the quality and efficacy of cracks and warez were directly proportional to how hard the mad chiptunez hit.

It wasn’t a real crack unless your eardrums had been blown out by an impromptu 16-bit EDM sesh.

I’ve been out of the loop for a long long time, but are they still absolute bangers of MIDI tracks?

Wasn’t that in the Mythical Man Month itself?

Really?

My seed ratio is going to be OVER 9000!!!11

Sorry friend.

If your data was occupationally-sensitive or renders you vulnerable to financial ruination, it’s time to move to a recovery phase and see if modern data recovery specialists can work their voodoo.

Remember: never run experimental commands (you or a GenAI) in a live environment. See how it breaks things in a test environment first - if it shits itself, you may even get to learn how to fix it before running the instruction on live data.

Anecdote time! A good friend of mine drove his car to a mutual colleague’s place once because the wipers were about as much use as two chicken breasts on metal poles. He says to our colleague “Hey Foxy, I hear you’re good with cars, can you fix these wipers for me? The rubber seems to be in good nick but it’s not clearing anything”.

“Sure thing,” Foxy proudly announces, “I’ll get to work”.

Foxy strips the wipers down, one component at a time, before dusting his hands off and walking away.

“What’s going on, Foxy? The thing’s still in bits!” my pal says.

“No idea,” says Foxy, “not a fucking Scooby mate” and goes back inside, leaving his wipers and actuating motor in about fourteen pieces on the roadside.

So much for being good with cars.

Brown bread: an instance of cockney rhyming slang for “dead”. Difficult to use outside of the UK.

Mortally challenged: always good in a heavily moderated or corporate environment where every negative is somehow lexically spun into a positive, no matter how ludicrous.

One way ticket to Switzerland: hopefully a soon-to-be-outdated joke about taking advantage of their more liberal assisted dying laws.

Not necessarily a shooter, but Out of Sight was a cool take on the Second Person genre, and unusually eerie because of that very mechanic.

The issue is that it needs to be informed consent, rather than just “they said yes”… or even worse, “they didn’t say no”. I feel like I need a shower just typing that.

In this instance, the girl may have seemed like a willing participant - but anyone “consenting” when they’re below 16 (or whatever your local jurisdiction’s legal age is) needs to be taken with a truckful of salt, and in most cases is entirely inadmissable as a legal defence. I’m all for granting young adults the opportunity to make most decisions for themselves - but there are certain grey areas that their age renders them vulnerable to coercion or exploitation, sexual interactions being one of them.

There are of course very narrow exceptions - most notably the Romeo and Juliet laws, but it’s generally accepted that if one party is below the age of consent while the other isn’t, then the consent is not informed and therefore not valid.

It doesn’t have to be age-based either. It can be in environments where there is a sufficient difference in power dynamic (big difference in levels of seniority in the workplace; persons with learning disabilities or additional needs; or those with dependency issues) where consent is not informed and is the subject of coercion rather than genuine consent.

Fourth for Summit.

Say what you like, Summit Squad are nothing if not dedicated.

In fairness, nobody specifically told me not to kill other folk or set people’s houses on fire or sexually harass folk. What I did have drilled in to me was an idea of mutual respect; personal boundaries; how not to be a complete dickhead (some may say I’ve not learned much at all about that bit); and how to coexist with others to make everyone’s day that little bit easier, regardless of their gender identity.

I can only assume those basic life lessons are either not being driven home as strongly as they should be in modern life; or there’s outside influences drowning out those voices.

I’m sorry to hear that you had some arsehole giving you such poor life “advice” though. I hope it hasn’t defined or shaped your values of intimacy. It’s yet another erosion of (what I’m assuming) are women’s rights from an early age, and it’s bang out of order.

I couldn’t get my head around that stat, thinking that on average it was the current pope and the next pope (who doesn’t know it yet) in the Vatican; or whether it counted the remains of popes gone by.

Then I saw the metric area of the Vatican and it made a bit more sense… but not by much.

I’m unlucky enough to be in junior management… and that sounds to me like the manager or supervisor has the breaking strength of a melted fucking KitKat.

Sure, they’ve made a problem go away, but they’ve emboldened the arsehole to pull this stunt in the future, and it has done untold damage to the self esteem and mental health of the poor airport spud who was doing their job just fine.

From a personal perspective: if I was a passenger on that plane and we were delayed because some arsepiece threw a hissy fit at the gate, I’d be fuming that the airline caved too.

It’s gash. Fuck that guy, but fuck that supervisor too. They literally had the grounds to fuck that guy right off and enjoy every second of it, but they buckled and became part of the problem.

I went to Tesco (a large (perhaps too large ((brackets)) grocery retailer in the UK) a while back with some raspberries that hadn’t even lasted until I got home before going mouldy.

Literally, all I wanted to do was show the customer service desk lass the issue, show them my receipt, get a replacement, and fuck off to make the interaction as easy as possible for them.

An honest appraisal of what the problem was; some witty banter; and a general understanding of the “don’t be a dickhead” principle to frontline staff meant that she kept hold of me for ten minutes, noted down details and times and whatnot, and it ended up with a £10 apology gift card in the post - which in turn purchased a rather nice bottle of wine.

Where I’m going with this: I cannot fathom how people cannot be polite about issues like this. I’ve never understood how being a wanker to someone whose job it is to sort issues out somehow nets you a better end result. Perhaps the best advice I’m going to give my kids is to spend six months or a year of their teenage starts to their careers in an inbound call centre in a field they’re interested in - yes the job can grind you down and yes the pay sucks, but the basic life skills and soft people skills it teaches you is fucking invaluable.

tl;dr: solid advice, ask nicely, don’t be a twat, and you’ll probably end up with a net result better than you started.

About 1500 of them apparently.

Life’s too short to get hung up on it, friend.

I know it’s easy for me to say, but each success; mistake; and blatantly oblivious sign that they’re DTF missed are all learning experiences.

It makes you who you are now, and that’s kinda awesome. You’re better than who you were before. Onwards and upwards!

I was just clueless as fuck. I’ve got the sum total of zero game when it comes to dating, not that it matters now I’ve settled down.

I did learn my lesson though. Met a girl who was absolutely stunning, like cover girl model looks, and she was lovely. Asked her out on a date expecting to be shot down, and she said yes. At that point I was like a dog that had chased a car and caught up with it, I didn’t know what the fuck to do.

Anyway, we went out a couple of times - nice restaurant, bowling, the cinema… had a great time with her but it wasn’t really moving forward and just kinda started to fizzle out, which was no big deal.

One evening she phones me, saying she was at a house party two or three towns over, and was getting bored - and asked me to take her home. No worries there, I wasn’t doing anything, so I drove over to get her and she hopped in, a bit worse for wear after a glass or twelve of wine but not absolutely munted.

Halfway down the road home, she’s like “actually, can we go back to yours? I don’t really want to get in and my parents see me like this”. Not a problemo, took her back to mine, got her a coffee and sat and chatted. She came through to my room when I was getting changed and crashed out on the bed beside me, faced me, and said “maybe I’ll sleep here tonight?”

I’d learned my lesson, I could see that she wanted all two inches of this rage and disappointment. So I said “sure, no problem… I’ll sleep on the sofa”.

I drove her home the following morning and she never said a word. I desperately wished I could have taken that opportunity, but the whole consent thing after her sesh at the party made it a little bit dicey. I never did get another opportunity. She was absolutely lovely though and I hope she found a guy that made her happy. 😊

I dated a girl once who came round. She asked “are you going to give me the tour?”

I was like “uh, okay sure” so showed her around the living room, kitchen and back yard, before heading upstairs. I showed her the guest rooms and my room, and she sat on the bed and was like “it seems comfy in here”.

Right then I did what any guy would do, stopped for a moment, and said “it sure is. Now let’s head back downstairs and see what there is to watch”.

It was a good couple of years later when I thought back about it and it hit me like a train, “you fucking idiot”

I wonder how screen readers would parse that.

Would it be “in blinking text: Welcome to Jeff K’s website!”

or…

WELCOME TO JEFF K’S WEBSITE no text WELCOME TO JEFF K’S WEBSITE no text WELCOME TO JEFF K’S WEBSITE no text WELCOME TO JEFF K’S WEBSITE no text

etc?

Oh that sucks. I bought a multi pack of bin bags (or trash liner or whatever they’re called across the pond). I’ve used the company for years because the bag material is fairly thick, and it doesn’t just perish away if any liquids sit at the bottom. Decent quality.

This batch though must have been produced when the machine that seals the bottom and perforates it 5mm below the seal, must have been needing a service. The perforations looked like faint dents in the plasticy material, which meant that when you tried to rip a bag off the roll, it just stretched the plastic rather than tear off cleanly along the dotted line of perforations. It meant that rather than just fucking one bag up, it often pulled across the seam of the next one, making two bags useless.

The whole multipack was fucked and it was infuriating. I can only imagine the machine’s perforating teeth were blunt as fuck.

Little things.

Well jeez, I didn’t expect to find an Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters reference here, especially this late to the party.

Here’s another good source if you’re interested.

The stage one music is a banger too.