palordrolap

I might have mixed some things up in the 20+ years since I saw that episode. For example, I could have also sworn it was Sam who made the wormhole comparison and was told “No.” I do remember it being awkward though, like the question was embarrassingly naïve.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It’s not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter’s novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King’s Jaunt.

Depends on what frame of mind I’m in. In a sufficiently devil-may-care mood, I might try and create a Moriarty. Or better, role play as one.

Or figure out how deeply it’s possible to nest holodeck simulations before things get funky.

I could be a Q without any collateral damage. Torment Picard and Janeway. Get punched by Sisko. Roll it all back. Q’s done the same.

Be a (male) Mary Sue in any TV show universe I’ve ever watched and not be judged for poor writing… Although O’Brien did appear to think he could discern sarcasm from the Enterprise computer from time to time.

And of course there’s the thing that Riker, Barclay and LaForge, if not a good many of the rest of the crew almost certainly got up to in there… I’d be stupid to think I’d not try that at least once.

When I got rid of mine, I made a list of all the media I still wanted a copy of and then, over time, found second-hand or new old stock DVD versions online. That was ten years ago and I’ve still not broken the cling wrap on some of the replacements I bought. Just goes to show how much I really needed them!

That said, my collection was far less than 100, so your collection might be an expensive endeavour to replace.

Tapes with crud recorded from TV and computers went to landfill. All the commercial ones went in a consignment I had a charity organisation collect along with a lot of other things I was clearing out at the same time. In 2025, I’m not sure charities will accept them any more.

I did manage to digitise some of the stuff from the TV / computer ones with an old VCR and a TV card in the computer, but that must be coming up on 20 years ago now. That’s all on a DVD around here somewhere. In one of those multi-disc wallets. Remember those?

They can still be had online if you feel like paring down the space your DVDs take up. People used to use them for burned DVDs, of course, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting legit DVDs in one. Make a separate binder for the DVD covers if you really want to, and send the cases to landfill or recycling.

If you want to go really nuts, do the same with Blu-rays.

I do regret getting rid of a few things during that clear-out, but maybe only one tape had some sentimental value. And yet, if I’d kept it, I’m think I’d be equally disturbed that I didn’t get rid of it with the rest of them.

Transphobic arguments tend to either be in bad faith or poorly-informed, and are often bolstered by Brandolini’s Law. i.e. the one that says “The amount of energy needed to refute bullsh-t is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”.

The especially clever ones claim that peer-reviewed journals say things they don’t.

If Reddit are against transphobia it might be one of the few things that’s still going right over there… and I wouldn’t expect it to last.

Humanity - civilised Greeks or not - didn’t have the metallurgical knowledge to be able to build locomotives and rails out of strong enough materials yet. Ancient Greece basically coincides with the Bronze age.

You’d have to not only bring (knowledge of) steam locomotive tech, but also every single bit of iron tech required to build one. You could skip the requirement for rails by opting for a steam traction engine, not a full locomotive, but those are far closer together in technological ability.

None of this factors in the propensity for steam boilers to explode, which you may or may not consider important.

There’s a reason we were still using beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc.) for traction until the 19th century.

Like the concept of predeterminism (is the future already written?), the concept that this might all be a simulation has exactly the same “solution”: Don’t get too hung up on it. We might as well act like it isn’t.

We have as much control over things whether this is all real or not.

Do what you can to get by with as little harm as possible to yourself and others until, well, you know: Game over.

If you have the strength and maybe resources, you might even be able to make this existence more pleasant for others, but if not, try not to worry about it.

As for brain chemistry, I’ve been in the same head space that brought about your question, and undoubtedly will be again at some point in the not too distant future.

It’s probably only because I’ve taken a bath today and put on fresh clothes that I’m relatively chilled out and philosophical right now. Also the Sun is out, which is probably helping too.

Potential exception: “Adult.” Arguably because it generally isn’t a verb when emphasis is on the second syllable, some people do that even when it’s a noun.

I’m an Adult vs. I’m an aDULT. *

Use as of “adult” as a verb is non-standard and where to emphasise that is even less clear-cut for those of us who put the emphasis on the first syllable of the noun. Interestingly, “adulterate” is less strange as a verb and the emphasis is definitely on the second syllable there.

We could tie ourselves in knots analysing the late emphasis form as a verbified noun, re-nounified. Ow.

* The underlying truth of said statement is irrelevant. Chronologically, I have been one for some time. Mentally… ehh.

In some countries there’s definitely a catch-all law for this. It’s called Driving without due care and attention where I live.

I can imagine that in jurisdictions where the police are more likely to be predatory, retaliatory or have quotas to meet that such a law might be considered too powerful by a judiciary that isn’t quite as corrupt, so that could be why such a thing doesn’t exist. Assuming that it’s true that no such law exists, anyway.

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.

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.

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”.

If these twisted statements are provably false - even if they contain elements of truth - then this is a case of libel.

Creating accounts everywhere someone is in order to track what they do and say is stalking.

Making repeated efforts to ruin a person’s day is harassment.

Contact law enforcement and/or legal representation. I’m not either of those but it seems like there’s a strong case here.

I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.

Adopting IPA would be wrong because it would require that everyone talk exactly the same way.

Loosening the definition to “something I bought that I didn’t need, despite having thought about it for a while and waited for the price to come down”, probably the recent remaster of the original Quake. And I only wanted it because it was the only way to get the Dimension of the Machine level pack that it came with.

As it turns out, I’m not really much of a Quake-head any more, but at least I’m no longer wondering about those levels.

I’m not sure that counts, considering which subset of the population is the largest consumer of it. That in and of itself doesn’t make it fail*, but the fact that the makers of it know this and thus might be tailoring it for that audience does kind of make the the whole thing about men.

Basically, we’re just swapping one meaning of intercourse for another.

* in the same way a group of men watching a regular movie that passes the test wouldn’t change that fact.

For wackier definitions and slang, I like UrbanDictionary. I’d say Wiktionary, but someone already suggested that one.

I’ve also used dictionary.com and thesaurus.com in the past. Obvious names, but they’re not terrible.

But back to UrbanDictionary - there’s a lot of craziness and dross on there, but there are also plenty of diamonds in the rough.