Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
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.
Each definition has a discussion page for pointing out errors and the like. And if you’re complete certain of something and can back that up with a source, you could even edit the entry itself.
You mean, like, other than twice my age being statistically dead?
Many.
Let’s start with neo-Luddite tendencies, e.g. deep suspicion of, and wanting very little to do with: devices with planned obsolescence; devices that basically spy on the user; this push for LLMs and similar generative artificial “intelligence”.
Or rather, the people who are pulling the strings, so to speak, behind those technologies. The technologies themselves have great potential, but that cannot be reached under those who presently control them.
Also a strong dislike of people, usually kids, making noise or worse, actually being on my property because they have no respect for certain boundaries, or they don’t even know those boundaries exist. Classic “damn kids, get off my lawn” old man attitude.
And finally: I still have a flip-phone and have no other computing devices beyond the one desktop PC I’m writing this comment from.
Also confused / ignorant here. The only one I can think of is a slur usually aimed at black people, not trans people. (Starts with C.)
With apologies to anyone who could have done without a reminder of that word, especially if it’s not the one OP’s talking about.
The reverse is true of pictures of sports folk, who are almost always pictured with their mouths open in celebration.
There used to be a saying here (UK) along the lines of “the back page of a newspaper always has a picture of a man with his mouth open” and that’s why. Sports at the back. Almost always men’s sports. Main picture was usually some leading point scorer celebrating.
The adjectival form is “felicitous”. (fe-LI-si-tus)
What do you think about when you’re laid there trying to sleep? Grabbing a notepad and writing things down can help, even if you get into a loop and have to write stream of consciousness about how you’re writing about writing. Eventually the troublesome ones will rise and you can write about those.
Other tips:
Avoid caffeine at least three hours before bed.
If you can’t avoid screens before bed, install something on any device with a screen that changes the screen colour temperature in line with the daylight cycle where you are. Redshift is a common one on desktops.
Have a “no screens in the bedroom” rule regardless. The bedroom is for sleep. Possibly that other thing that people use beds for. You can dress and undress in there too. Do nothing else in there. (Except maybe the notepad thing.)
Have a consistent bedtime routine.
When you’re in bed, try holding your breath while your mind is racing. The aim is not to pass out, just to associate the stress of one thing with the stress of another. Then when you can’t hold on, breathe deep and relax. It will take a while for your breathing to normalise. Do this as necessary once it has.
I like to play an illogical little game with myself that my room is upside down and the more I relax and sink into the bed the less likely I’ll be to fall up off the bed towards the ceiling, that is now somehow the floor.
Search your brain for the off switch that says “I’ll think about this tomorrow when I’m better rested”.
If you’ve been in bed for an hour without sleep, get up. Drink water. Read. Paper, not screen. Write in that notepad. Sketch. Do a word search. Stay awake until you’ve at least been to the bathroom to excrete what you drank. No work or projects. Nothing taxing. Only distractions. Go back to bed and try again.
Drastic measures: If you’ve gotten up three or more times under the previous rule, think about staying up. Tell yourself that’s it, you’re going to power through the next 20 hours. If that’s a terrifying concept, maybe the option of hiding from it under the covers will work one way or the other.
Last resort: Medication. I have to admit that I’m currently on meds that, as a side-effect, do help me fall asleep, but all of the above helps in the middle of the night if I wake up with mind racing, and it used to help a lot before I was on these meds.
It’s the onomatopoeia associated with a stupid person trying to think with an emphasis generating -p suffix, in the manner of well → welp and no → nope, then modified further into an adjective with a further -y suffix. Der + -p + -y.
Wiktionary doesn’t currently talk about the -p snap suffix at derp, but it does at welp. While I don’t quite have the gall to edit it into derp myself, I’m convinced it’s the same thing.
(One definition of “herp” is, of course, derived in the same way, doubly emphatic due to the unnecessary aspiration on a hesitation noise. h- + er + -p. Thus was born phrases like “herp-a-derp” for someone acting with a ridiculous lack of care.)
I envy your financial situation that you can afford to do that.
My weekly grocery budget (single person household) is £25 (~US$34), which is about the price of a decent meal for one person in a low-end restaurant here. Seven days food and other household supplies for the price of one meal. Stop and think on that for a bit, maybe.
Family do help me out from time to time, but they’re not exactly rolling in money either, so what they provide would otherwise be covered by that budget. They just help me stretch things a bit further.
Could I afford to spend a bit more? Possibly. But I like to keep a little extra put by for that inevitable disaster where I have to hire someone to fix what neither I nor my family can handle.
Perhaps importantly here, I like to know that I could get by without family help, and I’m pretty sure I could. Can you say the same?
Hints for improving the algorithm:
From your watch history, delete videos that are too similar to the ones you don’t want to watch.
Use the triple dot menu under the video suggestion to tell them you’re not interested. Choosing a reason is not necessary, but you can pick one if it fits.
If you think you’re going to lose out on something by doing the above, add the video to a playlist first. Not the Watch Later list. Make a new one.
Check your previously made playlists for content you’ve forgotten about. This might only apply if you did step 3 at some point previously.
When I was able to work, I liked to pretend that Reddit - which was still reasonable back then - wasn’t social media to get around the rule that social media wasn’t allowed. I had intended to explain that I thought Facebook, LinkedIn and possibly Twitter were social. Since I didn’t have friends or follows on Reddit, and since I was anonymous, clearly it didn’t count.
I was never called out on it.
But I definitely thought, and still think, that there’s definitely a social element to it. I mean, what’s happening right now?
This isn’t Reddit, of course, but it amounts to the same thing. I’m responding to something written by a human who might actually read it. Conversations happen in the comments. As far as Internet goes, that’s social.
A solid 4, I think. Sure, I can build a PC and install an OS but both of those have been pretty much plug and play for decades at this point.
Don’t ask me about your smartphone, your smart home devices or your Windows 10/11 problems, I don’t have a clue about any of that. If you visited my home you’d be forgiven for thinking it was abandoned 20 years ago.
I can usually figure out basic tech I’ve never used before, but I’d prefer to have the manual, help or hindrance though that may be.
English here. One of the few things I remember from my French lessons was a comic where one character said it «… et patati, et patata.»
I forget where in France that was supposed to be. We’d moved on from the Tricolor books set in La Rochelle (west coast) at that point, I think, but it might still have been there.
when you move out
In this economy?
No, really.
Meme or not, more and more people literally do not have the money to be able to move out of their childhood home.
For those stuck in that situation, parents still have to know to ease off. A gentle reminder may be in order.
But - and this is an important part - the child needs to step up and start offering to do things around the place and pay towards bills if they’ve any sense about them. And then follow through and do things and pay up if those offers are taken up. Maybe even insist and be helpful by stealth if they aren’t.
If grown offspring don’t want to be treated like children, they need to get out of the “parents take care of everything” mindset.
Edit: I don’t even have kids. I don’t know where that last part came from.
Late Gen X, practically Millennial here.
My parents expressly forbade me from smoking despite being heavy smokers themselves. They also got that same forbidding from their parents, but I guess it didn’t stick with them.
As such, I’m not sure whether that had any influence, or whether it was a natural aversion to the stink and filth of it but I’ve never smoked. Cost would have also been a big factor that prevented me from getting into it. I never had any money as a kid, and also had no smoker friends, let alone generous smoker friends, so getting a hold of anything to smoke was pretty much impossible.
Stealing from my parents might have been an option, I suppose, but I would not have wanted to face their wrath had I done that.
Alcohol and I do not get along. Too many bad experiences have come about through the combination, and it took far too long for me to learn lessons from it.
Even if I was not on medication that came with the heavy suggestion to avoid alcohol, I would not drink.
Hmm. You might be causally disconnected from the grandparent reality, but you’re technically still inside both child and grandchild.
There are also browser extensions.
Big-endian versus little-endian. i.e. which end to crack a boiled egg to scoop out the contents with a spoon. (The other end goes in the egg cup). Gets some use in computer science due to the way certain numbers are stored in memory, and also with date formats. US format is middle-endian. Got to wonder how Swift would have run with that observation.
The allegory of the cave is deeper than that. Sure, perhaps there are unseen others guiding your world view, but it can go the other direction into the concept of qualia and the nature of perception itself. Perhaps some façades are necessary as we wouldn’t be able to perceive anything otherwise.
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.