Random Comment Thread

[bjdeming]

Came across these words of Mr. Lewis recently and enjoyed this truth few dare to speak since the old unpleasant "God is dead" days of falsehood.

There is something similar in Buddhism, but nobody here cares about that -- here, it is beautifully described by a Christian:

"Are you a scoundrel?"

 

[TH2002]

Today I found out the hard way that getting your foot crushed by a heavy object doesn't feel very nice... on the bright side, my right pinky toe was the only casualty.

 

[TH2002]

Last month there was a bit of a debacle involving my iPhone 13, so here's the story: The screen cracked severely enough to where it started bleeding through and became unresponsive, so we took the phone to Verizon and they told us to go through Asurion. Trying to file a claim with Asurion went nowhere because we naturally couldn't get their [expletive] site to work. Ended up just taking it to a repair shop at the local mall, they replaced the screen for $135 and even included a warranty for it. Everything seemed to be going smoothly - but literally a week later, the new screen stopped working and would only display vertical white lines. Took it back to the same shop only to be told the warranty only covers touch related problems and I'd have to fork out another $85 for them to replace it again. At the end of the day we went back to Verizon and they shipped me a replacement iPhone, and that was the end of that.

But in the middle of all this nonsense, I impulsively decided, "Hey, I never liked my iPhone anyway so why not get a flip phone to use in the meantime?" I ended up purchasing a Kyocera DuraXV Extreme - a phone I had been aware of for at least a year but didn't actually bite the bullet on until last month.

All I can say is, for an $80 flip phone it has really exceeded my expectations. Putting the phone in developer mode, it can do literally everything I use my iPhone for and more, only it costs 7 and a half times less and you get actual physical buttons that come in handy. Another reason I bought this specific phone is due to its ruggedness, which is pretty important due to the nature of my current job - so far it's endured two or three drops onto asphalt with no damage apart from a few scratches.

For $80 you obviously don't get a touchscreen, and because of this I will concede there is a bit of a learning curve with certain applications. Things like Spotify and wX that "just work" on a smartphone do take some time to get used to navigating with an on screen cursor, but I've found it to be very doable. The only major issue I've run into with the apps I use regularly is that wX occasionally crashes when using the four-panel (but never with the two-panel) radar viewer, likely due to the phone running out of memory. Of course, there's also the two-decade old complaint that typing out anything of length takes a long freakin' time... but hey, I had a Samsung flip phone in middle school so I'm no stranger to this.

One thing I've found to be pretty neat is that the "My Boy" GBA emulator runs on the phone, and you can map the emulator/game controls to the phone's physical buttons, which already makes gaming a better experience than on a traditional touchscreen with no tactile feedback. I also got Magic DOSBox and the MS-DOS original DOOM working on the Kyocera, cause why not? (Though I will again concede that configuring the controls in DOOM was a monumental pain in the @ss... but worth it in the end! And no, I didn't type this unnecessarily long and rambly post on either of my phones...)

 

[bjdeming]

Hope this doesn't offend anyone -- it should be shared with the world right now.

 

[bjdeming]

Just this follow-up and then no more. Per RUV's live coverage, autotranslated, Navalny's funeral is today and they have just buried him -- in the most 21st-century Russian way possible.

Sinatra and then Terminator​

Those of you who are following Navalny's supporters stream know that Navalny's coffin has been lowered to the grave.
While doing that, Frank Sinatra's song My Way played.

The British National Broadcasting Company reports that the theme song of the Terminator movies has since been played.

Navalny was a long-time humorist who truly went his own way.

Of note, the man who wrote that Terminator theme reportedly never wrote more movie music. But I do not think this is the last we will hear of Russia's organized political opposition.

 

[akt1985]

In Men’s College Basketball, it might be possible we have a Third Saturday in October National Championship Game. Still, Auburn made it the to the Final Four five years ago and this year is Bama’s first ever trip to the Final Four.

 

[JPWX]

Wishing you all a Happy Easter! May we never forget the true meaning of Easter

 

[notsoencrypted]

I have to get to work by 6am tomorrow and will be working until at least 9pm, but I'm putting off going to sleep to see how storms develop, especially since I won't be able to track them tomorrow.

 

[GeneralChow]

I have to get to work by 6am tomorrow and will be working until at least 9pm, but I'm putting off going to sleep to see how storms develop, especially since I won't be able to track them tomorrow.

LOL. Why?

 

[notsoencrypted]

LOL. Why?

First, as someone who has to take ADHD meds because I have ADHD, that meme is in really poor taste & not funny. Making a joke out of abusing prescription drugs is definitely a weird take.

To answer your question, though, because I'm an election worker and there aren't ever enough folks willing to do the job.

 

[GeneralChow]

First, as someone who has to take ADHD meds because I have ADHD, that meme is in really poor taste & not funny. Making a joke out of abusing prescription drugs is definitely a weird take.

To answer your question, though, because I'm an election worker and there aren't ever enough folks willing to do the job.

Relax. It's a joke. I don't know anything about your personal life. I never took these meme jokes personal despite also suffering from ADHD, and I've never had a friend with a learning disability blow-up cause someone referenced stimulants as a drug used to stay awake for multiple days. It's commonly understood that people with, or without, a prescription take Addy to stay awake for a couple of nights. In fact, I've taken Concerta to concentrate in Law School, and I'd estimate that 75% of the law and medical students at my University used it to study, especially when there was no time to sleep due to multiple final exams that were scheduled on back-to-back days (no time to sleep cause you got to study for tomorrows exam). Some use it to party all night despite having to work the next day. Anyway, if you wanted to complain in such a personal way, or request I remove the post, you could have just taken a minute to analyze your options, and then sent me a private post instead of airing out your grievances on the thread.

BTW... A lot of people with ADD post on forums, especially political ones due to their tendency to argue. I commonly find others with ADD in partisan political groups, because it's easier to make friends that allows them to engage in the us-vs-them fights that would normally repel people in ordinary social environments. I find it kind of amusing that you pulled an all-nighter to volunteer as a poll worker in a party primary. NY, WI, CT, or RI? When I was in college, I enjoyed the confrontation of politics so much that I ran for President of both the Democrat and Republican Club, and I won both. I was kicked out by the Republicans when they found out.

 

[TH2002]

First, as someone who has to take ADHD meds because I have ADHD, that meme is in really poor taste & not funny. Making a joke out of abusing prescription drugs is definitely a weird take.

To answer your question, though, because I'm an election worker and there aren't ever enough folks willing to do the job.

(Late to this, I know...)

No disrespect intended, and I understand that everyone reacts to things differently, but I honestly don't understand why some people get so upset and offended at simple jokes. If such a post was made maliciously that would be one thing, but I don't think @GeneralChow's post was trying to be malicious in any sense of the word.

I have OCD. The way my own mind torments me on a daily basis is something I wouldn't wish on the most evil world leaders history has ever seen, and that is not an exaggeration. But I don't mind people making OCD jokes, and if anything, humor is one of the things that keeps me going.

 

[notsoencrypted]

"Jokes" about illegal activities (since Adderall is a scheduled substance) don't appeal, nor does making light of a valuable tool. One can be rude without intending to be rude; the telling aspect is how one responds to finding out they acted inappropriately.

Jokes about ADHD don't bother me. What does bother me are "jokes" about a hard-to-get medication that is hard-to-get because people who don't need it see it as something to abuse (and joke about abusing) and thus make it harder to get for people who do need it.

 

[bjdeming]

Mississippi sabercat fossil found; also, the Clarion Ledger reveals why people call them tigers when they weren't:

Saber-toothed tiger or saber-toothed cat?​

At this point you may be wondering why it's called a saber-toothed tiger in the headline and saber-toothed cat in the story. It's simple. More people know them as saber-toothed tigers, so that's what they type when they search Google for information about them. If saber-toothed cat was in the headline, readers may not be directed to this story. So, Google wins, and it's saber-toothed tiger in the headline, even though these animals weren't tigers.

"It's a large cat," Starnes said. "As far as it being directly related to a tiger — no. It's its own thing."

 

[Jacob]

"Jokes" about illegal activities (since Adderall is a scheduled substance) don't appeal, nor does making light of a valuable tool. One can be rude without intending to be rude; the telling aspect is how one responds to finding out they acted inappropriately.

Jokes about ADHD don't bother me. What does bother me are "jokes" about a hard-to-get medication that is hard-to-get because people who don't need it see it as something to abuse (and joke about abusing) and thus make it harder to get for people who do need it.

Fortunately, illicit activities have never been joked about by comedians and other jokesters.

 

[bjdeming]

Mississippi sabercat fossil found; also, the Clarion Ledger reveals why people call them tigers when they weren't:

This story seems to have gotten some legs under it in online media -- yay, Mississippi! -- so I'm sharing a cool picture from the blog of the two cats mentioned in that Clarion Ledger article (source is Joe Mabel via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0):

That's Smilodon fatalis on the left, and on the right, an American "lion" (some controversy exists among taxonomists; apparently Panthera atrox might have been an ancestral jaguar).

That exhibit is at La Brea Tar Pits, where hundreds of Pleistocene animals got caught in the sticky ooze and preserved.

No one really knows much about American sabercats outside such traps because they mostly lived and died in areas that don't form fossils.

This is why the Mississippi find is so important -- people knew that this species roamed the East, and not much more about it than that. Every new discovery, even a single toe bone, adds to the scanty database in this part of the country.

We have come so far since the ice age ended, it's hard to realize sometimes that, despite our differences, we're always all in the same boat -- as this horror scene from Alpha shows: