Alex Steele is bloody awesome

Eh, ubuntu does okay. Canonical is what people dislike, as the choices made in what is and isn’t going to be part of Ubuntu comes from that entity.

That may seem like splitting hairs, but consider that a lot of people really enjoy Ubuntu once somebody else strips the unpleasant stuff away and replaces it with something else. Get rid of snaps alone, and you’d bump a lot of the haters into neutral or supportive.

But it really is like any company or organisational entity. You do enough shitty stuff that alienates your “customers”, and those customers will go elsewhere if they have a choice.

Imagine a world where Microsoft had their version of Windows, but there were ten other companies, and a half dozen non profits making their version that eliminated one or more of Microsoft’s bad decisions. Mint Windows might be very popular even though Microsoft Windows is hated as much as they currently are. It’s still Windows under the hood, though with different tires and braking systems. The analogy isn’t perfect and anyone wanting to nitpick it will be ridiculed in a humorous, but vigorous manner; it holds up for casual use like this.

Ubuntu is Debian with some adjustments, so there’s only so much Canonical can fuck up if they don’t want to vastly expand the amount of work they do. Not that they don’t try lol.

Good for them, regarding their willingness to stand strong. No idea if they have a chance, but fuck rolling over.

I just looked it up because the joke answer, while perfect, isn’t very useful to a genuine question.

Apparently it is safe to eat, but lacks any significant flavor, so it isn’t eaten much.

At least once

I haven’t held a phone to my ear since before smartphones were a thing. Headsets existed for land lines. Speakerphone functions existed on land lines as well as early regular cell phones (as opposed to dumb phones which tend to have more functions than the ultra basic phones did back in the nineties).

I’m fairly confident that the last time I held a phone to my ear was before the turn of the century. I know it’s been that long at least since I would have while driving and/or at work. The cell I had at the time worked better by headset, and there were plenty of cheap and decent ones available

They’re like a real life version of Willy Wonka’s edible buttercups

I mean, if we’re going to avoid the sparkling fucking vampires, then it’s gotta be mirrors. Makes no sense within the mythologies surrounding vampires imo.

Running water is about the purifying nature of it supposedly, as other “evil” entities are also unable to.

Wooden stakes being needed to pin them down or be a death blow, there’s links between wood and life that make sense within that framework. It wasn’t originally just any wood, it was (iirc) dogwood and ironwood. Something like that.

Garlic, also a purifier.

You gotta realize, most of the early written vampire stories did come from existing legends, and those legends did usually have an internal consistency to some degree or another. But not mirrors. Stoker pulled that out of his ass due to not understanding his sources, so it doesn’t really match with much.

The idea is that vampires lack souls, and thus fear mirrors, depending on what set of myths you’re working in. But there’s also supposedly a tie back to real people with rabies being easily startled, with mirrors apparently being something that would do so even easier, but I’m not sure it holds up to scrutiny since the tie to rabies is weak as fuck to begin with, and there’s no record of that being a specific thing. It seems more like a hypothesis being projected rather than something with provenance.

But we got being invisible in mirrors.

Now, some people have decided that the mirror thing is because of the silver in mirrors, and add silver being potent against vampires in some cases, but neither is based in any of the known vampire mythology as it existed pre-stoker. And there’s arguments there that kinda make sense if you buy into some of the supposed mystical and magical properties of silver. It’s tie to the moon in some beliefs would maybe give it sovereignty over most creatures of the night, and is supposedly why it’s werewolf killing.

I can’t even remember exactly when silver started being common against vampires in books. I know that the Blade trilogy made it seep into pop culture, but it did exist before that.

Most of the stuff around the older books does make a kind of sense, but not that one

I don’t think Vonnegut will ever be irrelevant to a given time. Maybe not everything he wrote, or said, but there’s a lot of his stuff that’s applicable to the human condition.

I have nothing useful to contribute, but holy crap I wish I had the household to do this because I’d love to try it.

But if I tried this, either the teenager or the old man (well, other old man) would fiddle with it every time they opened the fridge and I suspect that would interfere with the process.

Of course. Comes with a free skin though

Yup, you’re misguided.

Be yourself, all the time, unless you’re a bigot.

Brobdingnagian

It’s a reference to the giants of Brobdingnag from Gulliver’s travels. It means that something is absurdly large. It is also a large word making it delightful in that way. It also rolls off the tongue musically.

Coming in a close second is petrichor or petrichorian.

Petrichor is the word for the smell of the earth right after a rain. Petrichorian obviously means that something smells similar, or can be used to reference petrichor. I love the word for multiple reasons. First that it just sounds wonderful. Second that there’s a word for describing this one specific smell that is a universal human experience to anyone not anosmic out of all other smells that are similarly universal.

Third that it approaches onomatopoeia on that it sounds like the way the smell smells. The earthy petri combined with the grounded ring of chor (pronounced like core, and references that the smell is a core thing of rain and earth) is the verbal sound of the way the smell tickles the nose and makes many people walk around sniffing like hounds on a walk through the woods after weeks in the city.

Petri chor. It’s like the tinging of raindrops off of a piece of granite or marble in the mountains while you shelter under a tree and revel in the scents of it all.

I mean, it’s no Brobdingnagian, but as words go petrichor is a bit magical. It invokes and evokes almost as much as tintinnabulation, but does so for a smell, which is so much harder to do. That, btw, is an excellent word: tintinnabulation. Of the bells, bells, bells, which may be the most enjoyable poem to read aloud, ever.

There’s some other words that have the ability to invoke phantoms of their related senses. Cadaverine and putrescine come to mind; both names of chemicals involved in the putrescent smells of decomposition of flesh. Knowing their meaning brings forth memories of their smells. Not quite as effective in that, because you do have to know what they mean for the incantation to work, but still quite wonderful words. Sulfurous is similarly scent summoning. Flinty works as well, but is less musical as it resonates in the oral cavity and echoes off the teeth.

Look, I can do this all day. There’s a word for people like me: logophile. There’s a fancy word for people that are into words. How awesome is that?!

Oh, that ?! Even has a word! The interrobang! Ain’t English awesome?!

And yes, at this point, the entire comment is sigogglin’ (or sigoggly, or sigoggledy depending on where in the Appalachians you are), which is a twisty and crooked word for something that is twisty and crooked.

Loquacious, no?

Believe in it?

Nothing to believe in, it’s a word that describes an evaluation of events on a subjective level.

Person does bad thing, bad thing happens, other people decide that the bad thing was good because it happened to the bad person.

Secondary to that, they believe that the bad person’s actions led to the bad thing happening to them.

Comeuppance isn’t the same thing as fate, karma, or doom, all of which do require abelief in external forces. It just means that people think any bad things that happened are appropriate

No, the usual cycle most people run is changing their sheets weekly, assuming nothing makes it necessary sooner. It does vary some, I’ve seen households that change sheets monthly or less often, but damn.

Making the bed is a daily task, and that’s the assumption I was working on in the comment

It’s harder than it was before I needed bifocals, but yeah.

Once you learn the trick of it, it gets easier to do.

I wanna say I was late teens/early twenties when they first started showing up in my area, and I stood in the store I first saw one for like a half hour trying to see the image. My vision was kinda bad across the board, even then. But I got the first one, which was a boat, and then flipped through the rest of the selection they had, maybe five or six different ones?

But any time I got new glasses, it would take a few minutes to adjust when I’d run across one again. Same if I needed new ones.

They really are fun

See, that’s why you build a therapist in a box inside your head, so it can mediate between the other aspects of your inner processes

Horse shit, there’s a few regular commentors that do their best with every question they can, and even more that contribute irregularly but in good faith, even if they fall short of accuracy.

Well, I’ve dealt with insomnia since I was a kid to some degree, and as a teenager to a significant degree. I’ve kinda got a list.

The first thing I try is meditation. It’s a solid way to shift brain waves to begin with, and often leads to improved rest even if I don’t get back to sleep at all. So I always recommend at least laying still and breathing controlled patterns. Doesn’t matter much what style of breathing you do, it’s the control and regularity of it that helps being better rested. Half an hour of that, and 4/10 times I’m back to sleep. The rest of those, I’m usually at least feeling like I had another hour or two, so I can either get up, or switch off to other things.

Reading has been a lifelong help since it doesn’t bother anyone else and for me it’s almost a form of meditation of its own. So that’s usually what I’ll try if I still want to try to sleep more. It works fairly well. Out of those remaining 6/10, it usually gets me back to sleep 3 or 4 more times.

The rest though, I’m usually going to give up. When I was single, that meant maybe getting up and just starting my day, or fucking around doing what I could do without waking housemates. That’s where devices like phones and tablets have been a huge help. I can play games, fuck around on lemmy or whatever and not disturb my wife at all, much less anyone else. Sometimes I’ll throw on some headphones while doing so and listen to music.

That’s one where it’s optional, but doing it or not has different benefits/drawbacks.

Benefits of doing it are the inspection factor; making sure they’re both clean and dry, as well as undamaged. Then there’s the storage factor where folded clothes take up less space. They’ll also be less wrinkled, but that’s a matter of style rather than a true benefit to the clothing

However, not folding them gives you the option to save time, and there’s a lower chance any difficulties will arise from stagnant air because the looser the clothes are, the better air flow they have. So there’s less funk from any missed soil, less environmental impact from things like smoking or cooking, and more time for any laundry product smells to dissipate.

Pretty minor stuff overall, and nothing that really matters