Somewhere in late 2000s I saw one of the most mind-melting GIFs I’ve seen that compared the Solar System objects to the largest known stars at the time. This kinda reminded me of that.

One of my favourite tragicomical video game achievements was in Firewatch:

Adopted a turtle as a pet. The average lifespan of a box turtle is fifty years. It will outlive you.

And this is why I will not get a pet. I’m by definition incapable of taking care of them because they might outlive me.

I remember people joking about this just after the first LotR trilogy trailers/promo stills came out. Damn I feel old.

That’s illegal, if I were to be a dictator! Look, if were to be a Dictator of the World, there would be only one overarching Law: If Turtles decide to go out of their shells, they shall leave a little sign around that says “out for lunch” or something equally thoughtful.

You Chrome folks need extensions to use non-Google search engines?

Firefox uses just bog standard OpenSearch definitions. No shenanigans. Ships with both Google and Bing if you’re into that sort of things. And you can add arbitrary search URLs, no probalo.

Literally every game manual comes with instructions to do LOAD "*",8,1. (oh, did I say “manual”? Instruction card. Yeaaaah, the minimal instuction stuff isn’t new, kids.) Everyone and their dog figured it out. If there was any command anyone knew, it was that. …only to be topped by SHIFT+RUN/STOP for initiating tape load (which you could just do by typing in, you know, LOAD).

Know what else we did when we were kids? WE ASKED AROUND. If you don’t tell your kid how this thing works, you’re making things worse, to be frank. I mean, if some random kid came up to me and asked how to load a C64 game, I’d give them a goddamn lecture free of charge.

NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…

…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.

[looking up]

…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong

The weirdest shit about this is that JSTOR apparently has a very expansive social media presence.

They have an official Tumblr account.

I had to follow it out of morbid curiosity.

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Proto-Italic? Well that’s just someone’s amateurish, slanted opinion.

One of the most tragicomical science notes I’ve ever read comes from Gilbert White:

We put Timothy into a tub of water, & found that he sunk gradually, & walked on the bottom of the tub: he seemed quite out of his element, & was much dismayed. This species seems not at all amphibious.

Timothy was luckily fine afterwards! This watery misadventure got retaliated in the most turtle-rific manner imaginable: Timothy was determined to, and succeeded in, outliving White. In fact, memory and legacy of Timothy is even more alive now - everyone can go look at the 3D scan of Timothy’s shell on the internet. Did Gilbert White’s works get 3D scanned? No, only 2D scanned. So old-fashioned.

(Also kind of tragic that Timothy was only found to be female after she died. And some time later, another tortoise was named Timothy after her, and it later turned out she was female too. Something tells me humanity is never going to completely figure out this whole sex/gender thing.)

The ghost of dead Game Boy also came with ghosts of dead batteries. …So many dead batteries. Many coming from tragic circumstances, such as almost reaching the last level of TMNT 2.

Debian, the cool guy distro in 1999. The machine overlords run on Red Hat.

In the low budget parody version, Neo ran Slackware, and the climatic battle was basically about Agent Smith somehow fucking up his libc.so.6 but then Trinity got him a copy of the file on 3.5" floppy from another system. Or something.

Scrivener!

The frustrating thing is that, at least for me, there are no perfect word processors geared for novels and other scenarios where you manage large text masses.

Scrivener is one of those cases where you have a pretty excellent software that doesn’t have a lot of problems OSS alternatives have. I have smooth time with it. But at the same time, the software always could be better.

Probably the best OSS novel writing software I’ve used is Org-Mode for Emacs. But, you know, it’s based on Emacs, so it squeaks around the edges and gives the impression that it’s a miracle it runs as brilliantly as it does.

Wolves have a peculiar view of the passage of time and their relationship with other wolves of the pack. They think of were-wolves, are-wolves and will-be-wolves.

I’m going to just say that I’m exteremely sceptical on how this will turn out, just because there has been quite a few Wikipedia forks that have not exactly worked out despite the best interests and the stated objectives they had.

Now - Wikipedia isn’t exactly an entity that doesn’t have glaring problems of its own, of course - but I’m just saying that the wiki model has been tried out a lot of times and screwed up many times in various weird ways.

There’s exactly two ways I can see Wikipedia forks to evolve: Crappily managed fork that is handled by an ideological dumbass that attracts a crowd that makes everything much worse (e.g. Conservapedia, Citizendium), or a fork that gets overrun by junk and forgotten by history, because, well, clearly it’s much more beneficial to contribute to Wikipedia anyway.

I was about to respond with a copy of the standard Usenet spam response form with the “sorry dude I don’t think this is going to work” ticked, but Google is shit and I can’t find a copy of that nonsense anymore, so there.

I hope Firefox implements a great and robust tab grouping feature. Because they used to have one that worked beautifully.

Firefox used to have Panorama view, which was a way to group tabs with a nice visual interface. …and they removed it because not enough people were using it.

…Well if you stopped removing useful and perfectly functional features, maybe you wouldn’t need to rebuild them later when it turns out people do want that feature, huh, Mozilla?

There’s an extension that reimplements Panorama and it kinda sorta works like it used to.