Plan some rest stops in advance, about every two hours. A few minutes of looking at the scenery and fresh air can help a lot with alertness. Even better if it’s quiet enough for a power nap.

You just reminded me that pineapple upside-down cakes were a common thing in the 80’s. At least where I was. What happened to those?

Typically just fried on the grill with the patty, bacon, and onion.

I suspect Corporate Memphis is partly successful because it works with ambiguous skin colours, so it automatically ticks diversity boxes without the artist having to think too hard about representation.

My prediction is that the successor will double down on that. I hope it’s cartoony style anthropomorphic animals.

It’s the shape of things, too. They have no character.

I was shopping for door knobs recently, because all the knobs in this house are spherical and smooth. They’re impossible to grip. We have a disabled person in the house who struggles to turn them. Gloves slip right off.

At the hardware store is an entire aisle full of doorknobs, but nearly all of them are the exact same smooth spherical shape. The rest were ugly rectangular lever styles that work but look very industrial in a home that’s mostly natural textures.

Somehow all these brands, finishes, locking features, price ranges, dozens of product variations, and literally only two doorknob shapes. Both so minimalist as to be almost impractical.

I had to settle for the lever style for one door, and just put grip tape on the others.

I recently had to get a new card cancelled and reissued because it was sent to an old address. I definitely updated my address with that bank, but it didn’t stick.

I’ve updated my address with other companies and later found that different parts of their system kept different addresses.

Not too long ago I even worked on the address changing section of a finance company’s website. That project was a nightmare, and I learned a lot about why address changes are much harder to implement than you would think.

I really wanted to spend more time ironing out edge cases on that one, but I was under a lot of pressure to get it delivered because some genius had already committed to removing the forms we already used for this.

So basically it’s possible this person did change their address, at least for some things with that bank, and fixing it might not be something they can do without just the right specific instruction. As long as the bank can demonstrate a good faith attempt to do it right, they are legally covered. Sometimes it’s cheaper to compensate for very rare customer losses that result in edge case fuckups, than to pay developers what it would take to fix it properly.

Perhaps you have to experience it from the outside. It’s hard to put my finger on, but there’s a noticeable difference in how Americans see race.

Here in Australia we’re quite diverse, but within a generation people tend to act very similarly, regardless of background. There are still differences, and they should be celebrated, but I’d say we have more in common as just Australians. There’s a tipping point where what’s most important is either a common national identity, or ethnic identity. It feels like we are just barely on different sides of that line - which is funny because Americans are more into overt displays of patriotism.

For example, we won’t claim to be Irish because our grandparents were. That’s probably the most common differentiator.

That said, racism exists here like everywhere else, and is a problem. That may be a different discussion though, because it’s the minority.

You know what… the more I think about, it shouldn’t be any different between our countries. But it’s an impression everyone seems to have so there must be something to it. Maybe it’s because the United States is relatively insular? It means the differences within your country are more significant. Australians have a lot of interaction with other nationalities (tourism is an important industry and we love to travel) so our national identity becomes more significant, because that’s what we’re often representing. Europe would be similar with its relaxed borders.

I missed that whole meme, but back then my fiancée was working at a firm that was representing someone trying to assert IP rights on the dance. It didn’t make much sense to me why an Australian firm would be involved.

Reading up the history now to see how it started, I’m just more confused. I guess the Aussie channel that kicked off the meme wanted credit for making it big, even though they copied Filthy Frank?

It didn’t even occur to me that Deadloch is mostly about women, even though that shouldn’t be surprising, given who made it.

I had a similar revelation after I played through Forspoken. I assumed it would be a target for the anti-woke brigade since the protagonist is a black woman, but it was only after finishing it clicked that every character of consequence is a woman (with one exception I won’t mention for spoiler reasons).

If the story keeps you invested, genders are pretty irrelevant. I think genre expectations can shift if we don’t draw attention to them.

It’s more common than I was aware for software mascots to have distinct names from their respective products.

I kind of like “Ian”. Seems suitably humble for a diminutive little rodent.

Another option might be from the band’s own mascot, Snaggletooth.

Similar to that. Nouns that have a somewhat specific meaning in our business context, like Investor, Adviser, Product, Portfolio, etc.

This is the accepted writing style at my work, and it’s been driving me nuts for years. I’m talking about the copy we put on all our public facing materials. Even our resident linguists hate it, but apparently someone high up thinks it’s industry standard.

Remembering this just made me happier to be leaving soon. They’re so resistant to challenging entrenched habits. I should have seen these signs when I started.

Peep Show is my human litmus test. Seeing how people react to that show can tell you a lot about them.

Just brainstorming a semi-plausible explanations here. What if the variation is due to massive portals/wormholes to other planets? If you’re standing near one that goes to a place with much higher gravity when it opens up, it could cause you to be pulled toward it, or increase gravity around that area. If these portals are kept secret, the gravity fluctuations as they open and close might appear to be as random as weather patterns.

Could be an interesting plot point too, if your story includes races that have secretly come through these portals. Their existence could be discovered by triangulating the gravity changes during an event. Lots of interesting possibilities.

This would change my life more than any conventional super power.

If it’s just enough to beat out the house advantage, it might be all you need.