Platypus

Or if you’d prefer it in video form: https://youtu.be/eECjjLNAOd4

No way to know. All it tells you is that they probably haven’t discarded your application, which is certainly encouraging, but I wouldn’t read too much more into it than that.

Unless your goal is to just get laid, don’t pretend to be anybody but who you are. If your date isn’t happy hanging out with your real self, there’s no future in that relationship.

Probably Hercules the Liger. Terrifyingly enormous animal–pictures do not do justice to how intimidating a predator of that mass is.

It tests whether your mouse movement looks human–we’re really bad at things like moving in straight lines, so it’s pretty evident from a mouse movement log whether you’re a human or a simple bot. It also takes a bunch of auxiliary browser/environment data into account. It’s not perfect, but it’s complicated enough to defeat to provide fine protection against cheap spam.

• Cross-device integration/the Apple ecosystem. I use a Mac for my userland computing, and the ease with which it works together with my phone is a killer feature. Also in this category is integration with my family’s Apple devices.
• The software ecosystem. Apple’s first party apps and services are really nice across the board, and once again the ecosystem integration is the single biggest reason I use an iPhone. (the user facing apps, at least–Xcode and everything related to it are hot trash).
• Purely subjective, but Android is ugly to me. The hardware, the OS(es), and the apps just look bad to my eye. The iPhone looks and feels nice in a way that I haven’t experienced in an Android product.
• I don’t trust Google and I can’t be bothered to spend any time configuring my phone. I spend too much of my life installing shit and tinkering with config already; I want a phone that just works out of the box.

Not a huge beach guy, but I live for the summer. 80F is the ideal temperature; anything up to 100 is great too, as long as I don’t need to perform prolonged manual labor outside. Long sunny days make my lizard soul happy, and all of my best clothes are summer clothes.

That looks fairly tightly bonded to me–you’d probably be better off trying to cover it than remove it. There’s maybe a solvent, but without knowing which compounds are used for the lettering and the case, it’s a shot in the dark–always worth trying isopropyl alcohol for this sort of thing imo, but it also might damage the case.

Unrelated, but the random blue “AI” slapped haphazardly on top is a beautiful piece of accidental comedy given That Company’s rollout of AI

It’s not a matter of what people can use, but what people do use. Like it or not, Discord is the de facto standard, and it’s a lot easier to install workarounds that make Discord usable on Linux than it is to convince all your friends to switch platforms.

For many people, socialization is a core part of gaming, and Discord is far and away the most common platform for that socialization.

I had absolutely no luck trying. I went on dates, swiped apps, talked to every girl I thought was cute, and none of it went anywhere beyond some weird halfhearted relationships. About two weeks after I gave up altogether, I met a girl on my way to the water fountain and we just clicked. Six years down the line and we couldn’t be happier.

I guess my best advice is just don’t sweat it. Be yourself, do what makes you happy, put yourself in situations where you’ll meet new people, and sooner or later somebody will come along.

Quality follows where consistency leads

It depends which calendar you use! Every calendar picks a basically arbitrary system to uniquely identify each year, and in some of them “year 0” doesn’t refer to any year.

The Gregorian, for example, goes directly from 1 BC to 1 AD, since 1 BC is “the first year before Christ” and 1 AD is “the first in the years of our lord.” This doesn’t make much mathematical sense, but it’s not like there was a year that didn’t happen–they just called one year 1 BC, and the next year 1 AD.

ISO 8601 is based on the Gregorian calendar, but it includes a year 0. 1 BC is the same year as +0000; thus 2 BC is -0001, and all earlier years are likewise offset by 1 between the two calendars.

Blind Willie McTell

I got suspended once because someone “punched” me as a joke. By the letter of the regulation it counted as a fist fight even though (a) we weren’t fighting and (b) I didn’t do the punching. Good times.

It’s an album, but: The Fabulous Steel Guitar Sound of Pete Drake. It’s instrumental, upbeat, and just the right amount of interesting to just jam out to and get 'er done.

This little bronze orc:

It was a gift from my father, who in turn received it from its sculptor, Sterling Lanier. Lanier was a family friend and an editor at Chilton Books, where he insisted that a book he had read in Analog Magazine be published despite it having been turned down by a score of other publishing companies. The book was initially such a commercial failure that Lanier was ousted from Chilton–a grievous injustice, as the book in question is Frank Herbert’s Dune.

“Never use a knife as anything but a knife or you’ll end up disappointed and with a broken knife.”

Not sure where I heard that first, but it’s stuck with me.

I have a friend who was a classic Catholic libertarian in college–he held some views on trans rights, abortion, and economic justice that I find deeply disagreeable. It made conversations a little tricky because there were a whole set of topics I couldn’t bring up unless I wanted to wade into a debate immediately; sometimes I did, but often I just wanted to hang out and chill and that was hampered.

It took him exactly one year of being out of college and working a real job to realize that his economic views were fucked, and the whole rest of it unraveled from there. He’s now a staunch leftist, and it’s way, way easier to hang out with him.

That’s not, however, to say it’s not worth having friends you disagree with. We remained friends because we were able to disagree productively, and I feel I understand my own political views far better for all those long nights discussing them. Still, it was a friendship that took unusual effort to maintain.

My big dumb orange boy loves to sit right in front of the subwoofer. I guess he’s a metalhead at heart.