palordrolap

Immediately order a DNA test and/or a second opinion. There’s no way I’m not my parents’ child.

I look and sound too much like my father, so I’d have to be the product of an affair of his, and my mother would have left him and cut off contact with whichever relative was actually my mother if he’d done that. She absolutely would not have adopted me and raised me as her own.

I mean, I like the idea that I’m actually the beneficiary of an extremely wealthy family, but it’s simply not the case.

Edit: beneficiary, not benefactor

There was a situation where there were two sets of identical twins born at the same hospital at the same time, and somehow one of each got swapped. Each mismatched pair grew up thinking they had a non-identical twin and only found out about the mix-up later in life.

Maybe they wouldn’t have found out at all if both were swapped. Food for thought.

There’s a certain group of old men, many of whom happen to be running certain countries, whose EOL - natural or otherwise - I’ll be relieved to see, but the fear is that there are plenty of (relatively) young men with similar ideals waiting in the wings, ready to take the reins when the old guard is gone.

Note that I’m not wishing them dead per se, but no-one lives forever. Not even them.

The war would be over if Putin just took his troops out of Ukraine immediately and indefinitely. Even Trump can grasp that concept. It’s not hard at all.

But Putin won’t because he’s too far into a delusion that was first one of grandeur but has become one of sunk cost.

Trump might be able to grasp that too, but I’m not sure that his mind wouldn’t then immediately reject it because its roots are in qualities he admires in himself and others.

Anonymity on the Internet is about as strong as the lock on your door. A sufficiently motivated individual will be straight through it with barely a thought.

At present? Keeping an eye on Russian ships “just out for a walk” so to speak, in waters nowhere near their immediate interests that happen to be a lot closer to British interests.

Why does that need to be a jet? To remind those ships that if they were to bring their own jets for whatever reason, not that they’d ever even have the remotest possibility of the merest inkling of a thought to do such a thing, we’d be prepared.

Mild sabre rattling. Also known as “international diplomacy”.

Y’know if I was the exec of a bloodsucking electricity company, I’d be explicitly putting something in my terms and conditions that commercial AI data-centre use of my company’s supply is to be charged double or triple, and that undeclared use will be subject to heavy legal repercussions and surcharges.

There has to already be precedent for specific commercial uses of resources being treated differently from others. And if not, commercial versus non-commercial use may be a close enough precedent.

Likewise, if I’m the oil company or builder of power plants, generators and the like, I’d be putting a similar clause in.

This would then be one of those situations where desires align, however different the goals.

Name and shame them. Send them a complaint.

Relatedly, does anyone know if there’s a public list of sites that don’t work (properly or at all) in Firefox somewhere? A quick (non-Google) web search doesn’t seem to turn one up. If I was working at Mozilla, that would be the kind of database I might be interested in making a public resource. And I don’t mean as part of the Bug Tracker, though links between the two for legitimate problems could be useful, I guess.

Something with a very basic interface that has an offending site name, how it doesn’t work, perhaps why, and what, if anything, Mozilla can do about it. In short simple sentences. One per offending site in 16pt text. And a search feature for when it runs to the hundreds.

It could be something like: [favicon/logo] example.com - Outright states that it will not support Firefox. Mozilla cannot do anything about this. Complain to Example Inc. [favicon/logo] example.net - interface is buggy in Firefox. Site misuses web standards in a way incompatible with Firefox’s renderer. We are looking into this. <Link to bug tracker here> [favicon/logo] example.org - interface does not load. Site uses non-standard Google-only CSS properties. We are looking into this, but you could also contact The Example Organisation to ask them to review their CSS. etc.

I’ve not had any problems with the handful of sites I use, at least not outside of something caused by browser security or add-ons which I eventually figured out how to fix.

That said, I’ve probably forgotten a handful I just straight up refused to visit again when they didn’t work and now they’re not in my regular rotation any more, so I don’t notice.

At most, a week. Family would notice otherwise.

I’m sorry that your relationship with yours isn’t good.

The more underhand tactics all get a pass though. Outright lying to the suspect(s). Other dirty tricks to get, and keep, the suspect(s) talking without access to legal representation. Prison snitches who somehow obtain a perfect confession with details that only the perpetrator would know… but also the police who totally wouldn’t coach the sort of person who’d do anything for less time behind bars.

And there’s often the implication that suspects who jump the hoops and get legal representation, otherwise keeping their mouths shut are uncooperative scum who are probably guilty and should be thought of poorly, when it’s a perfectly valid way to act even if you’re completely innocent. In fact, it’s the best way to act because you have no idea if the police are corrupt and/or lazy and are looking to pin the crime on someone, anyone, and that might well be you.

OP’s example is having a toilet paper accident and poking their own rectum, which I doubt is the most painful thing in the world and other people are going for the “most painful” interpretation, so I thought I’d cover all bases.

If we’re talking about unpleasant sensations, there’s one I get that makes me feel nauseous that I can only describe as being like a smooth grooved surface with unwanted lumps in it and I’m travelling and lurching over it in some unseen dimension. (I’ve actually met at least one other person who described this without me mentioning it first, so it might be somewhat common. I have no idea.)

I was watching a Let’s Play video of a video game the other day and the texture for the water’s surface in-game somehow reminded me of it, and it made the video hard to watch.

If we’re talking about actual pain, I’ve had food-related (possibly also medication-related) stomach pain that had me curled in a ball thinking I was going to die and then thinking that might not actually be such a bad idea because then the pain would stop.

I now assume that that must be similar to what some people go through with period cramps. No way I’d want to do that once a month. The handful of times it happened to me was more than enough.

Honourable mention: The weird sting and sensation that isn’t actually a smell but is somehow in my nose if I accidentally touch a hidden juvenile thistle in a lawn. Those things are prickly monsters that are just a shade bluer than grass and you often don’t see them until you’ve put your hand on one. Other sharp pains sometimes trigger that “smell” as well. I always associate it with the colour of those thistle leaves though.

This feels like a recipe for screen burn, but I assume whatever elements the watch uses for pixels don’t do that, and it’s just the bad side of nostalgia making me feel that way.

There’s the old saying: “If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.”

So they’re either incompetent, are hoping you are, or they’re playing to this logic and only want rich customers.

These options are not mutually exclusive either.

We’ll only rejoin if it makes the rich people who live here a lot of money, and that would have to be as soon as possible after that happens.

Otherwise, picture a child sitting, pouting and petulant, arms folded tight, on a stool in a corner saying “no!”

There’s a vague possibility of long-term gains turning their heads as well, but the armchair physicist and psychologist in me thinks that the gain would need to be proportional to the square of time in order get through their greedy little brains.

My parents were of the opinion they were an elaborate hoax until they had me draw what I saw in one of them.

This was in a newspaper 30 or so years ago maybe. The image was accompanied by a depth-map image of what should be visible, but they covered that up. Then they asked if I’d looked at the newspaper before them because, even with my terrible art skills, it was clearly what was in the depth-map version.

I think they believed me in the end though.

FWIW, I can see them and am probably some level of ADHD or autistic. I would have expected the correlation to be the other way around to be honest, i.e. more neurodiverse folks can see magic eye images than neurotypicals, but our two data points aren’t enough to say one way or the other, only that maybe neurodiversity has nothing to do with the ability after all.

2140000000 for decimal round number enjoyers

0x7FEEDBAC for hexadecimal pun enjoyers

Edit: See responses for why this probably wouldn’t work. Nonetheless, if I was a grower I might look into it anyway just to see what happens. How much could a dry corner of a field affect margins anyway…

Fun fact: Rice can be grown in the dry. The reason it’s grown in the wet is that, unlike other grasses, it tolerates being grown in the wet, and so the water protects the rice from unspecified environmental factors.

My point here being the question as to whether the factors that destroy rice in the dry are worse than these flamingos. And if not, there’s a solution presenting itself here.

My parents recently got rid of a set of encyclopedias that they’d had in the house since at least the '90s. I don’t actually remember where they came from or exactly when they were suddenly there, but recently they got rid of them (donated to charity) and I was a little offended - not that I said as much - that they didn’t offer them to me.

They weren’t even recent. They were printed in the early ‘50s, but in my parents’ (still) no-Internet house, those encyclopedias were a good pastime.

There are usually several sets of the same available on eBay, but 1) the good sets are a bit out of my price range, 2) I have internet here and 3) I’m already hoarding far too much stuff.