palordrolap

Without anyone around who would be sad if I ceased to exist, quite a lot of me would leave pretty quickly, if you catch my drift.

But then, there’s also that all but one of me would be in my house, with my things. I’m a nigh-agoraphobic hoarder. Several billion of me would be a long, long way from home and my (our?) stuff, and several thousand would start heading to my house as fast as humanly possible.

There’d be a lot of road accidents. I don’t drive.

Infrastructure would crumble immediately.

Anyone who didn’t “leave” would starve in a few days.

This is not a good plan. Do not use.

Back in the day in the kids’ comics I remember at least one occasion where the spade card suit was used for that purpose. (Britain, 1980s/1990s)

A character’s speech bubble contained “I h♠te homework” or something similar. Might have been spinach instead of homework. Or school. Anything an irreverent protagonist might not like.

The artist was clearly using this as a counterpart to the more often seen “lo♥e”, but as an adult thinking about it now, I have to wonder if the artist had forgotten about the potential racial connotation of using it, or if they hadn’t but didn’t think it was particularly important.

Either way, ♠ could be used as a symbol of hate if the context permits it. Maybe best avoided if you’re looking for a generic one though.

Ironically: toilet paper.

It looks suspicious a.f., I grant you, but even when I had a desk job in an office, I’d have a toilet roll in easy reach on my desk for use on spillages - drink spillages - and for wiping my fingers and face if I was eating and needed to use the computer or to answer the phone. Also for blowing my nose, but I’d try to leave the room with enough in hand to do that so I wasn’t subjecting people to that unmistakeable noise.

I buy the cheapest TP the supermarket sells. It’s generally cheaper than most other paper products and works just as well.

Not terrible for it’s original purpose either, but I prefer something slightly better quality for that.

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he’s fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he’d find out why we’re really naming it after him and he’d try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

Children are potential workers, soldiers and slaves. Some cannot love them, especially not those of others, because to love them is to love a worker, a soldier, a slave, a thing that is necessary, a disposable thing, a means to an end, not a thing to cherish.

For people for whom means to ends are all they can conceive of, that is all other people are. And children are easily moulded into whatever the means require in both form and thinking. Adults less so. Thus they want, they need more children. Children for the machine. Means to all ends.

Now, this is a gross generalisation because there are plenty of people of all walks of life and political leaning who can and do love their own children, and these children receive, appreciate and reciprocate that love.

But the differences start showing up when you start to bring other people’s children into the mix. Especially those of strangers. Those from groups outside of their own.

Those on the right will see this as a fault in people on the left and vice versa. But it seems to me to be people who take on right-wing leanings who have fewer qualms about treating people as commodities.

When people with leftward leanings find themselves doing it, they tend to try to even out the pain across everyone that might be affected rather than concentrating it on one specific group of people. Some of this therefore lands on rightward leaning people who think that they’re being singled out. They’re not, but they are the only ones not used to it.

I kind of wandered off the point there, but yeah. Kids. Kids are malleable, and you can build armies with them. That’s why.

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn’t mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I’m not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro’s package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can’t vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn’t need internet access to work.

There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

The two ancient stalwarts are still up and running:

Icecast directory: https://dir.xiph.org/

Shoutcast directory: https://directory.shoutcast.com/

Note that these are sites containing links to online radio stations not a statement about the quality of what might be available. Shoutcast has the better website, but is also slightly more oriented towards commercial content. Given that you say you like ads from other countries, maybe that’s the one you’d want to try first.

The Wikipedia article I got the info from basically says that mid-month was considered a good time for religious celebrations. With St. Nick being a literal religious entity, that’s probably why his “birthday” was put there.

The mid-month habit goes a lot further back than St. Nick too. For similar reasons to St. Nick’s birthday, Julius Caesar’s assassination is/was said to have been on that date (aka the ides of March). It might even have been. There’s no way to be sure.

Had to look it up. St. Nicholas’ true date of birth is lost to time, but traditionally it’s said to be the 15th of March.

My mind goes to the literal running gag in the ancient webcomic 1/0. It was the word GAG given arms and legs and it would run around out of sight and turn up quite literally when the strip needed a punchline, or at least I think that was the idea.

You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.

They put you somewhere that you have no communication with the outside world. Now what?

There are probably some big Discord servers like that. Not sure about Matrix or Fediverse equivalents.

There are old school group-chat websites still out there too, but I’m not sure how popular they are these days.

There’s not much closure here because I do not know where any of these people are now, and I don’t care to look.

At school, if you don’t count the bullies, probably the kid who thought it was amusing to take rabbits apart after hunting them. I have another story in my head about something awful that happened to a cat which may also have been him, now that I think about it. He had an odd monotone to his voice and a dead look in his eyes, like he was elsewhere or sleeping and something else was running the show. He didn’t seem all that terrifying either, which is probably worse.

There was at least one teacher who I’m pretty sure had far-right leanings, with a couple of glaring red flags, but I didn’t notice until I was much older.

Then, in an echo of that, there was the smug CEO of the company that bought the one I was working for, who came up with the magical slogan “One company, one workforce, one leader”. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in a “Work sets you free” along with it. (This was in the early '00s, and is almost certainly not known to anyone reading this.)

But as far as shitty behaviour goes, I can’t count myself as completely innocent. There are many things I’ve done, that I won’t go into, where my conscience has since reasserted itself (or ignorance lost, or both) and I cringe pretty much every day. I can only hope the people on the receiving end are doing great and aren’t too badly affected by it.

It’s for this reason I’d hope that each of the above, and a lot more people besides, would have their consciences do the same thing.

Until you have a Rock-Paper-Scissors problem.