I assume they’re trying to out-do the old Soviet joke.

Preface to a new sex education schoolbook:
“Dear children. There are three kinds of love. First, there is the love between parents and children. We’re sure all of you are already familiar with that, so there is no need to discuss it here. Second, there is the love between two adults. Some suggest it might be too early to tell you anything about that yet. And third, there’s the love the People feel toward the Party, and that is what we shall discuss for the rest of this book…”

There’s a movie plot hook buried there. About a kid on spectrum whose robot buddy gets killed by the uncaring business. They go “oh no, I’ll have to fix my robot buddy” and go on to become a tech genius. One day, they become a tech millionaire, and the story’s antagonist, the shady businesses partner, goes “look, we’re bankrupt, we have no choice, we have to shut down all of the robot buddies”. And the protagonist remembers the saddest moment of their childhood and are like “no, we can’t do that”.

It’s an insurance company. I assume they had a 6 hour meeting discussing the shade of the quotation marks. Then the social media intern said you can’t change it.

I’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.

Things that do trip me up:

• Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
• Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
• so freaking many irregular verbs etc
• seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)

Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.

For those who don’t need cloud access, I just put all of my photos on a NAS and use a digital asset manager software. digiKam is great if you want an open source solution. I use ACDSee because it’s faster and has better usability in my humble opinion. But since both of the software packages store the metadata in image files and XMP sidecars and basically only use local app-specific database for caching, if digiKam ever gets a couple of quantum leaps ahead, switching back to it isn’t that big of a deal. (As usual, don’t use Adobe Lightroom or you’re screwed in that regard. Or so I’ve been told.)

I have them on CD-ROM.

I also think I have the final patches for them on floppies that I stuffed in the boxes. Not sure if they’re readable (or in fact the final patches)

Yup. Hasbro-WotC has already dragged their name in the mud, and they’re really busy digging their own grave with the recent push for digital-first/virtual-tabletops-first stuff and micro(macro)transactions. Meanwhile, they forgot that tabletop RPG rules have always been flexible and homebrewy (and the old OGL reflected that ethos perfectly), and you can’t hyper-monetise them the same way as video games.

They’re making the same mistakes TSR did. (Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, yadda yadda yadda.) Except in TSR’s case, they got bought by WotC who pulled an extremely community-supportive, business-ecosystem-building move by introducing OGL. Even if Elon bought out WotC I doubt he is actually going to be interested in fixing whatever’s actually ailing them right now, dude’s too busy fighting woke demons than actually doing sound business/pro-community moves.

Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now

Which is kind of my point. Over the years our public transport has been proudly advertising their use of biodiesels and bio gas, CNG and LNG. And apparently battery-electric buses are coming too. (Sorry, Adam Something. Apparently our city cannot into trams, as fucking awesome as it would be! But apparently the Green Party is proposing TRAINS)

cash certainly lives here

Yeah, and that was kind of a pointed example on my part. I don’t think cash is going away entirely. That said, vast majority of our public transport is already apparently either going on prepaid cards or debit so, eh.

And are these people who masturbate in the corner or who are creeping up your skirt in the room right now? (Not seen 'em here is what I’m saying.)

Over here we already have plenty of memes based on “What if Breaking Bad happened in Europe? It’d been very underwhelming because we have public healthcare.” But I’m glad Albuquerque can at least say “well we could maybe have mitigated some of the car shenanigans in the series now.”

When Twitter (and Reddit) pulled this off, I was just mildly pissed. Can’t do interesting things with my data, oh no.

…Image that, except it’s an expensive luxury car you’re no longer allowed to do interesting things with.

When I was a kid I saw Birdo in the Super Mario Bros 2 manual and the bit about how she thinks she’s a girl.

And I was like “Oh, interesting”.

When I was a kid, I had no idea how many mysteries would this universe hold. A new one? Guess I learned something new that day.

Elon Musk before: “Oh, these old Twitter executives were so dumb. When number go up, you’ve gotta show it everywhere!”

Elon Musk now: “Number not go up? For cripes sake, don’t show it!”

My gosh that Reddit app icon is horrible. It looks like a terrible meme NFT or something. …Which was probably the aesthetic they were going for, to be clear.

It’s apparently $50 a month, but based on one recent video from a guy who looked into this, there’s apparently a hard sell to “commit” to the program for a year, and if you do commit, it won’t let you cancel or refund, because you committed to the program, bro, that’s a sacred vow, bro, you can’t violate that, bro.

I’m a trans woman in Europe. Got traumatised by public restrooms in the 1990s way before my transition when one fucking coin-operated bathroom lock on a train station malfunctioned and I almost missed a train until some dude entered. Why the fuck do people use public bathrooms. Scourge on humanity. Especially coin-operated ones. Fuck them. I always hold until I get home, no matter what. Yet, glad our trains have gender neutral bathrooms. And they’re free of charge. SEE, AMERICA? TRAINS GOOD.

Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).

Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.

In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It’s not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can’t sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They’d probably just not work with that author again.)

Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.

So no, authors don’t really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.

In my opinion, as an outside observer, I’d say it is the duty of every patriotic American to mass produce signs that say “THIS COUNTRY IS RUN BY IDIOTS” and post them everywhere.

The way publishing industry has been for a very long time, authors (especially first time ones) don’t get to pick whoever pays the best deal. Just whoever pays the first.

Edit: Also, theoretically, publishers should accommodate author wishes once a publication contract has been made. Actually not unheard of that a publisher would do something cool for their up and coming star. But this? Sloppiness on the publisher’s part, plain and simple.

Why hello! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it’s no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.