They’re talking about Sleep Token, aren’t they?

I was a mobile developer and worked on Windows Mobile and Windows CE (un-ironically called “WinCE” by Microsoft themselves) applications some twenty years ago. It was basically just Windows with a lot of unnecessary cruft stripped out. The basic UI was indeed absurd, with the standard Start menu and utterly dependent on the fucking stylus to work. But for applications it wasn’t actually necessary to even use that shit. You could actually write applications that ran in kiosk mode and had nice big buttons so that users never had to deal with the Start menu or use the stylus at all. And in that mode it was actually extremely powerful – you could do anything that you needed to do programmatically. I never once encountered a situation where something that I needed to do programmatically wasn’t still available in the stripped-down WinCE API.

I have no idea how an engineer working in a software company could trust that thing

Because many of us are fucking morons. I had one colleague who was writing the control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Despite being way past the deadline and way over budget, the client asked him to create a special version of the software so the machine could be used with Little League teams. He decided to do his first test of this version on a field with actual Little Leaguers on it, which resulted in a 125 mph knuckleball (no spin at all so incredibly erratic in flight) a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head. Which resulted in the only time in my programming career that I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between two people (my boss and the client).

Limbed Lugubrious Motherfucker

I want my AI to sound like a Speak & Spell.

It was Yes (“Going for the One”) for me. Led Zeppelin was for the burnouts!

I bought my first album in 1977 for $7, which is $37 in today’s money. It’s pretty insane to think that the entire music industry back then was about getting people to pay $37 for a piece of plastic. Avocado toast eat your heart out.

Stalin’s regime was really reactionary

Even this is a charitable description. The best term for Stalin’s regime is “despotism”.

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Maybe it makes sense like how private schools there are called “public schools” and public schools are called “private schools”. I will never understand that one.

I would not be surprised to learn that ICE hires undocumented immigrants and that that’s one of the reasons they go around masked. It would not exactly be unprecedented – many of the overseers on Southern cotton plantations were themselves slaves.

I remember the good old days when Tricky Dick Nixon was the worst Republican imaginable. And that motherfucker started the EPA!

My favorite thing about Campbells was when they came out with their low-sodium soups. The cans were slightly smaller than regular soups, cost twice as much, and they weren’t condensed so you didn’t add water when you made them. That means you’re paying more then 4X the normal price just for them to not add fucking salt in the first place.

I shave my head year-round and I grow a long beard in the winter. I just can’t figure out how to handle the transition well. Like, here? Maybe here? Fade it? I dunno. A goatee solves the problem but nothing says bitter old dude like a baldheaded goatee.

As a man, my wolves are hairless and my crow has no feathers. The problem of what to do with my hair would be nice to have.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that ICE is hiring undocumented immigrants, for the same reason that everybody else does it.

I had the reverse happen with an ex-girlfriend’s two favorite bands, Death Cab For Cutie and The Decembrists. I fucking HATED that shit when I was with her and had to put so much effort into pretending to like it. A decade after we broke up I was all “wow, this is actually pretty good music”. Weird.

I haven’t been able to find this again, but there’s a short film that was made in England in 1946 that perfectly nailed how cell phones were going to work. There was even a man in a grocery store calling his wife at home to find out what ingredient he needed to pick up. The only difference was scale: the man was using a walkie-talkie, which despite the movie images of an officer using a device about 1’x4"x4", in fact also required a ginormous and heavy backpack thing lugged around by some misbegotten private.

BTW a fun fact: the word “ginormous” (a portmanteau word combining “gigantic” and “enormous”) dates to WWII or earlier. I’d always assumed it was valley-girl speak until I encountered it in a Battle of Britain memoir written by a pilot who was killed in 1942.

I don’t feel like the US military brass would do that, exactly

Coups are often executed by very junior officers.

When I was in the 8th grade, I had a friend with two kids. TBF he had been held back for four years and should have been a senior in high school by that point, but it was still pretty unusual.