I don’t think there’s a human on earth who can wiggle their nose without their lip muscles.

I picked up a thing that just now came out of early access, called The Farmer Has Been Replaced(). It’s a Python coding game, you’re given a grid-based farm and a drone that runs Python code you write for it to plant, water, harvest etc. crops. It’s a decent little coding exercise, not the worst way to learn Python.

haiku aren’t that hard

It’s five, then seven, then five.

You’ll get used to it.

There’s a certain amount of advertising I’ll accept. If I go to see an action movie, 1 to 3 previews of other action movies that are coming out in the next few months is okay.

Of course, because they tried to force a Mission: Impossible movie down my throat, I might never go see an action movie made after 2014 ever again.

I’ll take a stab at this.

The Scientific Method, as I was taught it from middle school to college:

1. Observe a phenomenon.
2. Raise a question about said phenomenon.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Form a hypothesis as to the nature of the phenomenon.
5. design an experiment to test that hypothesis against a control.
6. Analyze the data yielded by experiment.
7. Repeat the experiment to verify it isn’t a fluke.
8. Publish all of the above in sufficient detail that other scientists may examine your work for flawed methodology and repeat your experiments to further verify it isn’t a fluke.
9. Conclude whether your hypothesis is or is not supported by experimental evidence.

THIS WORKS

What is being done all over the world right now:

1. Get hired by a multinational corporation traded on the Dow Jones.
2. Be assigned a fact to prove, probably about an existing product.
3. Research the topic in question.
4. Design an experiment that will support the fact you’re looking to prove.
5. Use a very small sample size.
6. Conclude something wishy-washy like “there’s a statistically significant correlation”.
7. Publish a densely written paper with a very convoluted title in some obscure sketchy journal somewhere.
8. Cite that paper in your own press releases with headlines that blow the conclusion way out of proportion.
9. No one ever follows up on any of this, the experiment is never really peer reviewed, or is reviewed by others engaged in similar nonsense, and the public only ever reads the headline.

A lot of folks recommending Mint Cinnamon. I agree, that’s a great choice, one of my favorites. If for some reason there are technical problems, you might also try something with KDE, like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE. Also windows-like, even more mainstream than Cinnamon, faster to adopt new shit like Wayland.

No, don’t you see? America bad. That’s all this community is for, America bad. You’re not allowed to say or think anything else here.

Cryptographic signatures are something we should have been normalizing for awhile now.

I remember during the LTT Linux challenge, at one point they were assigned the task “sign a PDF.” Linus interpreted this as PGP sign the document, which apparently Okular can do but he didn’t have any credentials set up. Luke used some online tool to photoshop an image of his handwriting into the document.

You see the same panic about 3D printed guns. It’s not that difficult to make a gun at home, but 3D printers makes it slightly more trivial.

Not quite how that worked out.

Yes, the Ottoman empire did either outright cut off the spice trade to mainland Europe or heavily tax it, which caused Portugal and Spain to seek sea routes to the Far East.

The Portuguese claimed the route around Africa as theirs. It was long, but not too long. The route was known, and you don’t have to sail far from the coast the entire way.

To say Columbus was “commissioned” was a bit much. Columbus went to great lengths to approach the Spanish crown to propose his “going to the East by sailing West” plan, which was based on some bad math. Like he read an Arab scholar’s work on the subject which gave the Earth’s circumference in Arabic miles, which he read as the shorter European miles, so he underestimated the size of the earth by about 1/3. The cartoon I was shown in elementary school depicted Columbus as the visionary who first thought the Earth was round, when it’s quite the opposite. It’s more like he was a crackpot small earther. But he did finally convince Isabella and Ferdinand to sponsor a voyage. Three ships departed Lisbon in 1492, sailed down the African coast to the Canaries and then did something monumentally stupid: They made a right turn and headed due West straight out to sea.

Columbus, if not his men, deserved to sail out to sea and starve to death eight time zones East of Japan, but in the most impactful stroke of dumb luck in human history right about where he predicted Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands to be, he found Central America and the Caribbean. Columbus ended up making 3 more trips to the Caribbean, he saw the shores of Mexico, the mouth of the Orinoco river, was shipwrecked on Jamaica. He went to his death believing he had visited Asia and did not believe he had discovered a New World. Credit for realizing “Look, we’ve sailed 400 miles down the coast, there’s no way this is Indonesia” goes to Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan actually achieved reaching the Spice islands by sailing west from Europe, though most of his men including Magellan himself died in the process and what few men remained completed a circumnavigation because starving on the way back across the Pacific sounded less fun than possibly dealing with the Portuguese.

Yes, I have Ball’s Complete Book Of Home Preserving (which is a terrible title, as the book contains no information about dehydrating, freeze drying, jerking or brewing, only water bath and pressure canning). It has a procedure for “berry” jelly where it lists half a dozen different kinds of berries and how to extract juice from them, to include elderberry, and then you use a quantity of said “berry” juice in a standard jelly recipe. Independent of this, I’ve found a beautyberry jelly recipe that resembles this procedure, so I feel okay canning it, and have done so for years now. I’m going to stop short of recommending it to anyone else. By all means, if you’ve got access to beautyberries, make the jelly, but can it at your own risk.

Every September, I make a year’s supply of beautyberry jelly.

I do something that I don’t recommend people do: I can it. I’m like 5 years in, and I haven’t had a problem yet. There’s a series of pages in my Ball canning recipe book that the beautyberry jelly recipe I use conforms pretty close to, but it isn’t USDA approved or otherwise published by some authority as safe for canning, I’m going to recommend you avoid this.

Beautyberries, if you’re not familiar with them, are a bush/shrub native to the American southeast. The plant looks like a bunch of stems with leaves that grow along them, along with clusters of tiny white flowers in the spring at the base of each pair of leaves, that turn into vivid purple berries in the fall. The leaves can be used as a mosquito repellent if rubbed on clothing, and the berries are edible…although they’re bitter and astringent. Boiling them in water to make an extract and making jelly from that extract results in a bright red jelly that tastes like strawberry and tea.

It’s something of a pain to harvest, so it pretty much isn’t commercially done.

Two occur to me: Chell from the Portal games, and Lufia from Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. And both of those almost don’t count.

I almost don’t want to count Chell because she’s almost not a character, but I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing as her.

Lufia is one of the rare SNES JRPGs not made by Squaresoft or Enix, it was published by Taito. Gameplay is similar to classic Final Fantasy, the story manages to be quite tragic. Lufia, the title character, is not the player character, Enter Your Name is the player character, and Lufia is a playable party member/his love interest/…well, play the game to find out. So there’s reasons why I hesitate to call her a “protagonist.”

I have to mention a fun thing that series did: Lufia 1 starts with a playable prologue/tutorial section where you play as some legendary heroes fighting an ultimate battle. Lufia 2 is a prequel, and it’s the story of those legendary heroes, which ends with that same ultimate battle as the final boss. In Lufia 1, the heroes speak very formally. They sound stalwart and brave and a bit old fashioned, as legendary heroes should. In Lufia 2, we know these characters more as real people, and the dialog treads the exact same ground but it’s much less formal, makes them sound less hypercompetent.

I actually read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court recently. It’s one of those things where I knew the whole story going in because pop culture had remade it several times for both children and adults. I got Star Wars the exact same way. But I recently listened through the original on LibreVox.

Twain apparently wrote it to poke fun at a friend of his who wrote stories about noble knights errant, which is why he creates an ancient people who are perfectly ignorant and perfectly gullible, that stories of “rescuing maidens from a giant” were extremely embellished stories of buying pigs back.

Then there’s the entire aspect of a modern engineer teaching a historical people new technology. Twain makes a BIG deal of “Arkansas journalism” and convincing knights to carry advertising billboards with them which would have been very modern and American to a 19th century man. But also he manages to set up a printing press in a land that doesn’t understand pulp paper, a telephone network in a land that doesn’t understand electricity…in apparently a couple years?

Me? I think I’m an above average candidate for this scenario, I’d die in a boiler explosion attempting to build a steam engine.

When I was in high school, my girlfriend dyed her cat pink with cherry Kool-Aid. He didn’t seem impressed.

I actually wait for winter to rip DVDs for this reason.

it’s got room in its bones for marrow.

Leading the Western world, as usual.

Calling a hot dog a sausage is kind of overselling it. It’s a tube of animal matter.

That’s something that occurred to me playing Breath of the Wild. A lot of the item names like “rushroom” or “armoranth” are pun-based. And this game was written in Japanese and translated to English, along with at least a dozen other languages. Did they have teams of multilingual people sitting around coming up with puns? It occurs to me there are things like “Swift Violet” that aren’t punny…in English at least. But then you’ve got Hot Footed Frog, and the frog model has red feet.

What about…there’s a Gerudo or two that you can rent sand seals from, and there’s a lot of seal-based puns. “Seal ya later” “Let’s Seal The Deal” etc. How was that implemented in Japanese, Russian and Portuguese? I imagine that in some cases you’d just drop it and put straightforward dialog there, but make another character quirky in a language where that does work.

What about in TOTK, the quest about exploring in underpants? That quest outright relies on two sentences that mean two specific things can be mistaken for each other, they would have had to translate “All other paths/in underpants” into like 20 languages. What a pain in the ass that had to be.