For a second there, I thought I was looking at a cutaway of some epic new kind of pasta.

Ah, the good old days when your “dumb” refrigerator would kill children playing hide and seek because the latch wouldn’t open from the inside. When it was lined with asbestos because that’s literally the best insulation that exists excepting aerogel. When the mercury thermostat would fail—leaking mercury on to your food (and aerosolizing some which would be breathed in as soon as you opened it)—and it would freeze everything inside, complete with an interior wall of snow that could take days to defrost. It used old school freon, destroying the ozone layer. Or before then, fun highly toxic gasses like methyl chloride!

Those were the days! When a breeze through the house on a day with wonderful weather could blow out the pilot light in your oven, slowly leaking gas into your house, exploding and destroying the entire home late at night while everyone is asleep.

Then the wonders of electricity came along to produce ovens that were hooked up to 220V lines without a grounding wire, and wiring that would slowly fail over time, eventually making contact with the metal frame, electrocuting anyone who touched the device—or anyone that touched the person touching it.

Ovens were built different “back in the day”! They didn’t have anti-tip brackets, resulting in loads of children sitting on the oven door, spilling boiling liquids down upon them.

The best were those old washing machines, though! You could lift up the lid and look inside to see your laundry spinning at high speeds! Just don’t reach your hand in, or you could find out what the term “degloving” means.

Ah yes, the good old days of appliances.

Oh please. There’s nothing wrong with a bunch of girls horsing around.

American, here. I’m with them! Sort of…

Far too many American parents insist their kids use “please and thank you” for too many things. A classic example:

Kid: “Can you pass the butter?” (this is the natural state of American children… Probably all children, actually)

Parent, semi-scolding: “Can you please pass the butter!”

…or the worse, passive-aggressive form: “Please and thank you, (child)!”

I had this happen to me when I was a kid and my friends had it happen to them. I’ve witnessed it so many times—even as an adult—yet… It always felt wrong.

Normal people—equals in butter rights—don’t communicate like that.

Adult: “Can you pass the butter?”

Adult nearest the butter: “Here…”

There’s another, more efficient form that seems to be most common in the Northeastern US, especially with men: (just passes the butter without saying anything at all)

Truly efficient men—who may have never met before that moment—can communicate a butter request and reply to another man without even speaking. A look, with an upward nod and a follow-up downward nod from the guy closest to the butter is all these truly efficient communicators need.

The most efficient families—when it’s only adults present, performing their secret, adults-only rituals—tend to shorten it to the tiniest of requests, “Butter?” (points at butter)

Excessive politeness always feels fake and rotten to me. “Please”—from children—should be reserved for actual begging, damnit! With wide eyes and maybe some tears! Anything less feels like bad acting or an unnecessary, inauthentic ritual.

Politeness shouldn’t be ritual! It should be something you do because you’re paying attention and you’re genuinely invested in the concept of feeling sorry about inconveniencing another person with your request. If there’s no inconvenience—such as passing the butter—what’s the point?

Please and thank you for reading my rant.

Isn’t that just… Vinegar?

There’s a Waffle House across the street. Gregg Phillips might teleport there (if we’re lucky) and certain other Republican politicians are banned.

Plott Hound? I look to my left to my own barky barkster:

Yeah!!! Damned fine use of that wall space and a great demonstration of your hard-won mad skillz 👍

Haha! I’m glad I’m not the only one. I actually call this anime:

That Time I Got Stuck in Meetings as a Slime

I like super obscure achievements that aren’t documented at all. Like, your weapon and armor just broke but you’re in an easy area so you just keep grinding, trying to find that rare loot (or whatever). Suddenly, you get an achievement, “Naked Brawler” 😁

You check the wiki and that one’s not in the list 👌

I remember getting an achievement for something like, “Last Light” in some game where I ran out of torches in an area where you take severe damage from darkness. I got the achievement when I lit that last torch, very close to the end of the area.

It wasn’t documented anywhere! I posted about it to the game forum (this was back when forums were the primary place to talk about such things) and no one had seen it before.

Like a year later, the community finally figured out the sequence of events necessary to get that achievement and it only gets awarded to characters who are too far in to make it out before the torch goes out and those that read a very specific, obscure book in a starter area.

“You read the book‽”

“I… Uh… Read all the books. Doesn’t everyone read all the books at least once?”

🤣

Like someone else stated, it was an EPIC pussy magnet that demonstrated your car audio prowess. Only a special few knew the secrets…

She didn’t dial anywhere near enough numbers

Not necessarily! This particular phone had a feature that let you set shortcut numbers. It was an advanced form of the “long press a single number to dial a particular contact” feature that came before it. So you could go into your contacts and—via a series of absurdly complicated menus for such a simple device—you could set “7752” as the shortcut number to dial say, your bank of fax machines that somehow deliver the equivalent of 100Base-T Ethernet speeds.

“Tell me how old you are without telling me how old you are” 😢

I recently stayed at a rental property that had this (actual photo):

I tried to get it working but none of the remote panels worked. They were all disconnected somehow (owner probably cut the wires to prevent shenanigans by guests cranking the volume then leaving it like that). The CD player worked (central panel only) but oddly, it couldn’t pick up any FM stations. It would tune to them (“scan” feature worked) but they only ever produced static. I suspect the capacitors used in the amplification circuit dried out or something got corroded after being in a “regular ocean salt spray” area (it was on a beach) for such a long time 🤷

Wow! This brings back memories… It was a Soul Crusher: A primitive technology used to commune with the dead over long distances. I’ll explain…

These devices used the “Afterlife Toll” (AT) command set, invented by someone named “Hayes” which I believe was just a nickname or mistranslation of Hades. With the correct invocation, you could whisper into the great beyond. Here’s an example:

ATDT 6665551234

Translated: “Afterlife Toll, Death Touch <helliphone number>”. After this invocation, the user would hear the pleasant sound of souls being crushed in order to make the afterlife connection.

Of course—due to the popularity of such devices—crushing souls over long distances could get expensive so a number of Incorporeal Service Providers (ISP) sprang up to make it cheaper and easier than ever to crush souls from anywhere.

Cool fact: This is where the term, “soul crushing machines” comes from! These days, soul crushing is fully automated and far beyond the measure of Beings Per Seance (BPS). Nearly every computer is shipped with an ethernet connection and practically everyone is walking around with devices that can commune over WIFI (Wailing Incorporeal Fidelity).

In fact, our Incorporeal Technology (IT) is so advanced, you can have a soul crushing experience from anywhere in the world at all hours of the day, every day!

This is what happens to nearly every business Microsoft buys or invest in. They’re the enshittiers.

Sony is a close second, BTW 😁

My question exactly: The computers should be purpose-built, including the operating system.

Why TF aren’t they using something like NASA Linux‽

If they made it open source you bet your ass they’d get shittons of free support from the global community! If they’re running my software I’d be willing to hop on a call with the command center on any day at any hour!

“Yes, I know it’s Christmas but NASA is having some trouble with a systemd script on a space ship that’s currently in space…”

Maybe they should implement something beyond toy security.

I guess Iran wasn’t just blustering yesterday when they promised to do this.

“We miss platform lock-in.”

It’s so dumb that they have to reverse engineer this chipset to make it work.

MediaTek, YOU SUCK.