palordrolap

You may already know this, but I’ll say it anyway: It’s possible to follow hashtags on Mastodon, and so basically following topics.

It does rely on people putting relevant hashtags on their posts, but do you want to hear from someone who doesn’t do that?

Never really have. Around 8 or 9, I stopped wanting to get any older and since then I’ve always felt like I was pretending to be my age rather than being it.

I understand that a lot of other adults are also pretending, but I’ve all but ceased to be able to keep up the charade.

For example, I own a house, and even managed to look after things for a while, but that was a struggle and there’s no way current me is up to any of that.

I envy others’ strength and ability.

Duper’s delight. It’s almost like they’re surprised to find they’re revelling in getting caught too. At least maybe the first time. Afterwards they might do something wrong expecting to feel that way again and that’s all kinds of messed up.

Another UK perspective here. When the decorations go up may depend on the weather and/or the mood of anyone in the house. Each household will have their own preferences and rules for that and everything else.

Putting the decorations up in November is considered a bit soon, but I have some family precedent regarding that, and there was also something on the radio a few days ago about how particularly dreary weather has convinced a few people to get the Christmas tree and lights out early to brighten up the place.

Some put them up at the start of December, but the sensible time is usually a couple of weekends before the big day.

The superstition about taking them down again before Twelfth Night runs fairly strong here, but mostly because it’s “right” to take them down at that time rather than any courting of misfortune. (Or is it?)

As for other traditions, that’s harder to pin down. You don’t know that what you’re doing might be unusual until you see other people’s perspectives. Everyone knows what a horse reindeer is… Right?

Guarantees: Kids up at the crack of dawn ripping wrapping paper off presents. Someone will want to watch the King’s speech and someone else won’t. Someone will put on music that someone else doesn’t want to listen to.

For the adults around me (and me), we generally wait until after a late breakfast on the day itself to exchange gifts. Then there might be some visiting out or receiving visitors. Visitors might stay for dinner which is mid-afternoon.

Then it’s kids playing with gifts, adults reading any books they might have been bought, and finding something to watch on TV (or streaming or DVD etc.) that everyone can agree on.

… and hoping beyond hope that nothing happens that isn’t going to make you dread Christmas next year.

There’s no reason that the Holy Spirit wouldn’t borrow DNA from a suitable male human. The “special” stuff is magical, spiritual or whatever you might call it, and that doesn’t have to be in the genetic code.

So basically, there’s a good chance that the test would come back as Joseph being the bio-dad, whether he laid with Mary or not.

This or some other cue / billiard sport. The question doesn’t specify I have to be good at it.

I created an account on a Mastodon first. The Fediverse Tips account over there suggested KBin over Lemmy because of Lemmy’s tankie connection, and probably also because Kbin was a combination of Mastodon and link aggregator.

To me, the Kbin interface was marginally preferable too.

So I joined the original Kbin. But the dev / owner Ernest had to deal with real life. That instance died and the Kbin software was succeeded by Mbin.

So I moved to kbin.run, which was actually an Mbin. But that mysteriously vanished when - I guess - the owner didn’t want to, or couldn’t afford to, er, run it any more.

And now I’m on fedia.io.

Spicy food on top of interview nerves? Don’t get me wrong, I love a good curry, but for me that’d be tempting fate.

And it wouldn’t be my shirt I’d be concerned about soiling.

We’ll have to get rid of the politicians in the back pocket of those corporations first.

There’s a reason the new legislation doesn’t say anything about them.

The posts that I’ve seen so far seem to be lacking context that’s available when visiting the original on the home instance.

That is, these posts look like the first comment made by the OP in a thread below their main submission, but the main submission isn’t visible.

Very disorienting. I hope there’s a fix on the way.

I can’t speak for OP, but I’ve pretty much always had a separate wallet for just cards. Notes and coinage go in the more traditional wallet.

That said, it had got to the point that most of my payments, even when I went places, were usually by card. Even the bus.

Most comic superheroes derive the energy for their powers from some external dimension, or in the case of Superman, the Sun.

This pushes the questions onto how things work rather than where the energy comes from. And good luck getting answers there. Writers often contradict themselves.

And I seem to remember there being a story (possibly non-canon?) where Superman is forced to turn a handle forever to generate “free” energy to power the planet.

As soon as it begins, I’ll put on that one rubber horse mask that’s been a meme on and off for the last 20 or more years.

That in itself might be enough.

If not I may be forced to make horse noises. There’s actually a sound that’s called “blowing” I think is perfect for the situation, so I could technically “blow” the interview and still get the job if they’re sufficiently unhinged.

Were it not for the potential for criminal damage, I would also stand abruptly before making the noise and then, with suitable timing, violently kick the chair backwards.

I think that could all fit nicely within 30 seconds.

Or, you know, I could just tell them the truth that my mental state is incredibly fragile and the tiniest amount of work stress or office politics is going to be detrimental to both myself and the company in very short order and that I should not have been sent there in the first place… but where’s the fun in that?

The brief was to fail the interview, not also get yourself a criminal record, but I suppose you could float this as a hypothetical in the interview itself and not actually carry it out for more interesting (and less destructive) results.

I’ve seen this story.

We get comfortable. Complacent even. People forget the old ways.

Then the machines go wrong and we’ll have no idea how to stop them.

Not necessarily a Skynet scenario, but something else that overrides the biosphere worse than we’re already doing on our own.

Not sure how this plays into human politics though. There’s a strong chance we’ll still find a way to launch nukes at each other and end it that way instead.

That’s not how you floss.

squeaky squeaky squeaky

This is one of the scientific plot holes in The Fly. Or at least the 1980s version. The head-swap version has other problems.

IIRC Thatcher claimed to sleep for four hours, and she only did that because she thought it was necessary to be able to do the job properly. The job of, you know, running a country.

Sleeping for two, and then expecting a regular salaryman / career woman to get on the same level and then do that for a lifetime is an entirely new level of ludicrous.

I recently (re?)learned that “you” was the plural form and only became a formal form under the influence of French.

Basically, “you” was “ye”/“y’all”/“youse”/“yins” before any of those existed, and the others only came into existence when “you” became formal and stopped filling that niche.

And some dialects, including some very populous ones like standard British English, still don’t have a plural “you” as a result of that change of usage. The subsequent shift to being generic only cemented the problem.

“You” regains its plurality in things like “all of you”, “you all”, “you lot” (not really for the politest of company) and “you <number>” (e.g. “You four, go sit over there”) for a group of people, but on its own it’s ambiguous.

To qualify for a state pension, you have to have paid a certain amount to the tax office over the course of a lifetime. As someone whose mental state isn’t up to being employed and hasn’t been for quite a while, I’m certain to have a shortfall in that regard, so I’d probably deliberately give it to the taxman so that I might be better looked after in 20-25 years.

Lots of ifs, ands, buts and maybes have been missed out here, but in my case it might well be the best use of the money.