palordrolap

Once I’ve been through the recommended deep breathing exercises, I lay still for as long as possible, and then, if I’ve not fallen asleep, I get up, turn on the computer and do something mindless in Minecraft until I’m tired. I might watch videos online. I have Redshift installed which reddens the screen at night, so I don’t get too much blue light.

It usually takes an hour or three and then I’m ready to try sleeping again.

Or at least, that was the case until I got on new medication which helps with falling and staying asleep. Now, if I do wake up with mind spinning, it’s usually three or four hours before I get up anyway, so I do all the above but don’t go back to bed at the end of it. I just have something for breakfast and then carry on a normal day.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve felt the need for a depression nap since I’ve been on them. Doesn’t mean my depression is cured, but I’m almost never tired enough during the day to want to take one.

Not sure there’s any scientific basis behind the time of day a person is born and their preferred wakefulness hours in later life, but hey maybe it’s the case in some circumstances.

Not so in mine. I was a morning birth, but my preferred rising time for as long as I’ve had a choice has always been closer to noon. 10am is my 6am, you might say.

I would not be surprised if there’s a genetic link. One of my parents is also a late riser (at least, preferentially), and I’ve inherited that.

Hahaha, that’s not dystopian at all, hahahaha.

When you have a hungry bear on your doorstep, your concern is not misplaced.

Well that’s good to know at least. Still not sure I would have opted for that name, but then, these are clearly the games of sharper minds than mine.

That name puts me in mind of things like “Stormfront” and “National Front”, if not also things like 4chan / 8kun.

…but that might be the point?? If so, I can’t tell if it’s a joke or serious. Disturbing.

I think this is more of a “If Israel keep this up, they’ll be coming for the rest of us once they’re done with Palestine. We need them as a distraction / punching bag to keep Israel busy.”

So far Jordan has kept their heads down and been left alone, but King Abdullah is probably starting to feeling a little tight around the shirt-collar as Israel’s belligerence continues to rise.

Asbestos is also inert.

I might have mixed some things up in the 20+ years since I saw that episode. For example, I could have also sworn it was Sam who made the wormhole comparison and was told “No.” I do remember it being awkward though, like the question was embarrassingly naïve.

For practicality: Whatever it is that The Nox do in the Stargate TV show. It’s not well explained because, well, no other race is advanced enough to understand it. Something about briefly causing two distant points in space to touch. Instantaneous travel to anywhere.

For impracticality: #1 The ring network in one of Stephen Baxter’s novels. Kind of like the eponymous rings in the better known Stargate franchise, but the ring source and destination are fixed and transport time between rings is light speed, so you arrive years after you enter. And IIRC, you come out as an approximation of what you were when you went in. A very good approximation, but still an approximation. The advantage is that the journey seems instantaneous to the traveller.

#2 Whichever story has it that travel in hyperspace / subspace turns out to be slower than travel in real space. This may have been a throwaway Internet joke, but it still amuses me.

#3 Stephen King’s Jaunt.

Depends on what frame of mind I’m in. In a sufficiently devil-may-care mood, I might try and create a Moriarty. Or better, role play as one.

Or figure out how deeply it’s possible to nest holodeck simulations before things get funky.

I could be a Q without any collateral damage. Torment Picard and Janeway. Get punched by Sisko. Roll it all back. Q’s done the same.

Be a (male) Mary Sue in any TV show universe I’ve ever watched and not be judged for poor writing… Although O’Brien did appear to think he could discern sarcasm from the Enterprise computer from time to time.

And of course there’s the thing that Riker, Barclay and LaForge, if not a good many of the rest of the crew almost certainly got up to in there… I’d be stupid to think I’d not try that at least once.

Strictly speaking, black pudding is a kind of blood sausage, but we’d probably use the former term for the entire category in Britain.

Some people classify haggis as a sausage, but it’s definitely not a blood sausage.

There’s also that drunk driving is usually lone participation, so there’s only one nutter involved.

But yes. Regardless of whether one is worse than the other, they’re both terrible and doing neither is the best option.

By analogy, I’ve invented a limb-chomper machine. Sometimes it mangles limbs when one is put into it. At least 50% of the time it doesn’t. So will you put in an arm or a leg?

And, get this, despite being an analogy, the machine is safer than either drunk driving or illegal street racing because only the user is at risk! Amazing!

When I got rid of mine, I made a list of all the media I still wanted a copy of and then, over time, found second-hand or new old stock DVD versions online. That was ten years ago and I’ve still not broken the cling wrap on some of the replacements I bought. Just goes to show how much I really needed them!

That said, my collection was far less than 100, so your collection might be an expensive endeavour to replace.

Tapes with crud recorded from TV and computers went to landfill. All the commercial ones went in a consignment I had a charity organisation collect along with a lot of other things I was clearing out at the same time. In 2025, I’m not sure charities will accept them any more.

I did manage to digitise some of the stuff from the TV / computer ones with an old VCR and a TV card in the computer, but that must be coming up on 20 years ago now. That’s all on a DVD around here somewhere. In one of those multi-disc wallets. Remember those?

They can still be had online if you feel like paring down the space your DVDs take up. People used to use them for burned DVDs, of course, but there’s nothing stopping you from putting legit DVDs in one. Make a separate binder for the DVD covers if you really want to, and send the cases to landfill or recycling.

If you want to go really nuts, do the same with Blu-rays.

I do regret getting rid of a few things during that clear-out, but maybe only one tape had some sentimental value. And yet, if I’d kept it, I’m think I’d be equally disturbed that I didn’t get rid of it with the rest of them.

You are […] implying that people of (generally) Asian religions need to change their iconography

That is not and was not my intent, and I was less sure of yours until just now. (This may be reading (in)comprehension on my part, to which I’ll be happy to admit fault.)

So, let me make sure I’m understanding you. Are you saying that you think that any and all gains from bigoted or unethical sources should be thrown away and that we should have nothing to do with them?

I understand why people would be extremely uncomfortable with some of these and I even think that where we can, we should avoid them, but we can’t get rid of everything.

If we must insist on everything then the whole of humanity needs to get in the sea because we’re all products of humanity’s inhumanity if you go back far enough. In many cases, it’s not that far.

If we say “nothing” then we give way to terrible people and let them have free reign.

So tell me. Where is the line? I still think that’s a fairly difficult question, even if you don’t.

You say it’s a solved problem in one area as though it should be a solved problem elsewhere. That puts your comment on unsound footing.

As for the comparison you don’t like, there are often only so many ways to write certain things in code. Some of those are invariably going to be very similar to that which was written by a bigot. That might be OK (like continued Hindu and Buddhist use of the swastika). Outright using that which was actually written by the bigot though?

People may say “please don’t do that”.

And there’s the rub.

This is a tricky one. If a bigot says the sky is blue, they’re not wrong about that. Other things, sure, but not that.

Maybe we could take their efforts and use it against them somehow. That is to say, we might deliberately use that code for anti-hate purposes, perhaps, subverting the bigot’s preferred goals. Make it so that any gain they might have had is overtaken by their disgust at how it’s being used.

On the other hand, taint is by association. There’s a really neat and geometrically useful symbol; fourfold symmetry, previously used by Hindus, that picked up an extremely negative association around 90 years ago, for example, and short of humanity forgetting history, we’re never getting that one back.

If you were someone helped by that code being used against bigotry and you found out where it came from, you’re probably going to have mixed feelings about it when you finally get the time to reflect.

You might understand why people would want to avoid it, even if it is correct.

That’ll, er, teach me to just go by the graph.

Thank you for your insight.

This does not appear to count work done outside school hours, which makes me wonder how much of the work teachers in other countries do outside school hours is actually being counted within the Japanese teachers’ hours.

Or is it the case that Japanese teachers do proportionally more outside school hours too?

You’re missing the fact that water wets itself*, and is thus wet. The only non-wet water is that where the molecules are far enough apart to not interact with each other. That’s very hard to achieve even in the vapour phase.

* Yes, yes, I see you laughing. “It needs new underwear” ha ha ha. But seriously, though.