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ALT235 FAVORITE SHIPS OF ALL TIME (ranked by my followers)
149. tommy merlyn and laurel lance - arrow
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So Graham Linehan got invited to perform a short set at the Fringe and managed to get the entire show pulled by the venue when they found out who he was and I am delighted to report that he is taking this very maturely and sensibly.
Current favourite take on this goes to Alisdair Beckett-King:
ALTSome background info on all this, btw.
Linehan had specifically been booked to perform at Comedy Unleashed, a London show whose concept is "comedy in which you can literally say anything you want". One would hope this would mean comedians getting to talk about royal sex abuse scandals without being arrested or something similar, but actually it just means white men saying slurs.
So, one of the few shows that will actually book Graham Linehan, a man who, regardless of his extensive mental breakdown to define himself solely by his transphobia, is at this point extremely out of practice at comedy and so not very funny anymore anyway. Booking him is like booking an open-mic'er whose level of skill is utterly drowned by the unpleasantness of him and his fans. He is Not Worth It - unless letting white men say slurs is your entire selling point.
And here's the fun thing about Alisdair's post!
Years ago, he was booked for Comedy Unleashed, the "free speech" gig that lets you say whatever you want.
Alasdair spent his set comedically analysing the logic of Comedy Unleashed from a left wing perspective.
And do you know? The pro-free speech, anti-cancel culture show have never booked him since, and refuse to give him the footage they filmed of the set (which they guarantee for you when you get booked). Funny, that.
PSA: *Beware* AI-generated fungi guudebooks!!
…Not a phrase I imagined myself typing today. But, via @heyMAKWA on Twitter:
“i'm not going to link any of them here, for a variety of reasons, but please be aware of what is probably the deadliest AI scam i've ever heard of:
“plant and fungi foraging guide books. the authors are invented, their credentials are invented, and their species IDs will kill you”
…So please be careful if you run across anything of this kind.
NOOOOO
A) I love this Tweeter an irrational amount
B) I mean, yes, be careful with food while camping, but who could possibly anticipate a bear having that kind of restaurant loyalty and GPS?
British comedian solves world’s ‘most difficult literary puzzle’ becoming third winner in 100 years
Since the Daily Telegraph hides the JF story behind a paywall, ….
Rearranging the pages of a short novel that has been printed out of order doesn’t initially seem like something that might be described as the world’s ‘most difficult literary puzzle’.
But it’s easy to understand how it has only been solved twice when you find out it was written by a famous cryptic crossword setter and that there are 32 million combinations.
Cain’s Jawbone, a 100-page-long murder mystery puzzle, was last cracked in 1935 when two puzzlers claimed £15 in winnings, just a year after it was originally published.
Now a British comedian has solved the literary puzzle for the first time in 85 years, after submitting the correct solution shortly before the closing of a new year-long competition.
John Finnermore who writes his own crosswords for The Times, under the name Emu, said his comedy writing – he has created and performed in countless Radio 4 shows – was a helpful skill, as was the benefit of lockdown.
“The first time I had a look at it I quickly thought ‘Oh this is just way beyond me.’ The only way I’d even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no-one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,” he said.
Mr Finnemore set to work spreading the puzzle, which is printed on 100 separate cards out over the spare bed.
“Every so often I’d potter in, stare at it till my forehead bled, spend an hour online researching the history of Shrewsbury prison or something, swap three cards, move one back, and potter off again.”
The puzzle was written by the Observer’s crossword compiler Edward Powys Mathers under the pen name of Torquemada and consists of a murder mystery book published and bound with the pages out of order.
To make the mystery harder, the book is filled with surreal, meandering sentences and references to lesser known Robert Louis Stevenson novels and specific eighteenth-century French murder trials.
Published in The Torquemada Puzzle Book in 1934, readers were invited to reorder the pages, solve the mysteries and reveal the murderers.
The book was republished last year by Unbound, the crowdfunded publisher known for its experimental works, with a new competition launched in collaboration with Shandy Hall, home to the Laurence Sterne Trust.
The closing date for the competition was 19th September, this time with a prize money of £1000 - approximately how much £15 was worth in 1934.
It took Mr Finnemore six months to complete what the book itself calls an “extremely difficult and not for the faint hearted” puzzle.
But the 43-year-old has admitted that had an easier time than his predecessors as he used Google to help him out.
“I googled constantly,” he told the Telegraph. “I cannot imagine how the two people who did it in 1935 managed.
“If you were sitting in the British library and you were extremely well read and it was the same year it was written then maybe you could do it but unless you know off the top of your head the licensing laws of the 1930s then you should absolutely allow yourself to just google everything.”
“It’s not cheating,” he added.
Getting the final combination was, Mr Finnemore said, a cathartic exercise throughout a particularly turbulent year.
“The process of taking something that looks like chaos and gradually turning it into something that looks ordered and designed, and indeed is ordered and designed, that’s a very satisfying thing to do.
“It gives you a little rush of ‘Oh, the world should make sense’, if only I could spend enough time checking these cards or putting the pieces in this order. Maybe then it would all make sense.”
You shouldn’t date or become serious friends/partners with someone if you can’t stomach the thought of being stuck in a car or train with them for 16 hours.
Here’s my logic:
- You should be able to work together to solve unexpected problems like fixing a flat tire or getting lost in an unfamiliar station
- You should feel comfortable and safe enough around this person that you can sit in comfortable silence
- You should be able to keep each other interested and deal with each others boredom in a healthy way
- If you’re gonna form a long term partnership with someone you should probably be able to tolerate each other while locked in a small box for a few hours
These tags are hilarious even though I don’t think you intended them to be.
*pulls European closer* The most populous countries in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil in that order, with these seven nations alone making up 48.16% of the world population. You may note with the aid of a map that many of these nations are quite large, and would take several days of travel to go across either in cars or on boats. Almost half of the world's population lives in places where you can travel in a cramped vehicle for days and still be within the country. Your worldview is limited and Europe is a tiny outlier in travel time and standards for international relations.
I think I added this in the tags last time I saw this post but I'm going to make an addition actually: the person in those tags is suffering from either lack of life experience or lack of imagination or both. I live in the UK (tiny country) and I once had a 4 hour train journey turn into 12 hours door to door. Shit happens!!
Other things you can learn from a road trip with a partner:
- how they handle frustration and/or the unexpected. If they get worryingly angry at some unexpected traffic, is that something you want to live with when the Internet goes out our your neighbor does something annoying?
- Priorities regarding spending money. Will they make you go to a museum on the free day, despite the fact you'll see only half as much of it because it's filled with school groups? Do they only want to stay at 4 or 5 star hotels? Or will they stay in a hotel in a sketchy neighbourhood that has you remembering every true crime podcast or Criminal Minds episode you've ever watched because it was a great deal?
- Priorities spending time. When you go, do you want to see the same attractions? If not, can you tolerate each other's interests without ruining the experience? What I mean is, if you take a book to the baseball game, does it damage their enjoyment? Will they allow you to drag them around the Civil War era fort and explain about traveling without snarling and complaining? If they let you spend 3 hours in the massive fabric store in Paducah will you let them spend an afternoon doing a distillery tour, and you both plan to let yourselves get spooked on the ghost tour in the evening.
Me: oh yeah, if you think school photography is hard now, try imagining doing this with film.
The new girl: what’s film?
Me: … film. Like… film that goes in a film camera.
New girl: what’s that mean?
Me: … before cameras were digital.
New girl: how did you do it before digital?
Me:… with film? I haven’t had enough coffee for this conversation
New girl: I need you to show me how to format the usb.
Me: format?
New girl: yeah what do I do?
Me: you… put the usb in. Then you make a new folder on it and rename it with (name, date, location)
New girl: but how do I do that?
Me: … they dont… teach you this anymore, do they?
The lack of computer skills is becoming a problem. Like there was a period of time where the older workers in office jobs had to be brought up to speed on computers, but now a lot of the newer workers have the issue too.
There’s a lot of assumed technical literacy because we had a whole generation brought up on desktop computers, but now it’s one that was brought up on phones, tablets, and chromebooks. Phones are easier to use, but that means the users have never had to work around the daily problems presented by most desktop environments.
But our systems are still set up assuming the kids are “digital natives” who just already know this stuff. So no one teaches them. So a new employee walks into the office… and they just don’t.
30-something here. And this is frightening for a few reasons.
Much of the back-end architecture will soon be more difficult to maintain, as those with the expertise retire or when the one guy volunteering to update a niche corner of some minute software function that holds up ¼ of the computer world dies.
While products are made to be “easier to use” now, which has made them more accessible, they aren’t made to last, contributing to tech pollution / e-waste. Many consumers don’t know how to upgrade or repair their own tech…if they are upgradeable.
Which brings me to my next point.
I bought a new low end laptop recently. Not chrome book, but actual Windows PC laptop. I haven’t had a personal computer for a while and with a lot of expectation to “return to the office” because COVID’s over, right? *heavy eye roll*, I wanted something cheap and portable. I found a deal because a lot of low end laptops are being discounted because school children aren’t remote now. I was actually looking for refurbished but found what I wanted cheaper new, sadly.
Finding one that I knew would run the software I needed or that wouldn’t be bogged down just with Windows? A challenge. You’ve got to know what RAM, HDD vs eMMC vs SSD, cores, age of processors, and all those specs mean.
Finding one that wasn’t Windows in “S mode,” a bullshit mode that locks you into the Windows app / store for ALL software (where they take a cut of each purchase)? Even more challenging.
When I booted it up…I imagine most people just click yes through things because why not, just want to get right to it, right?
The amount of privileges I had to decline because of targeted data collection, for ad preferences and other nefarious reasons; the number of easy-to-miss “no thanks” options to decline enrollment in bloatware; the number of things that wanted me to launch the free trial, where they could automatically enroll me into a monthly PAID subscription and could report failure to add a credit card to pay for it to credit agencies (!); many of these presented as the “recommended” or default option… ASTOUNDING.
And then I still had to go into system settings and turn off additional data tracking that they didn’t even present during set-up, along with bloatware bullshit programs they wanted to always run at start-up. Because I knew where to go and find that stuff. Don’t even get me starting on fucking Cortana.
Technology has gotten bad. Even 10 years ago, it was a couple simple agreements not to pirate, using software at your own risk, etc. and that was it.
Now? Waiving rights, arbitration, hidden terms that could leave you owing money if you don’t uninstall it, data collection to link accounts and literally track every move / your exact location / your usage, attempts to personalize ads through your specific searches, inability to block cookies unless you download a Google app!?, four pop ups for every website, as the default?
It is scary how much tech that was designed to increase productivity and make life easier has become yet another way for corporations to track us, sell to us, and sell their data on us, even potentially incriminating us.
Oh, and heaven forbid you know what you’re doing and try to upgrade or repair your equipment yourself. Warranty voiding? Should be illegal, may be illegal in some areas, but they still tell you it’ll void your warranty. Good luck finding the parts. Using non-OEM parts will void the warranty too…by design.
I did not survive Windows Vista era to deal with this bullshit.
I did not survive
Windows Vista era to
deal with this bullshit.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Anyone have any resources for technology literacy for beginners?
Yes! @aquadraco20
General basic safety
How to avoid ransomware, malware, hacks, and how to maintain good data privacy.
https://www.getsafeonline.org/
^ this has intermediate information (as well as beginner info) that I think people who grew up on the internet benefit most from (so it won’t tell you what a phone is, or how to press the power button to turn on a computer). I recommend all sections the personal section under the top drop down (except the one aimed at children).
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/internetsafety/
Same deal as above, with quizzes and additional topics.
https://www.digitalliteracyassessment.org/
^ this one is mostly video and audio which some people might helpful
HTML
https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
W3schools is a well known free resource for coding. I recommend HTML because it gives basic website building capabilities, so you can create a neocities website for example or even edit your Tumblr theme. You can also learn CSS (used with HTML to make prettier websites) and Python (used to make programs).
Touch typing
Touch typing is using the home row on keyboards. It allows people to type faster than pressing individual keys one at a time, like on a smart phone.
This site has lessons, and honestly looks much nicer than the program I learned to use touch typing with.
https://www.how-to-type.com/touch-typing-lessons/how-to-type-home-keys/
This site has lessons and practice tests and speed tests to measure progress. In middle school I was taking a practice test about three times a week and a speed test once a week for about fifteen minutes each time, if that helps.
—
These three areas are the main things people were taught in computer literacy courses.
I also recommend checking your local library or other educational resources (like local colleges, your current college/highschool/middle school etc, the college you graduated from). These can have in person instructors which can be super helpful. Feel free to send me any questions and stuff, if I don’t already know I’ll try to find out and share where I found it!
Helpful things I’ve done with my windows computer to make it safer/more efficient:
- Installing Malwarebytes/enabling windows defender
- Creating a backup of my computer on a hard drive
- Setting permissions for apps to start on startup
- Getting a password manager
- Installing a web browser that isn’t chrome
- Changing old passwords into better, more secure passwords- especially websites that have debit card info
I hope this helps :D