The books are great but they’re not really broken up into self-contained stories. It’s more like one incredibly long adventure and the books just end when they get to a certain length and then the story picks up in the next one. A series would be perfect for that. Only problem is that it would have to be heavily CGI.

You might like the Hornblower books more. Less politics and sociology of the era and more straight-up action, combined with some antihero introspection - like the main character obsessing about how small his calves are.

dung canoes

?

D. K. Brown

Save a slap for the dude who invented slaps!

As a mobile developer, tiny unhittable buttons drive me batshit. I used to get handed app design documents all the time that had these little buttons, along with image files for these buttons that were just large enough (width and height) for them. I would always do a trivial amount of extra work to make the actual tappable regions larger than the images to improve their usability, but when I mentioned this to the designers they would go apeshit and demand that I restore the original tiny tappable regions, usually with the bullshit rationale of that being what end-users expected and they didn’t want to verify that what I’d done to my best judgement was OK. Management would go along with the designers, on the grounds that enlarging the tappable regions required more time and effort - even though I’d already done it and undoing it would require even more time and effort.

It eventually occurred to me to just do it without telling anyone and I had no further problems.

A fun little fact about iOS: the operating system includes a private method (which is something developers supposedly can’t use without getting their app rejected) named _warpPoint. This hack was put in when they started supporting landscape, because the top toolbar and its tiny buttons became even tinier and virtually unusable in that mode. _warpPoint intercepts touches near the toolbar and changes the coordinates to the middle of the nearest button - basically doing the same thing I was doing by enlarging the tappable regions, just doing it at the global level. The irony is that they still don’t really work very well, despite the very existence of this method proving that Apple knows it’s a general problem.

YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO USES CAPSLOCK!

and Trump

Lol read up on Bush v. Gore in 2000.

the barrier for getting Linux to work is too high right now for a very large part of the population

My elderly (late 80s) parents have Windows on their laptops and it would be impossible for them to use it without my regular intervention. I might as well take the plunge and set them up with Linux.

So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?

you shall stone that man or woman to death with stones

Pretty specific - I guess that closes the “get them high” loophole.

As Moses said, “fuck the Cowboys”.

nor his manservant, nor his maidservant

“Slaves” in the original, but of course we can’t allow any hint of three thousand year old shit not being strictly relevant any more.

If George Lucas had directed Spinal Tap, he would have already gone back and made Stonehenge orange.

No … Wingdings.

He’s been killing the same ratty mouse toy with a broken wand for years.

My cat kills actual mice, then eats the front half of them and leaves the back half on my pillow next to my head while I’m asleep. I’m totally used to this now, but when she first started doing it I would wake up and scream like the movie mogul in The Godfather who finds his favorite horse’s head in his bed.

She is at least nice enough to lick the back half clean first.

Nothing drives me as crazy as my phone constantly putting in “thus” instead of “this”. Nobody fucking ever uses the word “thus” in a text message.

Take WWII for instance, being neutral kind of says yeah we are cool with both sides.

Being literally surrounded by the Third Reich meant their choices were neutrality or actually joining up with Hitler, so they really can’t be criticized for choosing neutrality. They can be criticized for their actions during and after the war in helping the Nazi leaders squirrel away the wealth they stole from the Jews, something that was not necessary for a neutral nation to do.

I’d rather rip on Sweden which at least had some possibility of joining the Allies but instead supplied Germany with the high-quality iron ore they absolutely needed to keep their war machine running - the exact same thing they did in WWI. They also supplied Germany with much-needed ball bearings, but at least they sold them to the Allies as well.

They don’t even have a duty to know what the law is.

I used to live in that state. So glad I left, no fucking idea what I was doing there in the first place. Even Texas is better.