Anyone that couldn’t tell you were being sarcastic isn’t worth your time.

I find vague variable names exhausting. It adds not inconsiderable mental overhead when reading code, at least for me.

…constantly fails the engineering exam… …constantly eats roast beef…

I love Red Dwarf so much.

Is ran?

iPhone 3GS. Lovely little thing. Mine was white.

Some fast food travels well. Much of it doesn’t. I am baffled as to which idiots are ordering some of this garbage.

Seems like an odd place to post this but I’ll bite.

Even the things I love doing involve work. If I want to do some sewing I still need to tidy up before and afterwards, for example, or spend time pinning stuff (and then taping up the numerous stab wounds). It’s a bit reductive.

Instead I try to get paid for things that require minimal emotional “work” from me - that is to say, things that don’t leave me sapped of energy to work on my passion projects. I don’t dislike what I am paid to do but I’m not super enthused about it. That means that when I’m done working I’ve still got the creative juice to work on stuff I actually want to do.

If instead I have to spend my working days pushing myself through stuff then I tend to be left with nothing in the tank, even if I still have time left at the end of the day. Instead I get paid to do something I’m good at but that doesn’t usually involve extended periods of advanced problem solving or frequent uphill battles of effort (there’s always a bit, of course, it’s not a perfect solution!). That isn’t to say what I do is easy, but much of the stuff involved is stuff I’ve been doing for twenty years so is comparatively easy for me.

The notion of having this many lanes in a built up area is insane to me.

What a soundtrack!

That’s an interesting way of phrasing “has actively enabled corruption for decades”.

APNG wasn’t officially part of the spec?!

I was fortunate to find something that I have enough skills for but I absolutely agree on the polymath thing. One would think that it’d be a useful skillset to have but I don’t think most businesses can grasp the concept. As a result my employer doesn’t receive anywhere near the benefits they could from me.

I love Cold War era “throwing technology at the wall to see what sticks” projects. So many ideas were tried and often the ideas themselves weren’t bad but something else was a limiting factor (e.g. our level of material science technology at the time). Even so, they’d often get a lot further than one could reasonably expect, which is rather cool.

I’m reminded of Louise Belcher describing safety tape:

Gene: Are we safe here? Louise: Of course! It’s safety tape. They can’t just call it that if it’s (screaming as the mechanical shark smashes through the safety tape)

It’s the same reason I look both ways before crossing the street even if it’s a one-way street - just because something isn’t allowed doesn’t actually stop it from happening.

Here you go: “Students in England now graduate with average debt of £53,000, data shows” https://piefed.social/post/961417 https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jun/20/students-in-england-graduate-average-debt-increase

Work wanted me to go to the US for a thing and thankfully I had family reasons for being able to say no. I’m not setting foot in that country in a long time.

Rough price on these things?

The whole point of that site is to compare sizes of cars. Plug in whatever you want to compare: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/mazda-mx-5-1989-roadster-vs-ford-f-250-2023-4-door-pickup-crew-cab/

I enjoyed Wasteland 3 a great deal too.

I rather enjoyed Gears Tactics a few years ago.