Apparently FB learned nothing from the classic “I bought a toilet seat on amazon and now amazon’s trying as hard as it can to fuel the toilet-seat-collecting hobby I’m apparently hooked on” problem

That first one was definitely the funniest, but the some of the other bowl-demons are pretty great too.

There’s a bit more detail about exactly what’s going on in this article.

I’m surprised how timeless and appealing these little drawings are. They avoid a lot of the foibles which make a lot of late antique/medieval art look dated, and the exaggerated proportions, noodly limbs and googly eyes wouldn’t be out of place in a webcomic or cartoon.

I also love that these bowls refer to themselves as “amulets”. Next time someone describes something as an “amulet” in a novel or TTRPG I’m definitely going to imagine it as an inverted bowl with a googly-eyed stick figure demon on.

For python, the lack of type information for function signatures and return values in the documentation has always annoyed me.

The lack of naming consistency in the standard library, too — it’s almost as bad as PHP, with nospaces, under_scores and CamelCase at every level: modules, classes, functions, arguments.

I can’t think of a third major annoyance off the top of my head though, and almost every time I use another programming language, I end up realising just how well designed some aspect of python is, so it’s not doing too badly.

I’ve gotten through entire (admittedly short) conversations in dutch just by speaking german in a dutchey way. It’s not just a weird version of german though, they have some (adorable) words of their own too!

My favourite circular musical cosmology still has to be this one from Christopher Simpson’s 1659 “The Division Viol”, where he also makes some amusing remarks about the structure of the solar system.

although I’m not convinced that the singular/plural ambiguity is a big problem. “you” already has ambiguous quantity, and both “you” and “we” are inherently ambiguous and context-dependent

as a staunch “they” proponent, I’d say it’s not a bad idea. I’d type ey/em/eir and pronounce [eɪ] [ɛm] [eə]. Possible use singular verb conjugation too for reduced ambiguity e.g. “ey wants to be referred to using “ey””

Maybe the idea is “pay me to clean up the mess I made on your window”…

I can think of ways of doing it, but they’re not pretty — e.g. onscreen keyboard made of <a> elements, each keypress is a full screen refresh which stores the new contents of the fake textbox server side (either cookies or URL param to identify session). Makes me wonder… did anyone do something like this at the time, before HTML forms were invented?

I feel the pain :/ I was already freelancing when I took my GCSEs and was forced to do the ICT BTEC you’re probably talking about. It ended up being my worst grade overall because I got so angry with it halfway through and tried (but sadly failed) to fail it on purpose. Plan was that if a job interviewer asked why IT was my lowest grade I would take great pleasure in ripping the course content to shreds.

Please tell me that’s the original “this is a server, do not turn off” sticker?!

just imagine how long it would have taken if they had compensated the slaves :/

@_aitor I mostly reached a similar place and it’s very relaxing. I occasionally have to remind myself that I’m helping purely because I chose to. The help might be ignored or even rejected, and that’s fine. Might have an impact on whether I chose to help that particular person in the future, though…

oh man, I go wild in thunderstorms and high winds. I have yet to find somewhere with both, Iceland had great wind but no thunder, central europe is the other way round.

reminds me of the parisian system

@jkphl @t how long are you all in Berlin? I’ll be headed that way on Saturay or Sunday, would be great to meet up if you’re still around!

jeez, tell me about it. So annoying. I keep having to chase this one out of my garden

Their website vectortours.de is one of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. A German domain with a weird mixture of Albanian and German text. Most of the phone numbers don’t work, and when I tried calling the German number and asked in German about their lines from Macedonia to Montenegro, they were dumbfounded and had no idea what I was talking about. Some of the ticket desks in Skopje firmly denied the existence of the company, until we eventually found one who gave us a ticket. Then, by chance, we ended up staying in a hostel in Prizren which was literally next door to the Vector Tours office, which was adorned with three completely different logos! I think some other weird stuff happened which I forgot, but in total this was enough to cement them as a semi-legendary entity and permanent in-joke.

Have you ever traveled on a “Vector Tours” bus? They became something of a personal legend after my Balkans trip