Why the hell can’t you spell colour?!

You might like The Laundry Files books by Charles Stross. Exactly that plays out in one book where elves invade Earth.

The premise is that magic is real, and can be summoned/controlled by the appropriate application of mathematics. If you discover this truth, you’re irrevocably attached to The Laundry, basically MI6 for supernatural affairs, and you can never leave.

The protagonist is an IT nerd in England. He almost flattened Wolverhampton with a new algorithm he discoved but they caught him in time. His wife is a protagonist in a few books, and she’s a delight. One of my favorites is where a bunch of high-end accountants accidentally make themselves vampires.

That plays out in the Discworld novels. The idea is, pray the man about to kill you is a bad guy, because he’ll fuck around, gloat, maybe make a mistake. If he’s a good guy, he’ll kill you instantly.

Exercise for it’s own sake sucks. Find something physically challenging and fun. Kayaking is a great example, and not the crazy fast rapids type. Hiking is great exercise as well. Dedicate a pack to it and keep modifying it untill you’re carry what you want and need. LOL, mine’s about 25lbs. with beer and a little shotgun. You get the idea, even if those things aren’t your jam.

You might be surprised what you can find on maps! Zoom out and see what’s out there. Found a park by the Navy base that few locals know exists. Been exploring this area for years and there are still places close by I’ve never been.

The government will still have to pay to use Excel. Too much shit will break, you can’t just flip an .xlxs into another program.

It’s a serious term in IT! One of those things that’s recognized as an issue, and then blown off IRL.

Think of paying down a monster credit card bill while living like a monk. Only same thing to do, but it hurts in the short and midterm. Long term, you gonna pay far more.

Solid answer! Guess I’m a cow patty for even asking, but you came to the rescue.

Why was the US funding FOSS projects? That strikes me as weird, inappropriate and suspicious.

Bet something’s broken in IT. Some system can’t talk to some other system. In any case, something stupid is broken in logistics. A desk jockey decided return labels were cheaper than implementing the solution, and that might well be true!

Making shit up: The frontend can’t talk to the backend without an expensive, highly specialized addon, which is a monthly subscription, which has to be applied to 1,000 machines. They could unwrap all that and simplify, but now we’re talking a massive overhaul that drags in 14 other systems, costs 10,000 man hours and had some inevitable downtown.

“Fuck it! We’re sending return labels!”

And this kids is why tech debt comes with usurious interest rates!

Was gonna say, you gotta be fit as hell to even get a place in something like that.

Bingo. Lots of stupid things at this level boil down to legal protection. You’ll see it everywhere once you learn and look.

I was noticing him slowly dial back the makeup and fake colored hair late in his last admin. Somehow… the makeup returned. (with a vengeance)

Keep saying this, and no one has ever had a plausible answer: YouTube does not do that to me.

I watch lots of gun content, you would think I’d be overrun with right-wing horseshit, but that never happens. I get sane channels, apolitical, learning, legal and fun related stuff, like I like.

Here’s my front page this evening. All interesting except maybe some TV shows I’m not familiar with but have watched clips. Don’t think I’ve done much of anything to curate all that, just let YouTube decide.

The only time I remember the algorithm going nuts was after looking at survival gear and gas masks. LOL, quickly run down with crazier and edgier content. That could have been a rabbit hole, had to cut myself off before it got worse.

Maybe it has to do with my subscriptions?

For large loop needles?

Here’s the real sauce: Hold the thread still and bring the needle to it. Most people who struggle are trying to poke the thread through the needle.

Forgot all that! Had though Harding was the one who knee-capped her, and it wasn’t even the knee.

Didn’t realize I felt exactly the same. Same goes for stores. If the local store screwed themselves in my favor, I’d likely say something. If the big box store fucked up? LOL, mine.

That take is anything but disagreeable. Please read the assignment.

I’m on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I’ve unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they’re deep.

Not a fan of all of Watt’s novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.

Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.

Blindsight:

"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.”

Echopraxia:

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

Third run through Discworld in the past 2 years. My god, been trying to think how to explain to my best friend. I lack the words.

On my third pass right now. Skipped a couple of the first novels, but I love the original order. Got feels for all the series, but I like the perfect way he kept them mixed up.

“Oh shit! Another witches book!”

“Back to the Watch! NICE!”

“Rincewind? Hell with it, those are all funny as hell.”