m;bluelander @matt@cybre.space

In the old days the only way to program your computer was to sit on the roof during a thunderstorm with two lightning rods; you held up the left rod when you wanted a zero and the right when you wanted a one

Has the eternal terror prism gone too far? Tonight on Oprah, the torment nexus speaks publicly for the first time since its retirement about its contentious legacy, making amends, and whether its mistakes can be forgiven before the prism's all-consuming white flame has reduced the last trace of life on our planet to smouldering ash

You know, now that all hope has been devoured by the pitiless maw of the eternal terror prism, I'm starting to miss the torment nexus. It was kinda cute, really

"Jon Ronson" is the USB-A port of names

The least relatable part of every conlang critic video is when he painstakingly pronounces every sound and sorts them into categories based on what parts of the mouth / teeth / tongue / lips are used to make them, because from my perspective the words are formed in my brain and are transformed into sound coming out of my mouth by magic

My favorite phoneme is the plosive glottal aspirated labial front palliative unvoiced fricative bottom avuncular dental glottal schwa

Sometimes I make a change on a page on my wiki that I'm not happy with and immediately want to revert. Luckily, this is easy to do on a wiki. I just press the back button in my browser, click in the text field, hold ctrl-Z until the text stops changing, then click save

I'm up all night to take drugs
I'm up all night to eat bugs
I'm up all night for hors-d'œuvres
These bugs are all nice and crunchy

Write a speech. Sound silent. Animate static. Write poetry like the pros.

Big financial news in today's WaStreJo

Technically any kind of scope is a periscope if you're using it in a Nando's

Actually I don't think this works because "serve" in toki pona only refers to the thing being served, not the person receiving service. You can only serve someone in the same sense as that twilight zone episode where it's a cookbook

Well, I guess that's the bad thing that's going to happen to them for doing it

o anpa tawa jan pana
(bow down before the person you serve)
sina jo ike tan pali sina
(you will get bad things because of your actions)

Bad thing to call Oceania: "The Austrient"

Okay, earliest reference I can find to this terminology is a 1972 mainframe game called "bagels" (or, um, "bagles".) The fact that these terms spread at all is probably thanks to the game's inclusion in a 1975 book called "100 Basic Games".

"Bagel" definitely predates "zilch", and "pico" and "fermi" are definitely the standard spellings. The alternate versions I remember are either a corruption in my memory or a difference that teacher introduced. I find either option unlikely, considering a church on the opposite side of the country from me had kids play a game with a name that exactly matches the corrupted version I remember. Maybe that teacher moved to California and became a pastor.

What's still unclear is why those terms were chosen in the first place, and why it's not more widely known as a pencil-and-paper game. It's a better pastime than tic-tac-toe or hangman

I tried different spellings of the words, (because it's quite possible I'm misremembering it, this happened when I was 7) and I discovered that some people call it "pico, fermi, zilch", and still more people replace "zilch" with the word "bagel". But even the most common combination I can find, "pico fermi bagel", only gets around 100 results https://www.google.com/search?q="pico+fermi+bagel"

Am I correctly remembering the name the teacher gave the game? If I'm not, why did someone else refer to a game by that exact name? Is there a canonical name for the pencil-and-paper version of? Why "pico" or "pecos"? Why "foamy" or "fermi"? Is it a reference to Pecos Bill? Is it a reference to Enrico Fermi? If you're going to replace one of the three words, why replace "zilch", the one of the three with an intuitive meaning? Was there a conspiracy to cover up the pen and paper version of the game to keep people from knowing they can play Mastermind for free?

You know the game mastermind, where you have the four colored pegs and the other player is trying to guess the combination? I learned to play it as a pencil and paper game that uses numbers called "pecos foamy zilch". "Pecos" refers to a correct number in the correct position, "foamy" refers to a correct number in the wrong position, "zilch" refers to a number that doesn't appear in the combination at all. The origin of "zilch" is obvious, but I have no idea what "pecos" or "foamy" refer to, or even if that's how they're spelled. I've never heard anyone else refer to the game this way, and searching for that phrase has exactly one result, in which it appears to refer to a different game https://www.facebook.com/redhilllutheran/photos/mrs-napiers-2nd-grade-class-of-16-students-performed-dont-forget-zero-play-about/1103634616398755/

The most incredible thing about youtube is how if the pause button is the currently selected control, pressing space pauses the video, because space activates whatever control is selected. But then it immediately unpauses it, because space is also the "toggle pause" hotkey

It's been like this for 15 years

This deep dive into the history of Caramelldansen is the most interesting thing I've watched all month. I'm glad I found this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI3yD3WAcz4