My family probably wouldn’t be surprised about anything I own. They know the kind of guy I am.

A stranger might be a bit concerned about a certain wooden chest in my dining room. Large enough to fit an adult man (yes, we tried) but filled to the brim with swords, axes, pieces of armor and a 3 foot wooden spoon.

Edit: second place to a glittery pink princess themed friendship book filled with entries from adult millennials who like retro games, horror movies and metal.

And hungry dog in the bottom right

Depends on your needs. There are a whole lot of great games for the PS5 (my partner finished Blood of Dawnwalker just a few days ago) and most of them run really well but let’s be honest, 95% of what you want to play is also available on PC.

If you are looking for something to just plug into your TV, sit back and play a game, go ahead, buy a classic or slim PS5 they are great. I wouldn’t recommend the PS5 Pro. Sure, it has a bit more power but so far I haven’t encountered any game that would have needed it and I doubt many will come out before the end of this generation. If you have enough budget for a PS5 Pro, you probably have enough budget for a Steam Machine instead.

Good to know, thanks!

This is part of an ongoing fan comic, so you might be missing a bit of context. See this archive for a link to the post that inspired it and all 13 comic strips so far.

The characters are Calvin and Susie from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, imagined as adults. Notice Hobbes in stuffed animal form in some of the panels. Calvin now uses the name Panthera and identifies as neither male nor female, using fae/faer pronouns, which are rather unusual, even for non-binary people. It started as a joke that Calvin hates being normal so much that if he ever transitioned, he wouldn’t just be a girl (whom he has always found gross) but something as far outside the norm as possible.

Okay, let me break it down step by step.

• When Susie sees Panthera, she notices faer boobs and assumes Calvin has transitioned to being a girl.
• Panthera explains the band name which doesn’t fit Susie’s assumption so she remarks “But… you’re a girl!”, hoping to get an explanation.
• Panthera in typical Panthera/Calvin fashion doesn’t give a clear answer but a flippant “What gave you that idea?” which Susie interprets as a no.
• Being accustomed to binary genders, Susie sees only one other option and tries to confirm “Then you’re still [a boy]?” but gets cut off.
• Now, Susie is completely confused and apparently can’t think of a third option besides male and female. In her confusion she circles back to the one thing she can be sure about: the person in front of her has boobs. She asks about that.
• Panthera still doesn’t give a clear answer to what fae identifies as, prompting Susie to spell it out: “Well, what do I call you then?”
• When presented with the business card, Susie accepts the name and pronouns but still struggles with the concept.

So in short: Susie is familiar with the concept transgender people but still thinks in binary genders and can’t quite get her head around Panthera being non-binary. Hope that helps.

Not a boy/man anymore but not a girl/woman either.

This tumblr thread explains it

I think we might need a Calvinball community (mainly because I’m too lazy to make a tumblr account and they limit how much you can read without being logged in)

Edit: the archive is also available on Neocities

Clearly you meant 3 ABY 22 AFE and not 1980.

Statistical models are not technically algorithms

Which makes “opt out of algorithms” even more wrong.

They should define a bare minimum baseline of data points that should be made available to users to control the content they want to see

I’m not a fan of specifying too much here. Many platforms don’t track location while other fields that we can’t think of in advance might be useful. Finding a more general rule that still gets the intent across might be hard but I’d rather have it a bit under-specified than suddenly requiring a social media site to track my location every time I post because someone wasn’t careful enough when writing the text of a law.

Other than that, I agree 100%.

I really really REALLY hope this is phrased well. Otherwise it is impossible to implement. People don’t know what an algorithm is.

Sorting by date uses an algorithm. Filtering by tag uses an algorithm. Even counting out a number of posts uses an algorithm. An algorithm is not some magic oracle but just a list of instructions like a cooking recipe.

I think OP misunderstood it because the first few sentences mention Trump multiple times, then switch to “The White House”. If they are not familiar with the concept of using “the White House” as a synonym for “the president (+staff)” or if they are not a native speaker, that might seem like the White House might be a separate entity able to comment on the president’s actions.

I guess they used “The White House” because they did not ask Trump personally but his press secretary or whoever answers questions from the public.

One of our local radio stations does this on purpose. The first time I saw one, I thought it was an accident. Then I saw more of them all around town for weeks. I guess the idea is that it makes people notice them more and share photos on social media… seems like it works.

Yeah, they are mentioned by name in the bible

So in other words he spends weeks to write extra tests so that the agent can save him days of coding.

The answer is obvious: the pyramids are the tips of half-buried D8s.

Most movies are mixed for a theater surround sound system. Remixing them for tv speakers is usually not worth the effort. Dialogue usually sits on the center channel while effects and music are spread across left, right and surround channels. A tv with stereo speakers can‘t do much except mix all of that together and that makes it hard to hear the quieter parts.

If you watch a lot of movies, I recommend a soundbar or even better a 5.1 system. It’s expensive but it mostly solves those mixing problems.

I’d argue that shortened names aren’t pronouns. Like, “Bob” isn’t a pronoun after all. But that’s a cool idea nonetheless.

Counter-argument: the only two reasons why “Bob” isn’t a pronoun are a) because English has other pronouns and b) because not every name has a form that’s short enough to use in place of pronouns.

I would say it’s fully plausible that a language develops proper pronouns (with case markings and everything else you would expect) based on a rule that works with any name. As an arbitrary example, a Robert, Robin, Ronald and Rocinante might all use roki for the nominative case, ros for the genitive case and ron for the accusative case. In the absence of other pronoun systems, that would be indistinguishable from what you imagine as pronouns. Add a few centuries of sound shifts and you get something really interesting.