Zero tolerance policies aren’t meant to protect students, and they aren’t even meant to protect bullies. They’re meant to protect teachers and principals, mostly from having to face scrutiny for how they handle bullying. They can just punish all parties equally and wash their hands of the matter, and any criticism can be deflected by saying, “zero tolerance; everyone was treated the same.”

I never truly appreciated this recurring gag in the Buttons and Mindy segments of Animaniacs until I had a toddler of my own.

I’m a sailor.

Ships sound a certain way, even when not sailing. If they ever sound differently, you know something has happened and you’ll have to respond to it. Even if it’s just a drill, the response is the same.

My sailing days are actually behind me, but I still get tense when I hear unusual sounds in my house or office.

I’m extremely sensitive to changes in noise levels. Whether it’s a very loud and short noise, like a door slamming, or some change in background noise, like a furnace turning on, I’m just acutely aware of it.

‘Epitome’ will forever be epi-tome in my head: ‘epi’ like in EpiPen and tome as in a big heavy book.

And the ‘c’ in ‘indictment’ also always gets pronounced when I read the word to myself.

I don’t know how to feel about it being an RTS, as I’m pretty bad at those.

I guess a straight slow-time game might end up too similar to the board game, though.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

Here’s my original post again. I bolded the key part: it’s Trump telling the lie, and the news organizations are credulously repeating it.

This same article doesn’t provide any pushback to this claim until much later in the article, and then it only says that, “Carney said Canada accounts for only about 1% of fentanyl imports into the US,” instead of calling it what it is: a lie.

This is what has my onions cheesed: that major news outlets are uncritically repeating all the fetid slop that spews from Trump’s mouth. Another example was the ‘Governor Trudeau’ bit from a few months ago, where I saw one clip of a gormless CNN anchor nod their empty head and chuckle as Trump’s lapdog displayed the most wanton disregard for civility and the truth.

Canada had “failed to cooperate” in curbing the flow of fentanyl and other drugs across the US border. The Canadian government says it is cracking down on drug gangs.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

My own experience, as someone who is not necessarily tech illiterate, but also not an expert either:

I decided to check out some basic Linux stuff, and found a post directing newcomers to a website that was supposed to be a top-notch beginner’s guide. This guide started with a history of Linux, written in the style of an early 2000s GameFAQs guide. It then jumped immediately into selecting a distro, and started describing each option with terms like "lightweight"and “robust” without explaining what those terms meant in that context - or even defining what a distro was in the first place.

As someone who has used Windows for around 3 decades, I could make some inferences to fill in the gaps. But I imagine someone with less experience with PCs would get completely lost.

Now on the flip side, I’ve also shared in another thread the story of how I lost interest in programming partway through my introductory university course, and mostly received positive feedback. The folks in that thread seemed happy to hear the perspective of an outsider.

This recently happened in my campaign.

We were fighting a dragon, and it kept flying around its lair, making it very hard for my Barbarian to hit it. We ultimately won, but 3 of the party of 5 died.

Later, while dividing loot, I saw that I had been carrying a Potion of Flying the whole time, and the fight probably would have gone better if I had used it.

I was thinking Flagpole Sitta, but that works too

Or a 90s indie song.

If I can’t find a Canadian version of a product, I look for Mexico next.

Help your neighbours, everyone.

I can think of a bunch of other things that Google should be embarrassed about, but Gemini is uniquely humiliating because of how proud they are of it and how hard they are pushing it.

Copilot is one of two LLMs I’ve briefly tried. It was noticeably better than Gemini was at the time, but still seemed entirely pointless. Nothing it (or Gemini) offered to do were things I wanted help with. I enjoy research and writing, so why would I outsource those things and burn down an acre of rainforest in the process?

The zeal of the convert.

According to his Wiki page:

“In August 2019, Vance was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church in a ceremony at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

I met my partner through a dating site. In the two years prior to that, I had used the site to meet over two dozen other women, which led to no long-term relationships but did result in a few short flings.

I can say that what helped me was expectation management. This was actually my second time using a dating site, and the first time around I was super picky, looking for “green flags.” Correspondingly, I messaged very few women, and met even fewer (four in two years). The second time, I realized that someone having a sparse profile didn’t mean they were a boring or lazy person. Sometimes it does, but other times it just means they aren’t very good at writing about themselves.

I’ll also say there’s only so much the metrics of dating sites can tell you about someone and your compatibility with them. There’s a level of response bias to the questionnaires on these sites, i.e. people answer the questions based on what they think a potential partner might like, not their genuine beliefs and preferences. You’ll never discover your actual compatibility with someone unless you talk to them, so I took the approach of, “unless there are explicit deal breakers in your profile, I’ll ask you on a date and we’ll see how things go.”

There’s also the expectation management for the frequency of matches, responses to messages, dates, and beyond. Dating apps aren’t magic machines that will get you hooked up in hours. They take work, and you’ll see a lot of rejection (most of it just utter silence). There can be long dry spells. Sometimes you’ll need to take a break because you’ve literally messaged everyone on the site and you need to wait for more members. And sometimes, they just won’t work for some people. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. Success for many of these sites and apps is highly dependent on one’s physical attractiveness, and some people simply did not win the genetic lottery.

I watched some of that original CGDQ stream live, and it’s amazing how far they’ve come.

The story seems generic at first, but it goes places later.

One feature I really liked about this game was that you can adjust the encounter rate, even down to 0%. No in-game consumables or equipment needed, just an option in the menu. If you want to gain a few levels, you can crank it up. If you just want to revisit an old location because you missed an item, you can turn it off.