Bidwell, J. (1997)

I’m now going to be perpetually frustrated that I’ll never be able to find and identify my tree soul!

Perhaps, or too boomer

Sheep are really friendly. I guess as herd animals they are very affectionate if they trust you, and very wary if they don’t know you. Try throwing them some dried corn a few times, they’ll fall in love with you and be eating out your hand and wanting cuddles in no time.

I’m super curious to know what contexts you send this meme. Is it just something funny that one of you remembers occasionally and sends? Or does it have a specific meaning like “sorry can’t come have to work”?

It’s not even upgrade, even twenty years ago, most of them were either always rinsing or on some sort of intermittent timer. I guess when they were just a big communal trench it didn’t make sense for them to be flushed by an individual. (UK / various Europe)

Yeah, I caused myself a lot of misery by trying to follow the “eat the frog first” strategy, and get the big important stuff out the way before the easy / less critical things. Just led to me wasting days not doing the big thing, and all the little things were snowballing into much larger problems.

Now I go with “put the frog on your plate” - I tell myself honestly that the important task should be top of my list, and then proceed to avoid it by doing all the other shit. Sure, I have to deal with the problems of leaving something important til the last minute (and they are numerous) but at least everything else isn’t also on fire.

Same, was confused until I zoomed in.

Yup, looked weird to me, like some only had one central eye, or they looked mishapen. But since I was focused on the cross, they were out of focus, so it didn’t seem very significant that I couldn’t see them clearly and they looked weird?

Then for the last couple of seconds the faces started appearing in the centre of the screen, where I was looking. But they looked normal then, so don’t know of they started showing the same faces on either side so my brain started compostiting each eyes vision into a single central face. And that made me wonder if that’s what was suppose to happen with grotesque faces, they were suppose to composite and appear clearly but gross? Rather than just vague and peripheral.

There’s quite a lot of reviews and comments from the time hating ESB (a muppet as a spiritual guide? Contrived twist!) and RotJ (too cheesy! Just an excuse to sell toys!).

Yeah, the one table i saw eating in was a group of young guys in smart suits looking very serious.

Had an amazing Chinese restaurant near my old place, really excellent food but always completely deserted. They always seemed so surprised that when we called for takeout and whenever we collected it they’d chat about how busy they’d been, and how bus loads of tourists stop by, it just happens to be empty right now… Uhuh. Surrre. I live in this street, I don’t see busses of anyone. But the food was consistently excellent, so they must have actively not advertised because otherwise they’d been super popular.

I did. I don’t know anything abut them and Wikipedia seemed to suggest they were a type of alligatoridae. I originally googled “caymen crocodile”, so it could have been worse.

What’s with that weird ai bullshit ? There’s real videos of giant otters fighting alligstors if you want that sort of thing

Infinitely better.

Adorable. But if anyone is curious (as I was)

He is! 95% mice, very occasional birds. I had attributed that to birds other advantages (mostly being able to harass him by flying at him but not low enough he can reach) but perhaps it’s also the colour!

Is that why cats can be so ginger and still good hunters? My orange stands out so much in the garden, but maybe to dichromatic mice he’s super stealthy?

Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

I travel a lot, and spend time in a lot of random places, stay with friends and such like. My job means that I can set my own schedule most of the time, but sometimes I need to respond to something pretty urgently. So, there’s been plenty of times when I’ve been travelling light and suddenly been asked to pull a bunch of data from a spreadsheet and write some quick report on it, so usually I just ask whoever I’m with if I can use their pc for an hour and get it out the way.

It’s certainly possible do it all on a phone, but it’s much quicker and more pleasant to just use a proper keyboard and screen. And there have been times (like after a ill-advised encounter with a fountain in Rome) when my phone is temporarily out of action, so if I need to deal with travel arrangements on a public computer it might involve accessing my emails.