In about 2008 I was flying to New Zealand via LAX for a refuelling stop. We did not go through passport control but the US decided to take our finger prints and retinal scans. I am still furious.

I use Lawnchair for that.

At least for me it’s /etc/caddy/CaddyFile

When I was a kid, we had a class on Logo in, I think, 4th grade? (It was either that or 5th grade.) It wasn’t particularly hard to make various geometric drawings with it, but it also wasn’t clear how to use it to do anything beyond that.

This sums up my early experiences with programming. It felt like either pointless flashing lights or building the universe from scratch. These days I have lots of tasks that programming is useful for but for the longest time no sources I encountered ever seemed to talk about what practical use I could put the concepts to.

Telling me about for and while loops and various other things felt like learning by rote and I never got very far. It wasn’t until my late 20s when I had a load of tedious administrative tasks to do that I was able to get my teeth into programming.

Can you give us your config file?

Optional is the way.

To make a commodity with dropping demand even more common? Capitalism can’t keep its story straight.

How can a film from 1979 have visual callbacks to an event from 1986?

Starting an online community, being disinterested in my studies following a lack of academic direction at Oxford/Cambridge, finding the dating pool and friend pool at my school insufficient to make many meaningful connections, playing a few 2004/5 video games, drinking at our sixth form bar, and ultimately running out the clock on a way of life I was tired of.

In the autumn nothing much happened and the next year I’d go to university in Scotland mostly to get my parents off my back. In hindsight I don’t think I could have done much else with the options and knowledge available to me.

It was pretty bleak, emotionally.

Choosing not to swear is fine. Choosing to swear is fine. Choosing to swear but leaving out a few letters is ridiculous behaviour and deserving of mockery. If someone chooses to do something silly then being laughed at is a predictable consequence.

That’s depressing on a number of levels.

Then why even sign the card at all?

Whenever a prerecorded message plays over a tannoy saying something like “we apologise for the inconvenience” I get annoyed.

There is no “we” to be apologetic. The message could express what has gone wrong, or what is being done, but expressing emotion on behalf of a non-living entity can fuck right off.

I have a South Park mug that says “not safe for dishwasher or microwave” on its base. I’ve had it since the late '90s and have never honoured those instructions.

Whenever I see that on a piece of crockery my response is the same - “May the odds ever be in your favour!”

Is he not a smidge old for that?

Brian Lunduke is still around? Oh dear

That doesn’t sound like you appreciate the spirit of OP’s question. I’m not sure if I feel the social interaction will be worth it for me to engage further so I’m instead going to get some more sleep.

That seems statistically unlikely. I’ve met plenty of people who aren’t normal so I do have lots of points of comparison.

I’ve met so very many of them.

I was plenty good at maths up to the point where I couldn’t study more (as in, my other subject choices locked me out of taking the next stage, A-level). However in general I found the more complex stuff abstract and characterless.

For example statistics bored me. We’re working out the upper quartile something something? To what end?

I’ve used maths for accounts, programming, carpentry, and so forth, but that’s always been fairly basic stuff. The more advanced stuff has never been of the slightest value to me (I still don’t know why I, a layman, should give a shit about factorisation, prime numbers, happy numbers, etc…). I am not saying that it has no value - simply that to me personally it might as well be memorising the principles behind a naming scheme for shades of grey paint. I can learn the principles and they make sense, but so what?

I pretty much felt the same way about the higher levels of chemistry. Oh these are ionic bonds? Okay…?

My teachers were excellent and enthusiastic (my entire maths class got the highest grade possible, myself included) but I don’t really see what there is to like. I didn’t dislike it, I was just indifferent. The easier stuff could be like a basic puzzle game, the more complex stuff I could apply the system I learned and provide the correct, if pointless, answer.

It felt like being taught someone else’s complex system for sorting different sizes of white paper, I suppose I could say.