Posts made by WTFE

So, I picked up a couple of weird teas a month or so back. These are each 1kg of raw pu'er tea.

The one in bamboo is just a pretty normal raw pu'er (about eight years old), but the one on the left is termed "spring snow bud raw pu'er" and looked pretty odd in the photos. So needless to say I was curious.

After a month, with my existing brick still being worked on, I succumbed to the curiosity and cracked open the package.

This is the weirdest-looking tea (as in actual camelia sinensis) I've ever seen. The tea is very friable (which is unusual for a pu'er block); what you're seeing there is about 500g left over after I broke off by hand a bunch of the tea and put it into a spare 500g tin I had lying around. This tea's look is a serious WTF, but the aroma is incredibly powerful, like flowers with a tiny hint of grass. The reason it's so easily friable is that it's just the tips of old-growth trees (not shrubs), so they're short. Usually pu'er discs are made with full, long old-growth leaves; individual leaves can be longer than 15cm. These are wound up around each other and compressed together before drying, so taking them apart takes strong tooling. (I use a pair of specialized pliers, although specialized knives are used too.)

It brews up like this.

That's the very first brew. The WTFery with the leaves continues at this point. It looks more like really fat juniper scale leaves than actual tea. This is because these are the first shoots of spring, as I mentioned earlier, and then just the tips. Each "scale" is a bunch of leaves wrapped up around each other in a tube-like formation. It really is tea, it's just not in a form factor I'm used to.

This is by far the best tea I've ever owned. (I've had better, but not in my price range.) It's sweet, with a very slight hint of distant sour and the ghost of a hint of pine flavouring. The liquor, as you can see, has almost no colour, but man does it have flavour. From that first batch I managed to get six full brews (increasing the soak time from 30s to about 2.5m by the last one) without having it lose any flavour. Even after the 2.5m soak time it doesn't get much darker in the liquor than it is in this photo. After the sixth brew the flavour started to noticeably degrade. By the tenth it was a non-starter.

"Do you RP to play a character, or get a character so you can RP?"

Yes.

Which one?

Depends on my mood.

If it was an April Fool's Day joke, it was by definition neither funny nor classy.

They say the pun is the lowest form of humour.

"They" are incorrect.

The prank is the lowest form of humour. And the April Fool's Day joke is the lowest form of prank. Even lower than this, however, is the fucktard who keeps an April Fool's Day prank running all day. And below even that, to the point that it's actually got bootprints of the former on its face, is the total shit-for-brains that keeps the joke running longer than the actual day. (I'm looking at you here, Walker@MUS*H, you fucking retarded shit.)

Don't do April Fool's Day jokes. The only fool involved in these is the fool who thinks they're funny. In all of fucking history you can count the number of April Fool's Day jokes that were funny on one hand. You could do it on that hand even after the bizarre gardening accident that sheared off all your fingers.

(And yes, Walker, I will be hunting you down to shear off all your fingers just so you can't type such an ill-conceived, ill-bred, ill-executed fucking shitty excuse for a prank ever again.)

@HorrorHound said:

I am terrified to ask...what is Second Life? I refuse to google it.

Second Life is the online game for people who lack a first.

Eventually.

Stinking up the place for months in the meantime.

I note with fascination that the person responsible for my whining about a lack of blocking is now banned.

Is, perhaps, the installation of a blocking plugin a higher priority now, or shall I invite Bane here to stink up the place as a way to hammer home the need?

This was asked for quite a long while ago with no response outside of a metaphorical shrug.

I've said it before many, many times. I'll probably wind up saying it again many, many times. "You get the behaviour you reward."

Yes. This is why I use words like "irritating". As in "irritating tick". The kind of "irritating tick" that says repeatedly and at length how much contempt he holds you in ... then adds you to a follow list. Presumably because I'm so interesting and informative and not at all because he wants to continue finding channels to be an irritating tick in.

Nah, this is just the "irritating tick" variety of hyperbolic stalker.

Personally, I view the "block" buttons as a tool for reducing the clutter in my feeds (wherever they happen to be). When I've identified someone as 1) a person I'm unlikely to ever have anything resembling a productive conversation with, and 2) someone who has the sorts of proclivities that make them omnipresent (like, say, inserting themselves into every conversation in a desperate attempt to make it be about them) I hit the block button.

Note the use of "and" above. It's important.

Basically I view the block buttons as the social equivalent of ad blockers: a tool to eliminate the irritating and repetitive from your digital experience.

You'll note that all the big social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), while having "follow" features, also have blocking features. If you're going to model your crud on other people's stuff, at least understand that model first. There's a reason why I can block, ignore, etc. in every major social platform (and 99.44% of the minor ones) ever released.

Hell, I'm pretty sure even "social coding" sites have blocks available.

The point, Alzie, isn't whether we can identify our stalkers or not (for the record I knew we could), it's that we've got a fucking stalking feature but no anti-stalking features.

Seriously, which deranged son-of-a-bitch wrote this software?

Source code available here.

Sorry for my choice of "weird" programming languages but I haven't yet found a decent replacement for Rexx in general utility scripting yet. It's easy enough to read, though, that I'm sure it can be trivially ported to the more hipster-oriented languages.

build-usb.rx is a simple utility that you run by issuing rexx build-usb.rx (or its equivalent on whatever OS you happen to be using). It will connect to the Linux kernel USB database and will download its contents, parsing all available vendor ID and product ID codes. (It specifically only looks for VIDs and PIDs, not everything in the database). It generates the file USB.rx as output. This output file should be placed somewhere in your Rexx implementation's macro path. (For Regina on Linux that would be found in the REGINA_MACROS environment variable. Other Rexx implementations will have their own equivalents.) When that is in place you have a new (external) function available that will let you look up a VID or a VID,PID pair to get a string back formatted for easy parsing. You can read the opening comment at the link above for full details, but as an example:

parse value USB(4321, 8765) with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
say vendor product

This snippet of code will print UNKNOWN because there is no '4321' VID. :

parse value USB('1a86', '7523') with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
say vendor product

This code will print QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial adapter.

Or the following short script will read the output from lsusb and print the vendors and products of everything on your USB bus (in Linux):

address system 'lsusb' with output fifo ''
do queued()
  parse pull 'Bus' . 'Device' . 'ID' vidpid .
  parse value vidpid with vid ':' pid .
  parse value USB(vid, pid) with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
  say vendor product
end

(Yes, I'm aware that lsusb already prints that information. It's just an example of use, not an actually useful script!)

...but there is a stalking feature.

Lovely software design.

@TNP said:

Actually, it's incorrect to label it non-Western. The swastika appears on ancient Greek coins up to 2500 years ago.

And on Canadian hockey jerseys in the 20th century.

And on American branding and marketing.

And on American military vehicles.

(It was particularly popular among aviators for some reason.)

Used in greeting cards too.

And in good luck charms.

Contrary to @Thenomain's assumption, I am sniggering here. (See what I did there?) I'm laughing at the complete ignorance people have of their own country's history to the point that you make shit up like "clockwise bad, counter-clockwise good ... or is it the other way around?" The total erasure of culture and history entertains me to no end. The swastika was literally everywhere in the west: Germany, England, France, Canada, the USA until it suddenly vanished from the public eye and was seemingly systematically erased out of embarrassment.

Or at least put into hiding.

Now the erasure makes sense. If you're German. The Hakenkreuz should be a huge mental scar on the German psyche for generations to come. And I can also see how European Jews would think that perhaps the original meaning has been lost for them.

Despite their own history with the symbol.

But for the erasure to be so complete (without any kind of legal enforcement no less!) in a country as far removed from the Hakenkreuz as the USA both astonishes me and delights me. And this is further enhanced as I watch mythology (like the "lefty-laid back, righty tighty" one for how the direction changes between good and evil) created (admittedly in slow motion) before my very eyes. Not in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of my parents, the swastika went from a popular emblem of good luck (to the point that Coca Cola was sold using it!) to something nobody knows anything at all about except that "The swastika is evil, m'kay?" Where "educated" people will "understand" that it was/is different in "the East" (albeit with the bullshit mythology of lefty-laid back, righty tighty) but where those very same educated people don't know that there's a very good chance their parents (or grandparents) had swastikas on their playing cards, their clothing, around their necks, on their buildings, etc.

@AmishRakeFight said:

The symbols inclusion into a certain horrifying ideology often negates its far more innocent origin.

You understand, don't you, that it is still used in that innocent (indeed meritorious) meaning? That people who view the swastika as a symbol of health, good fortune, moral uprightness, etc. outnumber the people who view it as Nazi by about 3:1?

My son took the rubbing that's at the base of that sketch from a temple's adornments. A temple that may have originated centuries ago, but whose current buildings are younger than I am.

The "backwards swastika" thing is a myth.

You can find the swastika facing both ways and flat or diagonal festooning places, religious or otherwise, all around the world.

Here it is facing both ways (flattened) in the same religious icon:

I'm a Barbie girl in a Barbie world. Burning plastic smells fantastic!

People who ask dumb questions.