Posts made by WTFE

One thing I love about life? This man lives on the same planet I do:

Libertarian Law Enforcement

OK, I guess I can see that.

Still doesn't change my peeve.

@Coin said:

This is true of any rabid fanbase, though.

I don't know. I've seen loads of fanbois. This felt … special. Like well beyond "short bus" special and into "station wagon driven by a nun" territory.

Interstellar

OK, that's not fair. The movie was fine for what it was: a stately-paced space opera with a few mild pretenses toward "realism". It was above average fare for SF movies; it was well below average fare for SF in general. So I guess my real peeve is…

Christopher Nolan

OK, again not fair. He made a few films I like, despite each one of them having a fairly deep structural flaw at some point or another. He's ambitious and he's trying new(-ish) things and I've got to respect him for that. He's not the super-film-genius-of-this-or-any-other-century he's made out to be, but he's a pretty good film craftsman. But that "he's made out to be" allows me to finally identify the real peeve…

Christopher Nolan Fanbois

Holy shit what an obnoxious bunch of turds! It's not possible, in the mind of a CNF, to dislike a Christopher Nolan film because, you know, you dislike some aspects of his work. No, the only reason that you could possibly not like a Christopher Nolan film is that you're stupid. I made the mistake of checking a few reviews of Interstellar after I watched it to see if I was maybe over-reacting to some of the things I found hinky in it. Wow, did I not expect the festering pool of fanboi pus that I found! In massive screeds (longer than a @HelloRaptor post!) with many correctly-spelled words I learned that I found Interstellar a bit lacklustre because I don't know the laws of … and I quote! … "phsychics [sic] and black holes" and thus didn't understand the movie.

The problem, of course, is that I understand the laws of "phsychics" just fine. And indeed this is part of why I think the "realism" of the film is overhyped. There's loads of physics that got done wrong. (Indeed you can easily point out which parts of the films got vetted by their pet physicist and which parts they didn't bother double-checking on.) And, also, apparently, "love transcends time and dimension" is a law of "phsychics" to this crowd of manboi [sic] macaques.

Seriously, what is it about Christopher Nolan in particular that makes his fanbois so utterly fucking repugnant as human beings?

USB hubs are the worst. Glad to see they're working for you today.

@TNP said:

Yes, it was a fairly common symbol in India going back a couple thousand years. But it's also found on ancient Greek coins dating back to the 4th century BC.

The swastika has appeared spontaneously literally around the world. This is probably because it's one of the easiest patterns to make. It shows up in Chinese as the (truly) ancient character for 10,000 (and often used in the context of "infinite" or "eternal"), it shows up in India, it shows up in various places in Africa, it shows up in both North and South America. It's one of the few truly universal emblems.

࿘卐 HITLER WAS HERE 卍࿗

Dumb shits (on either side of the two-tone US political "spectrum") who say they'll "move to Canada" when something doesn't go their way in US politics.

First, fuck you! Like we want your dangerously toxic politics imported into our country any more than they already have been. Stay in your own little cesspool, nicely sequestered from the rest of the world.

Second, could you do just a little research before spewing your tripe? Wanna move to Canada because the SCOTUS legalized gay marriages nationally? Guess what, Einstein!? We've had legalized gay marriages nation-wide since 2005…

So just stay in your little Hellhole. Don't bother us.

@Luna Not a slide rule. Two. They're both museum pieces (iff a museum out there had the grit to prise them from my cold, dead fingers, that is).

Here, @Luna: I'll give you something to make fun of.

I still own these:

I still use them on occasion. (Very infrequent occasion, yes, but still on occasion.)

@Luna said:

Me. I love me today!

Yep. Definitely an engineer's daughter. Self-love is pretty much the defining characteristic of an engineer.

I'll try that next time it fails. Thanks for the tip!

That box is not reliable. It shows up much of the time, but will occasionally just not appear for any reason.

Unicode. The standard, the consortium, and the people on it. All of it together. It's a festering pile of shit.

But…

Until recently it was the best we had. For whatever reason TRON Encoding never really took off. This left us with a billion other subtly incompatible and immiscible ways of doing mixed-language text that were half-baked and horrible to use. In comes Unicode to the rescue!

But…

Today, twenty-four years after Unicode was first released as a standard it has utterly failed in even covering all the "glyphs" (a typical horrific piece of Unicode jargon) used in major world languages. There are literally millions of people who cannot properly write their names in Unicode's characters. In some languages inappropriate combining must be done to approximate the real glyphs. In others the glyphs don't exist in any form at all, combined or otherwise. This despite seven major revisions (and innumerable minor ones) of the standard.

Along the way we've seen a dozen things like the political and technical stupidity that is the Han Unification. (Know what it is and disagree with why it's stupid? Well, under the logic of the Han Unification, most European languages really belong under a hypothetical Greek Unification because of the massive overlap in both characters and history between Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets. I mean really, what's the difference between A and А or P and Р? There's no reason to separate them! Hell even N and И are clearly variants of the same glyph! Stupid, no? Same applies to Han Unification.)

So... with seven major revisions behind us we still can't write everybody's name even in the major languages. (You don't want to know what being in a minority language group is like!) But with 7.0 we got this festering turd of an addition. On the down side: a few million people can't actually write their names yet. On the up side, however, they can at least express their discontent at this in ways that are disarmingly creative (�, code point 1F4A9, PILE OF POO) and they can be diverse when doing it! Because the hard-working members of the Unicode consortium have been tirelessly slaving to ensure that you can use cutesy icons when communicating, but not on, you know, making it possible to actually write your name!

TL;DR Unicode jumped the shark with 7.0. It's hard to take this shit seriously any longer.

@Thenomain said:

I have invented a daring new drinking game.

Browse Kickstarter. Sip when the extended entry claims that the item is "the world's first" something.

(FTFY)

Take a second sip if you're sure that it's not.

Finish the bottle if it takes you less than 15 seconds to find it for sale at a price way lower than the reward level they have for actually getting the "world's first" item.

@TNP said:

I've heard of that and always wondered what it tasted like. So what does it taste like?

I … lack the vocabulary to describe the taste. It's like 白酒 (baijiu, or "white spirits" -- typically sorghum-based hoch) that's gone off, but in a way that isn't as off-putting as that sounds. I'm not sure this is something I'd regularly drink, but it wasn't an experience I regret.

I have been living here so long that it often fails to occur to me just what a weird place it is. Sometimes, though, I get a wakeup in the form of "What the fucking fuck did I just experience?!"

This is one of those wakeup calls. I introduce to you "马奶酒" (horse milk spirits):

If you think the bottle is weird, wait until you hear what's inside it! The name is not symbolic or poetic in any way. It's a direct description of what this liquid is.

This is a (mostly) Mongolian thing: double-distilled fermented mare's milk. It turns out that mare's milk is one of the very few milks that has enough sugar in it to properly ferment by itself. So of course those crazy Mongols figured out a way to make an alcoholic beverage from it: Kumis. Then the crazy Han said "we can distill this!" The result is quite possibly the weirdest hard liquor I've ever let pass my lips.

My students are increasingly nervous of the impending exam. (This could be because I was playing up how hard it would be on QQZone, sort of a Chinese cross between Facebook and Twitter.) So today I tell them if they give me 1RMB, I'll give them the answer to one question. One girl tests me and hands me a 1RMB note. "Thank you. The answer is 'true'."

For some reason they thought I was cheating…

@Rook said:

@Thenomain said:

Except those reports every two months saying how your router's firewall can be actively bypassed because of Apparently Cool Feature X, nevermind the inherent network insecurities from The Internet Of Things.

Firewalls cannot be 'bypassed' if your router (any modern) uses stateful packet inspection. Nothing can just 'come in' unless you invite it in. The reports that state that your firewall can be actively bypassed are fear mongering, or written by someone who has no idea how they work.

Because, of course, the software that does the SPI is never flawed and never has exploits available.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, @Rook.