Random Thoughts

[Ceir]

New fortune cookie wisdom: "Even a dumpster fire illuminates something..."

[Nunavut Pants]

The current one is illuminating a lot of things I wish weren't there to see...

[Ceir]

Was listening to some Weird Al today. Playlist hit "Phony Calls".

Setting aside the song dating itself severely with references to 7-digit phone numbers and the Yellow Pages, it strikes me: in the age of the cellphone, prank calls are nigh extinct (not necessarily a bad thing). Everything has caller ID and visible numbers, nobody (that I know anyway) actually picks up a number they don't recognize...heck, the song has a clip of one of Bart's prank calls from The Simpsons, and the show dropped that bit how many years ago?

[Ironclad Alibi]

Was listening to some Weird Al today. Playlist hit "Phony Calls".

Setting aside the song dating itself severely with references to 7-digit phone numbers and the Yellow Pages, it strikes me: in the age of the cellphone, prank calls are nigh extinct (not necessarily a bad thing). Everything has caller ID and visible numbers, nobody (that I know anyway) actually picks up a number they don't recognize...heck, the song has a clip of one of Bart's prank calls from The Simpsons, and the show dropped that bit how many years ago?

No more prank calls and plenty of scam calls. I think I'd prefer the prank calls.

[Ceir]

No more prank calls and plenty of scam calls. I think I'd prefer the prank calls.

Pretty much.

Learned a useless fact when I dropped this thought elsewhere as well - Bart's last prank call on the Simpsons was apparently in 2018, which is far more recent than I would have expected. Then again, I haven't watched anything Simpsons in a decade or so; it stopped being funny a long time ago.

[Ceir]

I still consider it a personal holiday today. 56 years ago:

Happy Moon Landing day!

[Ironclad Alibi]

I still consider it a personal holiday today. 66 years ago:

Happy Moon Landing day!

Actually 56 years ago. I was there, working at the Kennedy Space Center.

[dalesys]

Actually 56 years ago. I was there, working at the Kennedy Space Center.

My second cousin's father, Don Lind, was one of the capsule communicators for Apollo 11 & 12... Would likely have been the second scientist to land on the moon.

[Ceir]

See, there's reasons I'm not an astronaut, and it's not just my arithmetic skills. And that's incredible, Ironclad.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

If Coca-Cola is going to start putting names on bottles again, they should do an ad about people drinking bottles of Coke bearing somebody else's name.

I even have the perfect song for this.

Call me Coke, we'll talk.

[Ceir]

If you're like me, you back up your web bookmarks and move 'em over when changing browsers or computers. Does anyone else have one or two that are definitively dead but you just can't bring yourself to delete? For me, it's the bookmarks for a couple forums that I joined when I first Got On The Internet, some of my first fandom and tabletop stuff - like, the web sites are 100% toast, and because they were forums the ol' Wayback Machine is patchy at best. But it's memories, tucked away as a text string in the bottom of a miscellaneous folder.

[Ceir]

I've been thinking about my imaginary Sarcastic Streamer Troll Game again (also, woot, it was thread post #5000, didn't even notice), and I realized I had completely neglected multiplayer! I've been watching some playthrough of something called Peak lately - a sort-of-survival co-op game about climbing mountains with your little rubbery dudes, and it does a thing that made me revisit this thought experiment.

Really, apart from the stuff that would already be in place for single player, multiplayer wouldn't take much to make it absolutely infuriating (based on the streamers I watch, anyway). Just three things:
- Friendly fire is on. Always. Permanently.
- Everyone always gets to see everyone's inventory, so people will know if you're hoarding stuff.
- if there is a co-op section or mission, where a party is meant to cooperate and work together, haring off on your own for Teh Lols will be punished. This is the one I got from Peak, if you get too far away from at least one other person in the group, a monster straight up kills you. If that's too harsh, checkpoints that 100% will not let anyone pass until everyone is there.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Irv takes a shot-sized sample of some iced-tea flavored alcoholic seltzer

The woman who served me the sample: On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate it?

Irv: (ponders)...Uhhh, I'll be honest, about a 5.

Irv's brain: For the social drinker who wants to drink Thunderbird without getting train-wrecked. Seriously, that shit was NAAAASSSSTY.


Also today, I sat in a Cybertruck. I did not complete these two activities at the same time.

[Ceir]

Alas, you probably can't blame the latter decision on the alcohol. Good on your for not getting trapped inside it when the locks malfunctioned, or the door falling off in your hand though!

[Ceir]

New thought. Surprising things from the retro cartoon channel, subsection "you really couldn't make that today": think it was a Harvey Studios, one of their 'tortoise and the hare' shorts from the '50s. Wherein after losing to the turtle again, the hare cartoonishly but unambiguously commits suicide. Pulls a gun out of hammerspace, shoots himself, angel floats off, iris out.

Boy howdy. Yeah, you couldn't get away with that today.