Also something related I never came to grips with: cat’s breath = the stench of a thousand decaying corpses. Licks fur constantly. Fur = the smell of springtime itself.

My (unfortunately late) void had a scratching post with the top level just at my nose height, so whenever he lolled around there I made a point of taking a deep breath of fluffy freshness.

The Problem is, being unprepared worked out for them because they always had someone around who was prepared. It’s the same people who say afterwards: “You see, wasn’t that bad, all worked out fine”. Yes, it worked out fine because someone else was prepared and saved your ass. The worst of those people then also somehow turn it into their own achievement, which makes them think like that: “Why would someone carry around $thing$, I never do that and yet I still manage to save the day.”

Unfortunately, being such a person seems to be a requirement to get hired for middle management.

I guess every religion old enough has such kind of loopholes. I know from Roman Catholic that there can be made up so many exceptions that the 40 days of lent before Easter books down to a few days of actually fasting. No lent if you’re travelling (commute to work counts), no lent if you have guests, and of course no lent if you are a guest somewhere else. And Sunday is exempt from lent anyways.

The permit requirement does not apply to kitchen knives, does it? Been some time, but I travelled to Tokio quite frequently for work, and always made it a point to go to kappabashi and get a nice cooking knife, some of the longer than 20 cm.

Yeah, it seems at a certain breaking point in the difficulty curve it becomes “catch up with the AI boni”, which made it a completely different game for me. And as you said, usually by renaissance you know if this is going to be a landslide victory (which at that point becomes a chore), or if you’re screwed.

I got to learn to love those bidet toilets through my frequent (extended) work travels to Japan. Got one for myself at home when the bathroom was up for renovation. Now I am dreading any work trip to not-Japan because I’ll have to shit like a barbarian for that time.

Oh, I have a similar story from my (unfortunately late) void:

Had a big chunk of pork, which I trimmed for the BBQ. All the cuttings (mostly fat) I put in a pad to render (?) the delicious lard. Somehow I forgot to put a lid on the pan while it cooled down, and the whole thing got forgotten in the mess the kitchen was after a nice Barbie and beers with friends. Next morning I woke up, thought “oh crap, the lard”. Went downstairs, first susicious thing: cat nowhere to be seen. Pan on the stove was completely clean. As in straight from the dishwasher clean. The I saw the cat lolling around on the sofa, barely awake, and almost unresponsive. Even shaking his morning treats did not prompt him to come into the kitchen (which usually was the ritual). And then it dawned on me: the little rascal slurped about a whole pound of pork lard during the night from the pan. Did not eat for two days straight, but seemed happy as a clam.

Wherever he is now, I hope he gets all the lard he wants.

Wait. The OPA from expanse? There is some resemblance, but I’d say it more looks like a gamepad/emoji hybrid.

I’m pretty sure my Dad’s cat is really a glutton.

Schnutzeplotzepfnitzekatz!

Guess the language…

Part of my work is to evaluate proposals for research topics and their funding, and as soon as “AI” is mentioned, I’m already annoyed. In the vast majority of cases, justifiably so. It’s a buzzword to make things sound cutting edge and very rarely carries any meaning or actually adds anything to the research proposal. A few years ago the buzzword was “machine learning”, and before that “big data”, same story. Those however quickly either went away, or people started to use those properly. With AI, I’m unfortunately not seeing that.

You can buy alcohol at Disney?! With everything being so prude about drinking in public in the US, this completely amazes me.

Or whenever using your credit card online. The pro version would be that it turns off functions successively depending on your BAC. At some point the only unblocked function would be to call a cab to go home.

Because if I spend 50k on an ICE car, I get a really manly truck which makes me feel important and not like a wimp driving a car that makes me look poor!

I am so surprised that this stone age reasoning still works so well with cars.

“But I need the space! … once every two years…”

Same with fuel efficiency: “My big ass penis enlargement SUV gets the same mileage like my tiny sedan did 30 years ago, so it’s not worse for the environment!” - “But a car the size of your tiny sedan 30 years ago would now be twice as efficient?” - “Does not matter, I will use up the transportatin CO2 footprint that has been allotted to me, why should I give something up for the benefit of everyone , especially something important like a antiquated status symbol?”

Did they solve their quality problems in the newest iterations? I had a 2 and a 3, and boy were those pieces of crap. Not the 3 I had to replace so many modules over its life span of 5 years that it kind of defeat the purpose, as it probably was a total of electronics enough for three phones. And it had so many weird bugs which took months to fix (the mic stopping to work after using a certain app, the not working auto brightness, just to name the annoying ones).

I really, really like the idea behind the Fairphone, but I just could not see past the crappiness of the phone (especially at their price point).

We had quite the discussion at work about this very scene (I am loosely related to OSHA stuff), at some point people might think of deliberately having work “accidents” so the employer has to pay for superior replacement parts. And then have an advantage on the job market because of this. Same could go for sports.

I guess technologically, we are very close, but might need to work on the whole ethics part a bit more?

Having said that, I would not mind some advanced Kiroshis to replace my screwed up eyeballs.

Whenever someone brings up that argument (windmills are ugly), which is quite a controversial topic in the country I live in, I take them to the open pit coal mines of the area. Those are really ugly.

I do understand the argument that the intermittent shadows the rotating blades may cast on residential areas are annoying.

Because WFH has shown that large parts of middle management are useless, and those MM people are pushing upper management for RTO before it becomes evident. It’s what MM has always done, suck up to UM and kick down on the workers, without real benefit to the company.

I think it’s “Tiny civilization”, which is really cute indeed. Got it on sale for less then 2 bucks, well worth it!

Edit: nah, probably not, but tiny civilization is a nice little game anyway :)

Very similar concept in Korea. I got a job offer there after a three month project I did as a PhD student, and at some point realised it was mostly because I was a good after-work drinker. Which of course was easy, as the only people I knew there were from work, and I knew it was for a limited time. Keeping that up long term? No chance.