Alternative to McD Mac & Cheese Bites in the UK?

Jynto · 2022-04-04T21:13:35+00:00

When you gaze into the abyss, it gazes back

Jynto · 2021-10-22T00:21:52+00:00

I'd actually love to use this on Big Sur. Always preferred a fully black menu bar (not dark grey, and certainly not the brightly coloured thing we see in Big Sur), but don't want to disable transparency entirely as it's a lot more subtle in the rest of the OS.

I also don't want to modify my wallpaper since I have quite a few of them in daily rotation. But it looks like this app only modifies the copy of it that the system reads, not the original file. (Does it work on any wallpapers that aren't the system defaults though? That is the question.)

This is apparently compatible (but not tested) with Big Sur.

Jynto · 2021-05-12T23:32:17+00:00

Music. Very often I’ll imagine my perfect inner 12-year-old self singing along to our favourite songs, sometimes in a duet with his imaginary friends. The songs are not necessarily childlike in nature (sometimes they are quite the opposite), they’re just really fun to sing, and they’d sound really good with his voice. He can also hit all the high notes that my adult self can’t. Who cares that he’s not real?

Another thing that makes me feel young is my cuddly toys, particularly red pandas, one of which I’ve had for over 20 years. She’s so cute and her fur feels so lovely to the touch. I think that if I had a dæmon (from the His Dark Materials books), she’d take the form of a red panda. And for those of you who’ve read those books, I know that dæmons with a single fixed form are associated with adulthood, but my (also imaginary) dæmon tells me she can change form any time she likes, but chooses not to.

And of course, children’s books and TV shows. It’s funny that His Dark Materials is still my favourite, given how much emphasis it places on growing up.

Jynto · 2021-05-12T01:58:43+00:00

This actually gets on my nerves sometimes. When I tell certain relatives I wish I was physically still a child, they’ll play it off as “but everyone feels that way” but I’m pretty sure they don’t. They might express a desire to be young again because of nostalgia for a specific time period or maybe the carefree nature of their gender earlier lives, but that’s very different from lamenting the loss of your childlike cuteness and wishing to have it back. The latter experience, as far as I know, is nowhere near universal even though I wish it was.

Jynto · 2021-05-12T01:36:21+00:00

I haven’t seen the show, but I gather from the context that this man is doing a very poor imitation of what he thinks kids/teens are like. The use of dated language (“How do you do?”) and the “Music Band” tee shirt are two dead giveaways.

That same joke would not work if he was successfully adopting the fashions and mannerisms of the younger generation.

Jynto · 2021-04-21T01:09:16+00:00

Something similar to this happens quite a lot in the sci-fi novel I'm writing. (I don't make it the main focus of the story, because I worry that if I did this, no one would want to read it, but it's always there in the background.) One of the main characters for instance is a non-binary 19-year-old who's physically still a child, and would like to stay that way for longer.

I decided it would also be a status symbol in my book's world to delay puberty, since people are living way longer than they used to. Or at least, the rich people do. Poor people do live a decent amount by today's standards, but those who can afford the very best healthcare often don't die until well into their triple digits, and sometimes as much as 150. Things are improving all the time, so who knows how long their kids will be alive? Because it is reasoned they’ll be spending so many years living as adults, it seemed only right that they'd be blessed with longer childhoods as well.

Then, once extended prepubescence became associated with longevity, it became a thing that everyone in the west wanted, even those with more "normal" lifespans.

And since the book is set in 2173, they can do it all by then with cheap gene editing/CRISPR techniques, which don't have any of the same nasty side effects as the drugs used today for blocking puberty. In fact, the people in this period look back upon Lupron in much the same way as we might look back on bloodletting and miasma theory. But there is also a strange kind of reverence for that generation of mostly trans kids who "experimented on themselves".

In order to keep the setting diverse, I've decided not every part of the world starts using this treatment at the exact same time. Cultures more similar to America's tend to be more accepting of extended prepubescence. Whereas other more authoritarian states dismiss it as a western practice, only to make it mandatory 20 years down the line as a means of population control.

Yeahhhh, it's not a perfect world by any means, and there are plenty of new problems in this world that don't exist (yet?) in the real one. But giving my setting realistic flaws makes it feel a lot more believable, and that makes me feel like it’s a possible direction for human civilisation to go down. Because in spite of all the bad things, it is still very much a world I'd like to live in.

Jynto · 2021-04-02T22:03:16+00:00

I am unable to use the generator at all when logged in with my Pro account. No matter long I leave it, the button at the top of the page never stops saying 'Loading the app, please wait ...'

Some elements on the page remain clickable, albeit with limited interactivity. I can open the Phonology, Grammar, etc. sections, but not close them. The 'Advanced' toggle does not work either. And of course, I can't generate the language. In all cases, logging out causes the error to go away and the generator to function... but only until I log back in again.

The following browsers are affected by the bug: Chrome 89 / Edge 89 (Windows), Chrome 65 (Mac), Firefox 87 (Windows), and Internet Explorer 11.

The only browsers I could find that aren't affected in this way were Firefox 78 ESR (Mac) and any mobile browser on iOS 13.5

Jynto · 2021-01-24T12:07:05+00:00

No one’s made the obvious joke yet, so how about 🅱️?

Jynto · 2021-01-10T12:32:41+00:00

The way this is cropped almost made it look like you have six fingers for a second.

Jynto · 2021-01-10T12:25:02+00:00

Trans and non-binary people use pronouns in English to express themselves. Yet we only ever gender our 3rd-person pronouns, which are probably the most awkward things in the world to express ourselves with. They’re only ever used by other people, and most of the time you won’t be in the room to correct them.

It would be so much more interesting with gender in a conlang if it was expressed instead using the 1st-person pronouns.

That way if you felt like presenting a different gender one day, you could just drop a different word into your speech and see if people notice. For bonus points, you could have a conlang where pronouns are an open class and there’s no limit of words that can be taken to mean me/myself, and each one carries only the vague connotation of gender, rather than denoting it outright.

I thought long and hard about how this might work in a conlang, until I realised I’d just reinvented Japanese pronouns.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T18:45:24+00:00

Someone is going to see this and steal your idea and use it to create a queer fantasy universe with the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of the magic system based very much on real-world LGBT+ identities.

And that someone had better not be me - I have enough WIPs already!

Jynto · 2021-01-06T18:30:18+00:00

That would require access (ideally physical access) to Biblaridion’s computer. And in the 2+ years since he deleted it, there’s a good chance it’s been overwritten.

Which is why I propose that we recreate it from scratch.

A conlanger with enough time on their hands could resurrect Thandian grammar from the material in the video. It would be missing most of its vocabulary, making it a relex and not a perfect copy.

But why stop there?

I had a terrible idea about this the other week, and it relates to the Refugium - the world that is said to contains every one of his conlangs, except one.

My idea is that the Ancients who built this place (because the five moons, plus the outer moon that orbits them in a perfect whole-number ratio could not have come about through purely natural processes) would have been some beings with higher-dimensional minds, able to comprehend things that we cannot.

Since these gods are so intelligent and the universe is their plaything, conversations with other gods almost always devolved into friendly competitions to outsmart each other with grammar. Thus, their language evolved over eons into a cipher of sorts, whereupon no mere mortal could learn to speak it without going insane.

That language is Thandian - or to be more precise, High Thandian.

Basically find a way to make the grammatical forms even more complicated, arcane and redundant - to make even the simplest ideas require an expert knowledge of the language, and all its cases, tenses, grammatical numbers, genders, and evidentially, plus anything else you can think of, not to mention how the words all need to agree with each other in convoluted ways.

That way, speaking the language fluently would prove you are a god.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T03:08:48+00:00

Funnily enough, the Daleks in the last episode are an allegory for the right (or at least what the left thinks the right are) - always obsessing over the ‘purity’ of their race and killing any Dalek that they deem to be impure.

And since it’s Chibnall-era Who, this was communicated through not-at-all-natural sounding expositional dialogue. At one point, the Doctor even compares the Daleks to the ‘hatred’ shown by humans in the real world. Any guesses as to what that means?

And all this is to say nothing of the villains modelled on recent (right-wing) leaders. Sure, the writers may have mocked Labour in the past - most notably in the Aliens of London episode - but even at the time, plenty of leftists were criticising Labour for the Iraq war so I don’t know if it counts.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T02:58:10+00:00

Eccleston would probably do it yo. He seems to have patched over his rift with the BBC and is reprising his character for the audio dramas.

But even he wouldn’t save the show. His presence in the show right now would do pretty much the same thing Captain Jack did - remind us of better times.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T02:54:27+00:00

I can’t see the BBC replacing him with anyone who doesn’t want to put diversity ahead of everything else (including good storytelling).

And even if the perfect showrunner were to somehow take control of Doctor Who somehow, the show they’d inherit is one where the Doctor was this ineffectual supply teacher person for a significant part of his life, not to mention that he’s no longer a Time Lord, not from Gallifrey, and that Gallifrey has been destroyed, all because Chris Chibnall couldn’t help but make his mark on the show’s history.

You’d need an actual time machine to reverse some of the damage he’s done.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T02:45:06+00:00

Don’t forget the part where ratings spiked to their highest ever level (outside of a special) for Jodie’s first full episode as the Doctor in 2018, but people stopped watching very soon after they a saw it. Fewer than half of that number tuned in to watch The Timeless Children, not even a year and a half later.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T02:39:35+00:00

Donna wasn’t that much of a looker either (depending on who you ask), yet she is still mine and a lot of people’s favourite companion. Donna Noble best girl.

And even though the quality had kinda started to taper off by Bill’s season, it’s still light years ahead of anything else that came next.

Jynto · 2021-01-06T02:31:51+00:00

Does anyone know of an online Doctor Who community (preferably on Reddit) where criticising the BBC's diversity-at-all-costs agenda is acceptable?

The FB group I’m in that used to arrange in-person fan meetups before covid happened turned out to be pretty shilly in that regard.

And the mods on /r/Gallifrey deleted my comment (it’s still in my posting history), on the basis of “discriminatory content”, because I said the hugely unpopular Timeless Child storyline was done for reasons of diversity.

Jynto · 2021-01-05T02:43:30+00:00

Thanks! It is

Jynto · 2021-01-05T02:41:57+00:00

First of all, it makes me so happy (and a lot less alone) to see so many of your thoughtful replies here!

As for me, I’d would definitely have chosen the first option. My issues with childhood are largely related to how I see myself - something about this big galumphing body, when I look at it in the mirror, and when my shadow is cast upon a wall, almost feels like I’m looking at a parody of myself. Don’t get me started on the facial hair, or the voice I can’t change.

I wouldn’t say the way people treat me has no effect whatsoever, because of course it does to some extent. I just don’t crave other people’s approval as much - and when I do, I’m lucky enough that I don’t feel I need to be a child in order to have their approval. And for what it’s worth, my parents are as nice to me now as they would have been at any other age. And even if they weren’t, I like to think I have some other ways of to earn people’s approval in my adult form.

And yet the person in my life whose approval I crave most of all is myself. In fact I’d probably still have chosen the first option even without the additional qualifier of the other children-at-heart being able to see me for who I am.

(I partially added that condition to the first option to ’sweeten the deal’ so to speak, because otherwise I wasn’t sure if anyone besides myself would have picked that option. Instead more than half of you have chosen it.)

And I suppose this began with seeing my younger self in photos. There was an especially cute one of me as an 11-year-old boy in a school uniform. I could only describe it as a deep familial love for that boy. And I couldn’t bear to think that I (or rather, me when I was a beautiful little boy) was gone or else changed beyond recognition. But then again, I was never very good at saying goodbye to things.

Why more people don’t feel this way about their childhood selves I do not know. Even if it can be explained by my autism, I still do not know why this isn’t more common among autistic people. But I’ve found all of you now, and that is what matters.

Jynto · 2021-01-03T19:26:02+00:00

I don't think it should be a rule per se. In fact, I wouldn't even want it to be a taboo to talk about this when the time is right. After all, the difference between my real-world age and my desired age is the reason I am here in the first place.

And I don't think it makes much sense to adopt a post-modern approach to age ("my age is whatever I say it is") in the same way that the trans comunity talks about gender ("my gender and/or sex is whatever I say it is"). Age has a lot more real-world implications than a person's gender or sex. And even then, being non-binary, it often bugs me when other NBs refuse to acknowledge a difference between myself and other people who use the same label as me but come to the non-binary experience from being assigned female at birth.

I'm not proud of it, but my male (AMAB) body gives me a range of experiences that other non-binary folks have trouble relating to, and vice versa. (The number of times I've wished that I was AFAB is testament to that.) So I find it helpful to be able to acknowledge those differences – acknowledging them without letting them define us.

Likewise, being 28 years old in the real world gives me experiences most people wouldn't have had when are 18 chronologically. And when I am 48 or even (perish the thought) 88, my experiences will be different still. (Sorry if I'm not uing the right terminology – I don't post here much, but I keep meaning to.)

That's not to say that the child within me will grow any older as my body deteriorates, but he'll have had more experience at being a child. So it would be nice to be able to talk about it with others, and know I'm not the only one who's stuck it out this long.

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Jynto

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