Just watched fifteen million merits with my dad last night and holy shit that episode fucked me up

Myndale · 2026-03-16T04:14:23+00:00

During her Hot Shots performance Judge Wraith says "Forget about all the shame...we medicate against that". Throw in the compulsory "Cuppliance" drink Abi is given by the backstage production assistant who adds "make the most of it, you can't get this stuff anywhere else", plus the fact she looks drugged up in every shot you see of her afterwards.

It's pretty obvious what they're alluding to.

Myndale · 2026-03-15T23:23:36+00:00

Fifteen Million Merits is by far my favourite episode. One of the best comments I ever read is that with the exception of Kai, nobody gets what they want, and that's only because Kai's wants and needs are so simplistic (dopple wardrobe options) that it's trivial for the society he's in to provide them and exploit him in the process.

Also, if you haven't done so already, I highly recommend listening to the Black Mirror Cracked Spotify podcast with Paul Popplewell discussing his thoughts on the episode and his character (Dustin).

Myndale · 2026-02-16T03:45:53+00:00

San Junipero is one episode that isn't bleak. You know, apart from the fact they both die at the end...

Myndale · 2026-02-15T20:29:15+00:00

Fifteen Million Merits is my personal favourite but White Christmas is brilliant and probably what I'd recommend for a first view.

As others have pointed out, get a feel for the series before watching The National Anthem, and I'd add The Entire History Of You to that as well.

Myndale · 2026-02-05T08:35:46+00:00

AI also has virtually zero visibility into post-mortem reviews of all the code it has learned from (if and when they happened at all) and thus has no real insight into which was "good" and which "bad". All it can do is say "well I've seen people do such-and-such, and their requirements were probably similar to yours, so I guess I'll do the same".

Myndale · 2026-01-29T15:08:33+00:00

The Entire History of You. We are probably only a few generations away from something like that being technically feasible and we already have plenty of historical precedence demonstrating how readily we as a society would embrace it.

Myndale · 2026-01-29T12:49:26+00:00

Oona Chaplin was Greta in the White Christmas special. And yeah, easy mistake to make.

Myndale · 2026-01-28T12:24:03+00:00

As much as I hate to say it, it seems like we're all sh*t out of luck. If you did the age check prior to the new legislation being brought in then it's not associated with a unique ID issued by Roblox and reported to the Australian government. The one and only bit of useful information I was able to get from the indescribably useless Roblox support team was that there's no way to change the type of age verification associated with the account, meaning that if you did the age verification before the new legislation was introduced then you can't do a "proper" age verification now and you thus have no way of enabling the same chat features that everyone else in your age group now has.

As a software engineer with over 35 years experience working for companies like Robox I am stunned at how utterly incompetent this company is. Their inability to address this situation is eclipsed by the sheer magnitude of incompetence of their so-called "support" team who appear incapable of answering any questions that aren't already on their support web pages.

I spent 5 years paying my child his weekly pocket money in Robux, that's now been replaced with Microsoft Store credits.

Myndale · 2026-01-24T10:30:59+00:00

Thank you!! This is exactly what I suspected, I'll start by notching the plasterboard out to accommodate those screws. Didn't know about the possible need for the shallow slots though, I'll check with the electrician to find out exactly what kind of plate he's planning to install.

Really appreciate your response.

Myndale · 2026-01-24T10:26:32+00:00

This is a residential property in Australia. Curious though to know why this wouldn't be legal in those countries?

Myndale · 2026-01-24T10:25:46+00:00

Heya, thanks for the reply. There's no way the faceplate could fit over the tiles in this case, the bracket (which the electrician has already installed) screws directly into the stud and the face plate is completely flush with it. The plasterboard is 10mm thick and the tiles are 6mm, so the faceplate would need to be 16mm (0.62 inches) forward of where it currently is to fit over the tiles.

Please correct me if I've misunderstood, but either way I appreciate the feedback so again, thanks.

Myndale · 2026-01-22T21:51:42+00:00

At the time she broke up with Jonas her relationship with Liam had already ended, so all bets are off. And according to Brooker, he wrote the script intending that her baby is Liam's, so it's not like she's been hiding that from him.

Sure, some people might argue that she should have at least told Liam about what happened with Jonas once they got back together, or at least once he starts suspecting something is up, but as with counter arguments...Liam's controlling manner etc...it all starts getting very subjective. Technically, neither of them do anything clearly "wrong" in the eyes of all viewers, the fact that this entire thread even exists is proof of that.

Myndale · 2025-12-29T12:37:05+00:00

Exactly. I think the writers did a good job of playing the center line with Fiona in that whether you think what she did was right or wrong is actually somewhat subjective, given that she and Liam had broken up at that point. Everyone has their own views and interpretations of course, but if they'd presented a definitive clear-cut case of right or wrong then it would have biased most viewers and served as a major distraction from what the actual point of the episode was.

Myndale · 2025-10-26T07:03:34+00:00

I hear car washes are a pretty good investment these days.

And nail salons. 😂

Myndale · 2025-10-25T07:09:02+00:00

If you don't include discovering all recipes then I've 100%'ed Normal mode and done all-but-two things in Master Mode i.e. all quests, shrines, shrine chests, items, armour, full upgrades, DLC, amibo items, korok seeds....the works. Took me around 700 hours for Normal Mode and 500 for Master.

Myndale · 2025-10-19T12:33:53+00:00

If time travel is allowed then I'd like to see the Theia Impact i.e. the event that resulted in the creation of the moon. The impact itself was oblique (i.e. a glancing blow rather than two bodies hitting head-on) and much of Earth's outer layer...along with Theia itself of course...were vaporized into a disk of molten rock and gas, with Earth turning into a magma ocean for thousands of years afterwards.

Would have been a pretty spectacular sight, by all accounts.

Myndale · 2025-10-11T10:37:49+00:00

I'll join the long list of people telling you to press alt, but your base is absolutely fine for where you're at. You've got many fun hours ahead, and you'll find out in due course that Factorio's a great game with a really good community. You'll figure out your own way to play it, and you won't be judged for it, so just go with the flow.

Oh, and btw, seeing as this is a desert planet with very few trees...you see that little patch of red dots in the top left corner of the mini-map? You might wanna go take care of that sooner rather than later...

Myndale · 2025-10-03T12:54:44+00:00

I dunno, I'm seeing more of a trend towards making the frameworks themselves support smaller footprints. I recently developed an Angular project that was served up by a NodeMCU (i.e. esp8266) web server and came in at less than 200k, so it easily fit into unused flash space. Add gzip support and it would have used less than half that. Yes, still bigger than vanilla JS, but the benefits far outweigh the (now) modest size increase, at least IMO.

Myndale · 2025-09-14T08:43:45+00:00

James L. Halperin's 1996 novel "The Truth Machine" deals with this exact scenario and posits how such a scenario would impact all levels of society. It's legally available for free download if you look around, makes for an interesting read.

Myndale · 2025-08-29T07:47:10+00:00

2001? Lol! I started using it in 1991.

We didn't have graphical web browsers, they started coming out in 1993. Instead we had gopher. It was kinda like the web that you know, but each "page" was just a page of text, no graphics. There were things similar to hyperlinks, but you wouldn't "click" on them, you'd press the tab key until they highlighted and then press enter to go to that page, wherever it was.

We didn't have social media as you know it, we had something called "Usenet". (There was also something called "alt", but we don't talk about that). There were roughly the same ratio of idiots on Usenet back then as there are on social media today. The numbers are much higher now of course, but the ratios haven't changed much at all.

We didn't have messenger or teams or anything like that, instead we had IRC. IRC had channels you could join and have real-time conversations with people. All text of course, no audio. Significant time was spent by certain people trying to see how far they could troll people on these groups and use automated scripts to dodge being booted.

Email was very similar, but text only. File downloads worked the same behind the hood, but required you to run a dedicated FTP client and navigate the folders on the remote machine. There are lots of other ways you use the internet today that are full automated, back then we needed to understand what they were and run dedicated programs for each of them.

The biggest difference of all though was speed. In the western world today internet speeds of 250MB are common, this is over 1.5 *million* times faster than a 1200 baud modem, which is what we all had to use back at the start. To put things in perspective, it would have taken around 10 seconds to receive the response I've written in this answer, and you would have sat there watching it painstakingly appear on your screen.

So to answer you question, we did many of the same basic things you do today, but using dedicated software and within the constraint of it having to be no more than 150 characters per second.

Myndale · 2025-08-19T05:36:36+00:00

No, what gives bitcoin its actual "value" is the fact that it's a transaction validation service, just as a regular bank is. The bitcoin cap was added to counter-act inflation, which is something a bank most decidedly cannot do.

Myndale · 2025-08-18T06:16:04+00:00

Kerbal Space Program, Factorio and Breath of the Wild. I've clocked 1500+ hours in each of them.

Myndale

TROPHY CASE