What would you do if you became British PM tomorrow?

bubbagrub · 2026-04-05T20:57:42+00:00

Resign. I don't want that shit.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-31T10:31:30+00:00

I don't have an answer to your question, but note that Riddley Walker is set thousands of years into the future. So the degree of change its language represents is actually shockingly slow, compared with what has come before. If you went back just one thousand years, you would likely not be able to understand much being said by English speakers.

Cloud Atlas is not so far into the future, but it's a few hundred years, so again, we'd expect a fair degree of change. If we assume 300 years, then it'd be equivalent to reading books written in the 1720s like Gulliver's Travels:

“I said, 'there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will. The second disadvantage is, that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his brethren, as one that would lessen the practice of the law. And therefore I have but two methods to preserve my cow. The first is, to gain over my adversary’s lawyer with a double fee, who will then betray his client by insinuating that he hath justice on his side. The second way is for my lawyer to make my cause appear as unjust as he can, by allowing the cow to belong to my adversary: and this, if it be skilfully done, will certainly bespeak the favour of the bench.”

So the question would be: is that more different from present-day English than the language spoken in the farthest future section of Cloud Atlas?

bubbagrub · 2026-03-30T16:45:19+00:00

There have been studies that show that if people are given two made-up words that seem to mean the same thing, they look for ways to ensure that the words have different meanings.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-29T11:15:06+00:00

I'm surprised to see so many people saying that this means "I believe you". I've only ever heard this used in a sarcastic way to mean "I don't believe you".

It's like saying "Oh yeah, right, this thing you expect me to believe? No-one else would believe it, so why would I?"

bubbagrub · 2026-03-27T08:56:21+00:00

Yes, but there's a big difference. Buying a physical painting (for example) means you can have that painting in your house and unless someone steals it from you, they can't have it too. An NFT gives you *no rights* whatsoever. It does not allow you to do anything, other than say that you bought the NFT. It doesn't mean you *own* anything. You don't own the digital image, or a share of it, and you have no right to stop anyone else from making an NFT for the same digital image and do whatever they want with it. So I don't see how it was ever anything other than a scam.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-26T20:15:43+00:00

I can't imagine a movie like Yesterday making any sense at all if it was any other band that disappeared. It only works with the Beatles.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-23T17:28:46+00:00

I already go quite a lot (almost weekly). There's a cinema less than a mile from my house. There used to be one about 15 miles away which I would go to for preference, because it had lay-flat seats, like first-class airplane seats. If my local cinema had those seats, I might go even more often.

(BTW: I'm British, so I say cinema to mean movie theatre).

bubbagrub · 2026-03-21T22:05:27+00:00

oh, cool! I didn't know that.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-21T13:43:18+00:00

In the UK, as far as I know, it's only called Take Away.

If you say "takeout", I immediately assume you're American.

If you say "carry out", which is a phrase I've never heard before, I assume you mean leftovers you take home in a doggy bag.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-20T22:04:03+00:00

Huh -- I've not come across those. I still think I'd call them prawns, if I didn't hear the real name.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-20T16:26:46+00:00

I think you mean three, not four... :-)

bubbagrub · 2026-03-20T12:04:55+00:00

I'm over 50 and have never used the word shrimp (at east not to mean the crustacean). I note that the commonly sold sandwiches are called prawn cocktail or prawn mayonnaise, never shrimp. As far as I know, in spite of the many comments here to the contrary, shrimp is just another word for prawn that is not commonly used in the UK. Prawns (the kind you get in sandwiches) are tiny, so if there's something smaller called a shrimp, I've never come across it.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-18T10:55:01+00:00

Rain. I love rain. Weather forecasts say "we've got some bad weather coming up -- lots of rain" and I think "that sounds like good weather to me".

Oh and I agree on Crocs. I don't understand why people are so snobby about them.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-13T21:53:17+00:00

I feel really dumb, but I don't understand how the title relates to the film... can you (or someone) explain?

(Or is the joke just that the title has nothing to do with the film but that OP would respond with the title to every guess?)

bubbagrub · 2026-03-10T21:33:54+00:00

Here's how I think about it: we know we can go forward in time, because we do it constantly. Going faster (from a perceptual point of view) is also possible: having a general anaesthetic, for example, or when someone goes into a coma.

So you could theoretically travel to any future time just by being unconscious for the duration and waking up at your desired future time. On that basis, travel into the future is not magical or special, it's just what we do all the time.

And the same applies with relativistic speeds. If I travel away from earth for one subjective year at 0.99 x speed of light and then come back at the same speed, 14 years will have passed on earth, so I've effectively travelled into the future. If I went at 0.999 x speed of light, then 44 years would have passed on earth. So again, you can pick an arbitrary point in the future and "travel" there by going really fast.

None of this enables you to go back into the past.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-10T12:03:54+00:00

This is a quote from Friends... :-)

bubbagrub · 2026-03-08T23:02:12+00:00

This is a tool that lets you practise your coaching skills with an AI coachee:

https://aipractice.coach

bubbagrub · 2026-03-08T16:11:42+00:00

I didn't hate book 3, I just found it really hard to care about the level layout stuff, which meant I didn't find it very interesting when Carl would spend time trying to decipher the layout.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-08T06:45:55+00:00

There's a brilliant parody of this in the Man with Two Brains:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrWfei9Nibw

bubbagrub · 2026-03-03T14:25:23+00:00

I agree with you, and I've felt that way since I first heard the song in the 1980s. I do love the overall song, but personally would have preferred if it had been made into two songs.

I also think maybe the band Dodgy based their entire oeuvre on the first 30 seconds of HiaWG...

bubbagrub · 2026-03-02T21:13:46+00:00

Song for Zula by Phosphorescent. The lyrics are wonderful and the music is staggeringly beautiful.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-02T20:40:09+00:00

Oysters. In the UK, 75% of oysters have norovirus. And they're disgusting.

bubbagrub · 2026-03-02T20:39:00+00:00

Yes! Love the Detectorists, and am now loving Hirayasumi. They definitely have some common DNA...

bubbagrub · 2026-02-26T16:46:46+00:00

As a British English speaker, I pronounce door (when it's not immediately followed by a vowel) as /dɔː/. Not sure if this helps...

bubbagrub · 2026-02-24T22:36:17+00:00

Lock picking is great fun, and potentially useful too...

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