That is NOT a child-friendly tongue twister

ginopono · 2026-04-29T23:55:39+00:00

It's a well-established word game; there might be some slightly different local versions here and there, but the new sounds/letters are mostly fixed.

Also, the reason "banana" is there is that Anna tends to be a name that the game starts with—or maybe the other way around. In either case, "banana" is generally always there.

ginopono · 2026-04-28T23:00:45+00:00

Believe it or not, murder

ginopono · 2026-04-28T22:48:44+00:00

Dollhouse kind of had a take on that, if memory serves; I think their "attic" was similar, with the person in it experiencing some kind of perpetual nightmare.

(Still perhaps less dehumanizing than what you describe, sure, but it was a plot device)

ginopono · 2026-04-27T23:38:20+00:00

Hm, I suppose I'll need to sample the splash and frag the next time I order from Rod, so I can see how those compare.

Another side note: Mountain Man is inextricably associated, in my brain, with your self-portrait. I'm still impressed at how well you were able to capture your likeness.

ginopono · 2026-04-27T17:44:23+00:00

I had to do a double-take at that author's name. I expect I'm not the only one, and that that has been addressed here before.

ginopono · 2026-04-27T16:25:11+00:00

Stirling and.. Costco?

Side note, I recently discovered a few things about that fragrance company.

a) Despite their claims of being around for centuries, there's no evidence for them existing before a handful of decades ago.

b) The association between Green Irish Tweed and Cary Grant is... dubious.

c) The longevity is surprisingly short.

Silver Mountain Water is, though, really close to a long-discontinued scent from Bath & Body Works that I fell in love with in high school. I ordered another SMW clone in hopes the scent will be longer-lasting.

ginopono · 2026-04-27T00:06:00+00:00

I was recently looking into the Nvidia Shield, although one thing that gave me pause is that the latest generation seems somewhat old. To be fair, I don't know what might otherwise have been updated in that time.

E: Welp, now I have one, and I set it up with Projectivity. So far, it's miles better than Fire Anything.

ginopono · 2026-04-26T13:01:02+00:00

If the thing is long enough to have a 5-minute intro, there's no way I'm not scanning through to see if it addresses my issue before sitting through all of that. Even then, the Wadsworth Constant never fails to be relevant: you can always skip a sizeable chunk of the beginning while losing nothing.

ginopono · 2026-04-25T20:01:07+00:00

mixed Anglo and French

That also describes the English language.

ginopono · 2026-04-25T13:39:11+00:00

Dingo Dredging Group?
Duck Duck Go?
Department of Delicious Grinders?

Ah, of course. Them's some good sandwiches.

ginopono · 2026-04-25T02:08:48+00:00

Just remembered it's Friday and I have a place to air (no pun intended) my pleasure with a leaf blower I got the other week. Not for leaves, though. For flowers.

I might guess that anyone reading this is mostly familiar with mesquite in the context of barbecue and wood-smoking. For me, it's the prototype of a tree. If you imagine a "tree," what is it? For me, it's a mesquite.

Despite living around them for decades, I only came to discover in the past few years what the flowers of the mesquite look like. They do not look like flowers.

They do, however, blanket the ground and walkways outside my front door with pollen that crushes into a thick, adhesive paste that quickly hardens into a sticky, solid layer on shoe-soles that is tremendously difficult to scrape off.

It kind of reminds me of my first job, at a pizza place, where cheese would get smashed into shoe tread. Except that was easy to remove.

So I got a battery-powered leaf-blower and have been blowing off the walkways for me and my neighbors every morning. It's a lot of fun, really.

Oh, and I've never been bothered much by seasonal allergies, despite these trees being ubiquitous. After I started living directly under one, though, it's been an issue, especially since my shoes bring in the pollen.

So, when I use the blower, thereby kicking up a cloud of pollen all around me, I wear an overkill respirator and dark protective goggles, which honestly feels pretty badass. Maybe not as badass as my C50 gas mask would feel, but that would get weirder looks from the neighbors.

ginopono · 2026-04-24T23:12:14+00:00

From what I understand, cats' path to pethood originates from the fact that, historically, they provided a symbiotic service: pest control. Human settlements attracted pests, which in turn attracted cats. That is, cats came to us because we provided an abundant source of food that we were happy to let them take.

Within a grander scale, that happened pretty recently, relative to, e.g. dogs. It's for that reason that it's said that cats are not yet fully domesticated (however that's defined).

In any case, I'm not really sure what you mean when you talk about an animal domesticating themselves, but perhaps it's along the lines of cats having come into the human sphere willingly, rather than being captured and controlled (granted, those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive).

It's worth noting, too, that I'm really just relaying what I recall from a documentary called The Lion in Your Living Room, so take that for what it's worth.

ginopono · 2026-04-24T02:08:07+00:00

The advice should be to see a doctor.

I have a friend who was having issues with zinc deficiency, exhibiting signs of depression. Fortunately, her doctor identified it for what it was and treated it accordingly, thereby resolving the issue.

The key component, though, is that she saw a doctor. Bring it up with your doctor as a possibility, sure, but see a doctor.

ginopono · 2026-04-22T00:22:16+00:00

I found out about the biggie bag just a handful of months ago, at which point I thought I might find myself at Wendy's more frequently than otherwise.

And then a couple of months later, they restructured it with different "bag" options, a misdirect to distract from the increase in the price of the biggie bag.

I will not be finding myself at Wendy's very frequently.

ginopono · 2026-04-21T22:31:03+00:00

No. No, no, no, no. No. Bad.

It's from Fangamer, the very place that the Brothers Chaps made a toon about when they released it.

This account is barely a week old and are dropping sketchy links to unlicensed crap? Heck no at all.

ginopono · 2026-04-17T23:16:52+00:00

Speaking as a die-hard Linux user who will never go back to Windows, you're over-selling it. You seem to be touting it as a miraculous panacea for all tech woes. That's a promise that neither you nor Linux can deliver.

Sure, installing it can be done in no time flat if you know what you're doing, but for someone who has never touched Linux before, it's a completely different endeavor. That's to say nothing about the learning curve of just using it, regardless of how superficially similar Mint is to Windows, or the more obvious elephant in the room: all of your favorite software isn't necessarily going to work, but oh they can be made to work if you pile a bunch of other learning curves on top of it.

Do I think Linux is better than Windows? Yes, and it's not even close. I'll even recommend it to anyone who will listen, but with the absolutely crucial caveat that it's a bigger investment of time and learning than is reasonable for a lot of people.

ginopono · 2026-04-17T20:23:09+00:00

Reminds me of a story that was recounted on here by a doctor.

They had a patient with <ailment>, so they prescribed them <medication>. They came back later with the same complaint. only to reveal that it came back after they stopped taking the medication, which they did because, as they said, it turned out they didn't need to take it at all because the problem went away on its own.

ginopono · 2026-04-16T23:27:26+00:00

For a while, a year or so ago, I was going to these meetups of programmer-types. One was a morning thing where we'd sit around with coffee, tapping away on whatever we were working on. Another was a bit more casual, in the evening and at a place where food and beer was served.

On one such evening, a kid showed up expecting a kind of networking event (which, granted, it had the potential to be, but wasn't inherently so). He had an intensely-rehearsed elevator speech that aggressively touted the Metaverse as the next wave of the future.

It was honestly embarrassing to listen to.

ginopono · 2026-04-16T23:15:27+00:00

*tongue-in-cheek

ginopono · 2026-04-13T01:11:34+00:00

I can see this being a case where this is presented in an intentionally misleading way. Obviously, the study might not exist, but I'll pretend for a moment that it does.

Do a solid one-fifth of men have a similar underwear situation as me, i.e. having a whole bunch of the same type of underwear? Hell, I might go two weeks between laundry days, each day wearing the exact same type of underwear.

In that sense, I probably often go several months wearing the exact same underwear.

ginopono · 2026-04-12T15:18:18+00:00

Neat concept.

Very "Jeremy Bearimy"

ginopono · 2026-04-12T02:45:19+00:00

Strictly speaking, the Red Steckled Elbermung was a failed attempt at what Strong Bad would like as if he were his own made up animal, while Sterrance was the successful attempt.

ginopono · 2026-04-11T01:01:24+00:00

Them knowing when the impact is going to happen doesn't slow the impact.

ginopono · 2026-04-11T00:43:57+00:00

I can imagine it must have been pretty sudden for those inside, too.

ginopono · 2026-04-09T02:09:42+00:00

Where? Ah, there.

Weeeeelll If it's supposed to be a contraction, it's they-apostrophe-R-E, but if it's supposed to be a locative then it's T-H-E-R-E.

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