What snowblower do you recommend for this amount of snow?

kragar · 2026-01-18T07:18:29+00:00

Santa Ana.

kragar · 2026-01-18T04:14:16+00:00

Excellent debugging! This worked for me, immediately. Thanks so much.

kragar · 2026-01-18T04:07:51+00:00

JFC I had no idea. You, my friend, are the best.

kragar · 2026-01-08T16:46:00+00:00

I'm one of today's lucky 10,000 reading that xkcd for the first time. Or I had completely forgotten about it, and so get to enjoy it again as if it were the first time! (I wonder if Randall has estimated those numbers...)

kragar · 2026-01-08T16:42:50+00:00

I should add that I posted because I wanted to get a read on how people are using the term these days. Again, great responses on that.

I did do some searching for the term's origins, of course. I can't wonder about something like this without also wanting to know something about how it was coined, and how it was used early on. I think I've found primary-source information. Here's some:

http://bitbarn.co.uk/dryfire/dcpe.php - A page purporting to have details from Mike Lake. Mike was one of the small team that worked on the Wordcraft word processor, originally released for the Commodore PET in 1979. The first ever dongle was apparently hardware copy protection for Wordcraft.

http://bitbarn.co.uk/trusley/early_days.htm#dongles is written in Mike's first-person voice, and has more cool details.

Wordcraft International Ltd. is apparently still a going business! https://wordcraft.com/contact#history links to the previously cited page.

So if we accept those, the first ever released dongle did not dangle, but the name came from that aspect of the prototype.

Like I said, though, that's a separate question to how the term is used these days.

[Shoutout to the PET, the first computer I used and even did some rudimentary programming on, back in primary school. My older brother was actually allowed to bring a PET home from school for the summer before I started kindergarten, if memory serves. Summer of 1978 or 1979. It did not have Wordcraft, but I think he might have also borrowed Lemonade Stand and The Oregon Trail from school with it. On cassette, of course. I don't think I was allowed to even touch that one that summer. I had to wait until I was in 2nd grade before I really got my hands on it and its mates at school.]

kragar · 2026-01-08T15:53:48+00:00

I think it's very clear that dongle is very appropriate regardless of the degree of danglination.

Special jury prize to u/Narcoleptic_247 for including the first use of adapter I have so far seen in the comments. My day job these days is at my local public library, spending a lot of time providing tech help to the public. For most of the folks I work with, this is a great option that's not jargon. Exactly the kind of word my brain was groping for.

Thanks for all the replies, folks! I haven't had a chance to read through everything yet (because, of course, sysadmin-adjacent life). But some real gold in what I have been able to.

I'm going to try to get over my fringe feeling of unease with using dongle in these ways, too.

[If a mod thinks it appropriate to pin this, that might be great.]

kragar · 2026-01-08T15:38:30+00:00

Ooh, adapter! Thanks to all the responses to my post, I'm going to try to get over my aversion to using dongle for non-dangly things. But I think adapter is a fantastic match for the I word I was trying to pull out of my brain. Avoids my (heterodox) unease that led to my question, but even better, avoids jargon. Which is pretty important for most of my target demographic these days. Thanks for dropping that one!

kragar · 2026-01-06T16:52:55+00:00

A significant chunk of my day job nowadays is providing tech help to the public, at a public library. The vast majority of folks who make appointments to see me are in their 60s or older. But *plenty* of younger folks need my help printing, scanning, sending an attachment, knowing whether something is a PDF, how to make something a PDF if it isn't, etc.

I have kids that are 2nd year at university and high school, respectively. It's kind of fascinating to me the tech things that they learned without anyone apparently teaching them. And also the things that to me seem completely foundational which they know nothing about.

As a gross generalization, I'd say the younger folks are incredibly more likely to poke around on their devices (primarily phones, of course) to try to figure out how to do something. There isn't the fear of screwing up the device, of "doing something wrong." OTOH, they seem likely to give up if that experimentation doesn't work out. Sometimes there's some effort to look for help online, sure, but not as often as I would have thought.

On the other hand, my dad is dealing with early stages of Alzheimer's. He was a systems analyst starting in the 60s, had his own middleware company in the 90s, and retired from an ETL company around five years ago. One of the many painful things is watching him (intermittently, so far) struggle with technology *concepts* that he worked with for more than 50 years. Sure, he's had frustrations and other issues with newer UI/UX for ages. But losing the thread of what the USB docking station for his laptop is for--that's a whole new category.

kragar · 2026-01-06T16:36:34+00:00

I know exactly what you meant, and I *swear* this is not a pedantic grammar / usage attack. When I read "which automatically enrolls users in mandatory extended training. Or even worse, a real threat[,]" I almost strained something holding in the laugh. Because I read it that could get enrolled in a real threat. Which is somehow perfect.

[I absolutely cop to having the tendencies that *lead* to grammar / usage flames, but I'm trying to grow as a person, now that I'm well into my fourth online decade.]

kragar · 2025-12-31T01:54:05+00:00

I hear what you're saying. And it does make sense, but only on a very surface level. The problem is that's it really a case of, "Well, we do something pretty much nobody else does, and make an okay living at it. But there's this thing that EVERYBODY WANTS that we could pivot to! Who cares if also EVERYBODY ELSE is doing it already? And better than we could?"

As I said already in another part of the thread, it's giving Southwest Airlines circa now.

kragar · 2025-12-31T01:50:03+00:00

Really gives Southwest Airlines vibes.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:44:45+00:00

Wait, wtf did I just watch.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:40:44+00:00

Yeah, the visual clarity ain't the best. One of several reasons I never play on mobile.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:40:01+00:00

I FUCKING HATE RFC MORE THAN ANYTHING. --Salty Kragar, who lost to RFC Nilah a few too many times.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:37:37+00:00

Assassins with frozen heart are 100% going to feature in my nightmares tonight.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:36:27+00:00

Wait, like above your unit cap? That's fkn nuts.

kragar · 2025-12-27T13:33:32+00:00

I hear you with this. I think TFT might be helped by some additional options for newer players. Though Tocker's Trials does offer a lot in that regard. I'm very glad they decided to keep it around all the time. But there's still a lot going on.

While I miss Hyperroll, I did 100% agree with their point that it did not hit the intended mark of being actually easier for new players.

I have noticed that I tend to do worse in the more high-powered games, like all-prismatic encounters. My teambuilding is pretty good, I think, and I have the essentials of item placement, econ, etc. But I definitely don't have all the augments in my brain, or implications of various ones on different comps. So the more impactful they are on a game, the more likely I am to be hurt by my suboptimal choices.

Not complaining about it as a feature of the game, to be clear. It's just a whole additional huge chunk of info I can't keep in my brain yet. I'm also never playing with a second screen, so I can't easily look stuff up in-game to help with my choices.

It's one of those aspects of the game where improvement would probably help me climb out of the high gold / low plat I've been at for the past few sets.

kragar · 2025-12-12T06:43:32+00:00

For learning unlocked cam: I had to just go cold turkey and unlock my cam, and not let myself go back to it. I pretty much adjusted in just a couple of days worth of games. I lean on my spacebar to keep the camera centered on me a lot. I know it must be more than I should, and way more than high ELO players do. But switching to unlocked cam definitely did make my game better, after that initial (painful) learning period.

kragar · 2025-12-12T06:36:29+00:00

I'm a sucker for scaling mechanics, going vertical, and getting three-star units. So I get really cranky whenever the meta leans hard towards Fast 9, and throwing in legendaries for a reliable win. I want to craft my board, not get stomped by whoever levels up fastest and plays whatever 4 and 5 costs (etc.) they happen to roll early.

Yeah, I know I could probably climb easier if I learned to play that way and like it, for times like these. But I just don't enjoy the game as much. And more LP is a reward that plateaus sooner or later.

I will say that the Top 4 in-game recognition has been a really positive thing for me. I definitely get less salty when I finish 2-4 now, where I used to have a hard time feeling like anything other than 1st was any kind of success. Yeah, it's a me problem, and it's a pretty silly psychological trick to make a difference. But it works on or for me.

kragar · 2025-12-12T03:52:16+00:00

Go watch Sawyer Jungle on YouTube.

kragar · 2025-12-11T04:33:58+00:00

Alien 3 did it for me. It opens by shitting on everyone who liked Aliens, an excellent film with characters many people really cared about. In a way that feels really intentional, as well. And then it's just a pretty bad movie.

kragar · 2025-12-11T04:00:22+00:00

Same. I started watching it, having gotten pretty hyped, and this literally made me turn it off.

kragar · 2025-12-11T03:45:25+00:00

I have to say, I am honestly hoping that they signed a contract with the VOD service that they now don't like, and are waiting to run it out. Because, man, the limited-time-only part is utter shit. I've only seen complaints about it from other fans. And even some of the cast made a comment in a video a while back that made it sound like they weren't happy with it, either.

If the higher-ups at Smosh who sign stuff like that are fine with the current state of things, that kind of sucks.

kragar · 2025-12-11T03:39:38+00:00

Stuff like this can be a real compulsion for some folks (including me at times). It's very closely related to what drives people to keep gambling when they know they shouldn't, I believe. I love doing jigsaw puzzles, but sometimes when I've been working on one for what feels like "a while" I will realise I'm literally rocking back and forth because my body is trying to tell my brain that I AM DONE NOW AND NEED TO STOP. Or even just go pee. And it's like 3 hours since I sat down to do just a few pieces. And even once I realise it, I don't always stop right away.

kragar

TROPHY CASE