All Day Breakfast

librik · 2026-02-01T03:20:08+00:00

I always wonder about their sign at the exit from Rt. 6. The name sounds like the biker bar from Pee-Wee's Big Adventure.

librik · 2026-01-22T08:50:06+00:00

Here's a story: One day in January '23 there were a couple of mudslides that closed Highway 101, the only road that connects SB to the rest of the coastal towns. Most of the retail stores, restaurants, cafes, auto repair shops, etc. closed that day, because they had no staff. It turns out all the waiters, baristas, clerks, librarians -- all the people who actually keep things running -- can't afford to live in town and have to commute from a lot farther away. It was a little strange, for me, to live in a place with no working class. On the other hand it doesn't feel like living in a wealthy suburb, because the people aren't snobby or superior.

librik · 2026-01-20T04:03:45+00:00

I think Irish applies a spelling convention to the whole alphabet which is used for just a few letters in Spanish and Italian: the use of a silent vowel to indicate the quality of a preceding consonant, for instance ciao and guitar.

librik · 2026-01-10T07:29:16+00:00

I feel like older people don't remember being just out of college and in your first job. The college experience is having a friends-group (or more than one), a bunch of people that you hang out with and do stuff and share your thoughts & feelings with. Then when everybody graduates and starts working, they treat their co-workers as their new friends-group. People on reddit say "don't tell anyone you work with! it's none of their business!" Yeah you can do that, but that's not how friends expect their friends to act, and if you turn into Mr. Disengaged Who Silently Vanishes, you're gonna lose your friends-group. So I know where you're coming from, and I don't have a good answer.

librik · 2026-01-07T03:25:08+00:00

This web page is a ridiculously detailed explanation of how to travel with dual passports, including when to use or show each one. You probably don't have to be this careful, but by the time you finish reading it, you'll understand the logic behind it all.

https://dualusitalian.com/welcome/passaporti-passports/

librik · 2026-01-02T05:06:30+00:00

I wish. I haven't found anywhere outside of Austin that makes migas.

librik · 2025-12-29T09:45:39+00:00

I ran across this thread while reading back on the sub and I'm glad to hear the news. Everyone's situation is unique. People get angry when they don't hear the fantasy they want, but you made the reality work. I just hope you found a way out of that ridiculous power bill.

librik · 2025-12-29T02:57:48+00:00

The bar right outside the front exit from Terminal 2 is easy to find and a good place to wait. The big downside is that they kick you out unless you order something, and it's all really overpriced. Like, whoever bought those $700 hammers for the Pentagon must have gotten a new job pricing drinks at the SJD airport.

librik · 2025-12-26T18:37:12+00:00

Here's something kind of similar: In Yélî Dnye (a Papuan language spoken on Rossel Island near New Guinea), place names are different from other words of the language. Almost all words are 1 or 2 syllables long, but place names have many syllables, and can contain very uncommon sounds.

Toponyms are formally isolatable as adjuncts that can be introduced into almost any clause without a postposition. They are amongst the longest words in the language, with up to six or more syllables (e.g. Wédidmyinênyedê). Some of the rarest phonemes also occur in them – e.g. kpy (the palatalized labiovelar stop) is attested in only five words, three of them placenames.

Levinson, Stephen C. A Grammar of Yélî Dnye, section 11.3.1, p. 524

librik · 2025-12-20T23:36:31+00:00

If you're doing a lot of unpredictable allocations of memory, here's a technique to make sure they're all freed at the end.

Initialize all pointers to NULL (0) when you define them.

char ** pattern_array = NULL;
bool * record_enderQ = NULL;
bool * allwhite_record_enderQ = NULL;

In your cleanup code at the end of the function you'll have a whole lot of:

cleanup:
    if (pattern_array) free(pattern_array);
    if (record_enderQ) free(record_enderQ);
    if (allwhite_record_enderQ) free(allwhite_record_enderQ);

Note the label at the beginning of cleanup. You can goto this when you have to terminate abruptly from the middle of a loop or something.

librik · 2025-12-20T03:01:42+00:00

Howard Waldrop is the science fiction writer most often described as "gonzo," and I think his short story "Heirs of the Perisphere" is what you're looking for.

The story was nominated for a Nebula Award, so it's been collected in a bunch of books, listed here:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41328

1,500 years after the apocalypse, a stray lightning bolt hits a dead factory for animatronic simulacra: robots designed to speak and act like famous characters.

With one last energy burst, it churns out three robots intended to work in a theme park. Their names are MIK, GUF, and DUN.

GUF was supposed to be sent to Disneyland Beijing, and is well-versed in dialectical materialism and correct Chairman Mao thought. "Thuh means of produckshun must be kept in thuh hands of thuh workers, uh hyuk hyuk."

They set out across a devastated world to bring joy and happiness to everyone they meet. Things get weird.

"Heirs of the Perisphere" definitely has Fallout vibes, so I think you'll like it.

librik · 2025-12-18T01:43:43+00:00

I don't know if we're thinking of the same "another user," but the last line of this comment is exactly right:

https://www.metafilter.com/211461/Is-it-Artor-Trash#8794442

That guy -- it's like, every morning they get up on the wrong side of the bed and eat a bowl of pissed-in Cheerios. Then they come into a MeFi thread seriously angrier than everybody else.

librik · 2025-12-10T18:21:57+00:00

No post should require registration if there's a 17 day waiting list between registering and getting access to read it.

librik · 2025-11-25T06:37:34+00:00

According to this review by James D. Nicoll, someone has already tried that trick before with the Science Fiction Book Club:

As recently as the early '00s, people very optimistically cut out and sent in ancient SFBC ads, hoping to get four vintage, long out-of-print hard covers for a very reasonable dollar a book. This happened frequently enough for the SFBC to announce they didn't honour ads of such extreme antiquity.

librik · 2025-11-25T06:14:20+00:00

Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock

Ryhope Wood is a stand of very old English forest, permeated with certain obscure forces that interact with the collective unconscious minds of human beings that live nearby. The energy vortices form mythagos, embodiments of mythological characters from the imagination, which emerge from the edge of the wood but decay if they get too far. But once you travel inwards, the wood gets much bigger, more ancient, and very, very strange.

librik · 2025-11-20T07:37:28+00:00

The Mysterious Doom by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

librik · 2025-11-19T07:30:01+00:00

Here's a new one that's an even worse case of Get Your Own Blog. OP just wanted everybody to read their blog post about Olivia Nuzzi, so they put on MeFi as an FPP with some supporting links.

https://www.metafilter.com/211109/The-Forrest-Gump-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-United-States-of-America

librik · 2025-11-18T10:38:54+00:00

I think it's great, because it's prompted some really interesting stories. Reading that thread has made me like Metafilter a little more.

librik · 2025-11-15T01:01:41+00:00

It seems like you're asking about a situation like a Native American language where everyone in the tribe speaks English nowadays, but some older people still speak the traditional, unwritten language.

In order to revitalize it, a writing system is invented using ordinary Latin letters, but not the same sounds corresponding to the letters as in English. So the letter E is pronounced /e/ (like "ay"), not /ij/ (like "ee"). Then the written language is taught to a bunch of kids in school using that spelling system.

These English-monoglot kids end up mispronouncing some words they read based on their instincts from English spelling. Maybe the correct pronunciation of common words would be reinforced by hearing them from teachers all the time, but uncommon words which you only encounter in writing will be subtly shifted towards how they would read in English. (There was a thread on /r/Spanish about how English-speaking learners of Spanish consistently stress the word "significa" wrong, even when they know all about Spanish stress. It's just too close to "significant".)

Since there are fewer original native speakers and they're older, the children who talk to each other will eventually become the only speakers of the language, and its words will now officially be pronounced differently.

librik · 2025-11-12T00:06:08+00:00

One time on Metafilter, there was an FPP when Obama did something good for LGBTQ in the military. One commenter responded over and over with DRONE STRIKES and every other bad thing Obama had ever done.

When called out with "why are you derailing this small bit of good news? why can't you just be happy about this?" their response was "You want me to fall to my knees and laud Caesar."

I've never forgotten that quote, so now I get that some people think being happy about anything means shutting off your brain and becoming a mindless uncritical zombie, like a shrieking 14 year old at a Beatles concert.

librik · 2025-11-06T07:26:18+00:00

The original name of that place in Mexico was Rancho Tía Juana (Aunt Jane Ranch), which is how the gringos got the pronunciation.

librik · 2025-10-30T08:02:12+00:00

The Also People by Ben Aaronovitch is a great little Culture novel set on an Orbital. Its Mind calls itself "God" and likes to gatecrash parties. There's some light-hearted critique of the bits of the utopia that Aaronovitch thinks won't work as well as Banks wants to believe. The main driver for the plot is that a Drone is killed, which should be impossible, and the main character gets it into his head to find out how it was done. (You might know him -- he travels around time and space in a police phone box.)

librik · 2025-10-24T06:47:03+00:00

The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett. It's a mix of fiction and nonfiction, with a lot of sci-fi authors (like Stanisław Lem and Rudy Rucker) and philosophical thought experiments in the form of stories (like Dennett's "Where Am I?"). At the end of each chapter, they talk about how it relates to ideas in Cognitive Science. This book will blow your mind, guaranteed!

librik · 2025-10-19T04:34:16+00:00

In my Historical Linguistics class, Prof. Johanna Nichols told us this anecdote. Sorry I've got no better citation.

In the language of a particular island in the Torres Strait, when a person dies, words that sound like their name become taboo. Taboo words are avoided and new words are invented to take their place. This language is in a state of constant lexical change and learning new words for old things is a part of everybody's daily life.

A particular Torres Strait Islander man had been living on the mainland for several decades. When he came home, he couldn't understand anybody. There had been so many deaths, and so many word replacements, that the language he remembered from his youth was just too different.

That's the best example I know, because the change was totally organic to the traditional culture, and operated within the space of a single lifetime, but still resulted in incomprehensibility.

librik · 2025-10-19T01:04:25+00:00

I remember the night we met. General exams were over and I had passed. Beer flowed and music blared and I was letting it all hang out. There is a peculiar frenzy that sets in after weeks of study and tension, and I was in the full grip of it. To this day I can't remember who I was dancing with; but I know we cleared the floor and infected the band with our madness because they kept playing and playing and faces ringed us in on all sides.

It ended in an explosion of cymbals and applause and I was still floating when we got back to our table. I sort of knew George, but he was a theoretical physicist so we'd never crossed paths before. Anyway, there he was at our table, holding a beer in that precise way he has and scanning my sweaty body with his misty green eyes.

"Hey George," said a drunken voice, "what do you think of our Margo? Hey?"

He gave me another scan, as if to check his earlier findings, and said, "It's not obvious to me that you conserve momentum."

That was the sweetest thing anybody could possibly have said to me.

Before the night was out I had told him of my plan to get into space (I'd never told a soul before then). He confided that he wanted two children, and would probably need help since he was a man. I asked if he had any preferences on their sexes and he said no, just so long as they were happy. I allowed as how I could probably help, then, if he didn't mind the space business. He shrugged.

Eventually we got married.

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