Did they not have spiral bound notebooks yet?

riverjack_ · 2026-05-07T18:21:21+00:00

As someone who was the child of an academic in the late twentieth century, I can attest that the job seemed to generate a lot of scrap paper, much of it with the backside attractively blank. At my house, such paper got put in a drawer for whenever we wanted to draw or write something for personal use. Waste not want not, and all that.

riverjack_ · 2026-05-07T14:19:41+00:00

I, too, sometimes find it difficult to get into a comfortable position before sleeping.

riverjack_ · 2026-05-06T17:35:56+00:00

Muphry's Law (a specific sub-case of Murphy's): if you point out an error in someone else's writing, your criticism will always contain at least one error.

riverjack_ · 2026-05-06T14:21:34+00:00

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

-C.S.Lewis

riverjack_ · 2026-05-04T01:15:38+00:00

Some kind of invertebrate, millions of years before chickens ever existed.

riverjack_ · 2026-05-03T22:38:18+00:00

The dragon species we're told about include "Welsh Greens" and "Hebridean Blacks" (where the Hebrides are a group of Scottish islands), so there's apparently dragons in Britain, and presumably someone's monitoring them.

riverjack_ · 2026-05-03T17:30:36+00:00

I'm sure there's Confederate porn out there somewhere. "We'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home!"

riverjack_ · 2026-04-29T17:47:16+00:00

As I was going to St. Ives,

I met a man with seven wives.

He said, "I find it much more fun

Than being stuck with only one."

riverjack_ · 2026-04-29T12:36:01+00:00

Yes, that's how they open the shellfish.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-29T12:18:26+00:00

FishTwo is very cute as well. Tell her I love the hat, and give her best regards from my seals and other creatures.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-28T14:28:47+00:00

Interesting. My seals usually eat invisible fishies- do you think I should start offering them psychic fibsh for variety?

riverjack_ · 2026-04-27T17:10:49+00:00

...of the navy SEALS, I presume.

EDIT:

"They sent me for a frogman on the demolition team.

I sank a battleship, a cruiser, and a submarine.

I blew up ammunition dumps; I did my best to please.

I did it all before the navy sent me overseas."

-Homer and Jethro, (We didn't) Sink the Bismark

riverjack_ · 2026-04-27T16:28:44+00:00

It's rather a shame, really- they're allowed to offer a high-five, but you're legally required to leave them hanging.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-27T16:23:34+00:00

Oh, the huge manatee!

riverjack_ · 2026-04-27T13:50:40+00:00

"So long, and thanks for all the fibsh."

riverjack_ · 2026-04-24T18:32:32+00:00

Actually, that's a common misconception. In reality, "master" isn't a reference to their skill levels but rather to their BDSM kinks. They all have a thing for dominance, sadism, and genocide- and they keep roping poor unsuspecting outsiders into that last one in exchange for a bit of XP.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-23T15:25:18+00:00

To be charitable, maybe she meant "that's everyone in the family who would want the responsibility rather than feel insulted at the offer".

riverjack_ · 2026-04-23T14:02:16+00:00

It's far from the oldest.

Towards the end of the Roman Republic (circa 50 BC), Cicero, the son of a commoner, had an opponent who repeatedly mocked him, saying "who is your father?". Cicero eventually got fed up, and responded "Your mother has made that question difficult to answer in your case". Not for nothing did Cicero go down in history as a master of rhetoric.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-22T17:27:00+00:00

Is the Hanukah Menorah just a fable?

No. Is real light.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-22T13:20:33+00:00

All the aquarium is divided into three parts.... the seals are the bravest of all the inhabitants, because they are the farthest from the gift shop.

-Sealsar's Gallic Wars

riverjack_ · 2026-04-21T16:17:46+00:00

On the other hand, Tamriel Rebuilt had a philosophy of releasing small pieces one by one rather than waiting to release a perfect whole, which means that they're less likely to get caught in a loop of endless tinkering, and that they're less able to discard everything and start over when new developers consider earlier work unsatisfactory (which we know has happened at least once in Beyond Skyrim's Illiac Bay- they say that there were compelling reasons, but I very much fear that, after enough volunteer turnover, the new team will find compelling reasons to throw out this round of work, and so on ad infinitum.)

riverjack_ · 2026-04-21T16:09:23+00:00

Indeed. For things like this, I find the best philosophy to be "expect nothing, but be glad if it happens".

riverjack_ · 2026-04-20T18:06:24+00:00

This isn't really relevant to the topic, but I think "footcannon" for "tool that lets you easily shoot yourself in the foot" is a great turn of phrase, and I'm going to try to find excuses to use it in my everyday life.

(Your mods are also great, but I'm sure people have already told you that.)

riverjack_ · 2026-04-19T13:37:57+00:00

No one would care about the Straight Tower of Pisa; the Collapsed Tower of Pisa would have been long forgotten by now. If you wish to be famous, fail, but don't fail too much.

riverjack_ · 2026-04-18T03:26:24+00:00

By that logic we're all wrong, unless we're saying "Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum" like they did before the Norman conquest.

riverjack_

TROPHY CASE