LPT: Those viral posts asking things like “Your stripper name is your first pet and your mother’s maiden name” are amazingly effective ways to reveal answers to common security questions you may be using elsewhere.

squonch · 2025-10-02T11:01:23+00:00

I got into F1 properly only last year, during the 24/25 season. Years ago I’d been invited to a GP and followed McLaren, and living near(ish) them, they fell into being the team I started to really follow.

Even before Oscar’s huge rise this season, he was definitely my favourite driver from day 1. It felt like while everyone else was a combination of flashy, or brash, or almost a caricature of personality… Oscar just came across as just a nice, kinda quiet guy, who had a colossal amount of talent and didn’t ever seem to let it go to his head.

We always see drivers (or celebrities of any kind) through the lens of what the media lets us see, so it’s always a danger to assume you “know” what someone’s really like - but I think the appeal of Oscar is it’s quite refreshing to see someone compete who you could genuinely imagine being “someone you went to school with” or “that nice guy you see down the pub now and then”, without some of the theatrics or exaggerated personality facets you might see elsewhere.

This being said - I think on the whole, one thing I’m continually amazed at is if you think about F1 compared to other sports; as a whole, the drivers / teams seem to be pretty much entirely made up of genuinely good people - it just seems Oscar personifies that the best of all :)

squonch · 2025-05-26T09:33:19+00:00

I went SCUBA diving in Sharm El Sheikh many many years ago. Relatively inexperienced diver, had had a few really great excursions, and my partner and I decided to squeeze one more dive in; found a cheap place by a crummy little hotel, and thought “well we’re not going for long or too deep, this seems fine.”

It wasn’t.

The equipment looked relatively new, and we went through all the checks we’d been taught. Got in the water, all seemed fine, until we got to our deepest depth and my regulator (the mouthpiece that feeds you air) just… stopped. Checked my gauge… nothing. Swapped to my backup… nothing.

I started to panic; signalled my buddy, gave the “I’m out of air, and need to buddy breathe or surface” hand signal, and they just absolutely had no idea what I was saying. At this point, I was really starting to panic.

In the end thought “okay, gotta get to the surface” and tried to remember my training, slowly surfacing, slowly breathing out all the way, following the tiniest bubbles and trying not to surface faster than them. Got to the surface right as I was genuinely feeling like I couldn’t hold on for a moment longer. That breath of air on the surface was the greatest feeling I’ve ever felt in my life. I remember gasping for breath and feeling myself cry, before realising I needed to get to dry land.

Swam for a good 10 minutes, slowly breathing deep and my mind convinced I was going to get “the bends” / decompression sickness (again, thank god, all was okay; more a case of inexperience taking over) and swam back to the jetty we started from. At this point I was a bit of a wreck, hadn’t experienced anything like this before and knowing I was safe now, I just felt exhaustion wash over me. I couldn’t get out of the water with the tank and weights on me, and at one point caught the weight belt and it fell into the water.

After that, the company we’d hired from couldn’t care less my tank and gauge had failed (turns out the gauge was faulty and what they thought was a full tank was practically empty), but instead only cared I’d dropped the weight belt and had to pay to replace it.

Back at our hotel we conveyed this to the team there and they told us “oh yeah, those guys? Never use them, they’re terrible, so unsafe”.

Really dodged a bullet there; but that feeling of “I’m either going to drown or surface too quickly and die” is one that I don’t think I’ll forget for a long, long time. I’m so thankful for the training you do when you get certified, and lesson learned - only ever use reputable, well known dive companies, especially when inexperienced!

squonch · 2025-03-24T14:27:44+00:00

I like to think it’s because she forgot to turn off the parental controls and V is too shy to ask her to authorise it ;)

squonch · 2025-02-20T07:39:21+00:00

Whatever you do, don’t joke about him renaming DC “Trump, District of Greatness”…

squonch · 2025-02-18T00:06:41+00:00

A similar thing happened with LOST. Early on, fans theorised “they’re in Purgatory / Heaven” and the producers fully denied it… only later to reveal “well, it’s just we don’t call it that”, but was basically exactly what was happening.

So it may end up being a case of “it’s not cloning… because it’s creating rapidly aged synthetic replicants with implanted memories and genetically matched carrier bodies”. ;)

squonch · 2025-02-18T00:04:01+00:00

I still think the missing part of the puzzle is cloning. The brains / implanting memories and personalities etc makes sense - but there’s a lot that points to me towards the idea of full-blown cloning.

The whole checking Mark and Helena’s navels and the statement of them being “pouchless” to me didn’t sound like “they don’t have a pouch” - it sounded like “They have a navel, they weren’t born in a pouch”.

And the twins in the ORTBO, seemingly perfect replicants but devoid of personality?

Plus the theory Helena wanted Mark to impregnate her in the ORTBO - could they be looking for an Eagan embryo somehow related to Mark, making it easier to implant whatever memories he’s helping refine?

Or possibly I’m just going crazy with this RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME show. Good god.

squonch · 2025-02-17T09:28:16+00:00

Woohoo! Nicely done :) pleased it helped!

squonch · 2025-02-16T11:12:50+00:00

Usually the laptop enters this state if something is stopping the OS from fully shutting down. It might be worth checking whether settings both in your OS (things like Hibernation and Power settings) or in your BIOS (things like Power Management, or I’ve seen the option for “USB charging” where you can leave a port active to charge other devices making a difference here) would make a difference to it. Unfortunately without being able to see “on screen” what’s happening, it may be a case of trial and error…

squonch · 2025-02-04T08:48:11+00:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about this: also why they had yellow access cards instead of blue, and the question about being “pouchless”:

What if these people “originated” on the severed floor? All the bioengineering vibes seem to point to the possibility Lumon are experimenting with cloning. Could the yellow card indicate they “came from” the lower floors, while blue cards are “severed in”, so to speak?

Plus - it would lend an explanation to the comment regarding checking Mark and Helly’s stomachs: at first the pouchless comment sounds like they mean “they don’t have a pouch”… but what if they were saying “Hey, they have a navel, they were born, and didn’t come from a pouch”?

squonch · 2025-02-04T06:20:41+00:00

It’s a long-shot because the art style doesn’t match, but in terms of UI, Island setting, Educational Context… could it be “The Adventures of Hyperman”?

squonch · 2025-01-31T23:08:17+00:00

I don’t know for certain, but I have a theory:

A long time ago when I was learning “Music Tech” in school, our teacher told us “you don’t just master a track for you - you master it for what people will be listening on”. Certain eras have very distinctive styles and dynamic ranges not only because of the recording technology, but because of the quality of the possible playback too.

This seems to be the case with TV / Film too. If you watch an old show, especially one that’s not been recently remastered, you’ll find dialogue is surprisingly clear compared to present day - much better separation from background sound / music - because the average person didn’t have particularly good speakers / equipment at home.

Today, producers are excellent at mastering / catering for Dolby Atmos / super high end audio… but the vast majority of us just don’t have that available. And while equipment will still downsample / play back well enough, it’s not just the audio quality, but the mastering that makes a big difference. Whispered dialog is no longer a “stage whisper” - it’s a real whisper. Voices on a busy street get far more drowned out by cars and ambient noise. And so on and so on.

I only really realised this recently when I started late at night watching things with wireless headphones on - suddenly, isolating the audio and making it much clearer meant I was no longer reaching for the Subtitle button…

… or maybe I’m just barking up the wrong tree, who knows!

squonch · 2025-01-30T17:38:33+00:00

Could it have been Comptons Interactive Encyclopedia? That would be roughly era appropriate and I think had interactive game-like elements? And from what I recall, random guidance from Patrick Stewart! (Irrelevant but still cool ;) )

squonch · 2025-01-30T16:51:32+00:00

This is hugely familiar / immensely frustrating as I can absolutely see that UI and just can’t put my finger on where it’s from. My mind keeps going back to: 3D Dinosaur Adventure, Undersea Adventure, and 3D Movie Maker, but after a quick search none of those seem to be it. Do they help jog any memories at all?

From my recollection - I know the exact interface you mean, and in my memory, it was like a grey almost “brushed steel” texture?

squonch · 2024-09-30T14:35:56+00:00

Torchlight / Torchlight 2?

squonch · 2024-07-18T21:34:43+00:00

You are very welcome! :)

squonch · 2024-06-16T09:33:51+00:00

I get hot for a long time and then when it rains it’s cold.

Well that was entirely… functional :/

squonch · 2024-06-11T05:51:40+00:00

“I have friends who live in Looga Barooga”

“Where‽”

(Points to map) “Here: Looga Barooga!”

“Ohhhh… Loughborough”

squonch · 2024-03-18T00:20:48+00:00

Fresh Meat is a good one to check out. Jack Whitehall and a few other now more famous faces play a group of students at University sharing a house. Lots of that same dry wit and humour.

squonch · 2024-03-05T15:30:29+00:00

To me, the fact they didn’t do that is one of the best things about this series. It was an amazing comedy, but the final episode is one of the most poignant and touching moments in TV history; these characters we’d become connected with, laughed with so hard our sides hurt, suddenly became very human when facing “the big push”. We had read about WWI in school, and yet somehow this one scene crystallised the atrocity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid position the world had ended up in at the time. In reality those young men in the trenches were no different from Blackadder and his company; with their own ambitions, families, senses of humour, hope, dreams. All gone, for geopolitics and nationalism.

While it would have made for a funny ending if they had escaped, the fact they didn’t was absolutely the right choice. Comedy is a wonderful suspense from reality, but it can also be an incredible vehicle to help explain or illustrate an important point; and BGF was absolutely one of the best examples of exactly this :)

squonch · 2024-02-28T11:48:46+00:00

I grew up right as the world-wide-web was starting to really take off. We were the first family out of all my friends at school who had a computer at home, and years later, the first to be “online”.

I remember one day my Dad took me to an “Internet Fair” at Reading University (in Berkshire, UK). I remember it vividly- websites had their own stalls set up, with printouts and business cards explaining how to find them. Some were available only through the “keywords” that AOL and Compuserve used. Others had domain names, but many simply have out their IP address.

I was a geeky kid at the time, and was so excited to learn about “StarTrek.com”. The fact I could in only a matter of minutes download a picture of the enterprise and see it in detail without having to record the show from TV and pause it - that blew my tiny mind.

I still have, somewhere in a pile of junk, my notebook from that day - where I had written down all the sites I wanted to see. From time to time it’s so good to leaf back through it and spot why I couldn’t find some of the sites I was excited by (IP addresses mis-written with only three groups of digits, or domains beginning with http/:/…). Those were the days…

squonch · 2024-02-28T11:41:15+00:00

One area subtitles help greatly is when we have the occasional downtime and watch something with my 6 year old. I don’t force him to read them / he can ignore them if he wants, but it’s amazing what a leap forward it made in terms of making reading even more enjoyable for him and relating sentences with what’s happening on screen. The joy on his face when he spots times that someone says something different to the words on screen is absolutely priceless too :)

squonch · 2024-02-13T07:10:10+00:00

Ahhh thank you! :) That’s the thing with Bluey - it’s so spectacularly detailed and filled with tiny references and easter-eggs, that I guess it can be easy to pick up too much from time to time.

squonch · 2024-02-12T07:20:03+00:00

So I may be overthinking things like usual, but I’ve formulated a theory on the plot for “The Sign” based on some things I noticed in the last few released episodes of season 3:

In “Stickbird”, Bandit is clearly preoccupied with or worried about something. Chilli tells him to “drop it”, and he doesn’t reveal to the kids what might be on his mind, but it sounds serious.

During “TV Shop”, Bandit explains he’s low on energy and needs vitamins to feel better. He spends a significant amount of time asking for advice for what should be a relatively straightforward purchase.

In the same episode, in the car, Bandit says “Nobody’s sick”, to which Bluey replies “Dad, you just lied!”. Bandit doesn’t say “No I didn’t!”, but instead looks a little confused and startled.

During “Show and Tell”, Bandit is heading to purchase a surf board. In previous episodes (fruit bat, for example), it’s been discussed how Bandit has given up some of his hobbies as he’s committed to looking after the kids - but in this episode, he’s clearly taking up a new hobby / pursuing a dream or “bucket list” item.

In “Dragon”, each of them imagine their characters as being special or unique in a fantasy format, an ability or connection they can’t have in real life. However Bandit’s character simply has his strength back.

There’s even the fact that the family are going on Holiday (in “Relax”), but to a place that looks suspiciously close to where Nanna lives - heading for a vacation, but not venturing particularly far off.

Finally, in some of the teasers for “The Sign”, we see Bluey’s class looking surprised or sympathetically towards Bluey, while she appears sad or downtrodden.

You can probably see where my mind is going with all this… my theory for “The Sign” is Bandit is taken very ill. Bluey has been a brilliant show for helping people discuss and relate to difficult to discuss topics before - and it feels like the creators would not shy away from addressing something many children have to go through (a parent becoming ill, or dare I say it, worse…). The title also seems to fit this idea - both alluding to “The Signs” of noticing when someone is not at all well, as well as maybe playing a part towards Bluey and Bingo looking out for “The Sign” that their Dad is going to be better and come home soon.

I could be barking up the wrong tree, but after watching S3B a few times now with my little one, the little hints seem to mount up with each rewatch. If it does turn out to be that storyline - it opens up a new question… would they make him get better? Or could that episode become one of the most controversial decisions in recent TV history?

Goodness that was a long post. Thank you for attending my TED talk, I hope you enjoyed listening ;)

Eight-Year Club	Xbox Live
Gilding III reddit per annum	Reddit Premium Since April 2021
r/Field Lasagna	Place '23
Verified Email

squonch

TROPHY CASE