Same with The Mysterious Benedict Society. I did find a site that would sell it to me on a disc, but once I received it, it became clear to me they didn’t actually have a license to do so and just sold me a bootleg. Oh well. I dunno why Disney just didn’t want my money in the first place.

It’s the “with which we are okay” that sounds a little stilted. Most speakers would probably phrase that part of the sentence as “which we’re okay with.” It’s just because “okay with” is so common that it almost feels like a transitive form of the verb “to be okay,” so splitting apart sounds odd.

Note that there’s already a different transitive verb “okay” which means “approve” or “authorize,” as in “the boss okayed your plan to use the forklift,” implying that the person doing this has authority or control over whether the thing happens. “I’m okay with it” by contrast typically means something like “I have no control over it but it also doesn’t trouble me.” “Unfazed by” (spelled in this way, not related to “phase”) would be a similar expression.

Capitalism is already a superintelligence, and its goals are misaligned with those of humanity.

Kinda feels like moving out of America ought to be covered by my health insurance, really

Sound doesn’t travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn’t dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren’t as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.

Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.

I don’t think it’s most yet, but it’s improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that’s primarily for gaming; it’s based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won’t run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn’t rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

Definite “Friday was the name of his horse!” energy here.

Wasn’t the phrase supposed to be “Primus sucks”? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.

If I’m remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There’s a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on “Sailing the Seas of Cheese” that’s just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: “As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there’s a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you.”

Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn’t think I’ve listened to that album since the 90’s. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.

It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.