The computer used to do something very basic & helpful and now it doesn't. I'm gonna complain

Source

why does my mother suddenly fail kindergarten whenever she tries to do anything on the computer

I know she doesn't know what "the maximise button" is so I told her "click the square at the top right" and she clicked...the printer icon...in the middle of the toolbar. and I'm just like okay. this isn't a technology thing you are flunking basic shapes and directions. I'm turning off your computer and getting you a block puzzle. you have a master's degree

this is so fucking funny

i can't stop thinking about this. this kind of shit is not like milsim plane nerds with their own super-expensive desktop cockpit recreations. that kind of hardware makes sense to exist.

this does not. they're playing world of tanks which is like the "call of duty" of tank games (casual, players only slightly bad-smelling). it also doesn't have support for tank peripherals. no game does. no trainers do afaik. which means that (assuming this isn't just a video editing) all of that shit they are fucking with translates into mouse/keyboard inputs that the game understands. that's weird/hard and perplexing, uh, and considering that "tank peripherals" aren't a thing that exist i can only guess they built them theirselves

which is fucking hilarious because why are they so good. why does the fucking cannon breech have a little dry ice smoke effect when the breech opens like they just shot a shell. what. manual turret traverse crank?? did they build a fucking ready rack!! they're even using the correct phraseology which means one of these mofos read a PDF file

"tank peripherals aren't a thing" yeah they are, it's called Steel Battalion and it singlehandedly killed the market for specialized controllers like this

Irony: As soon as it became possible to call people on the phone, we stopped writing letters to each other. But as soon as it became possible to write letters on your phone, we stopped calling each other. There's something funny about that.

Unironically the biggest death knell I heard for twitter was the fact that, as far as anyone is aware, there are no longer any furries working at twitter.

The rats have fled the sinking ship

The wolves have fled the sinking ship

The dragons have fled the-

I'm not even joking furries account for like 30% of all modern tech infrastructure.

All the terminology relating to tech and the Internet is English, and one of the endearing features of the French public broadcasting in Canada is that every time they use an English neologism they have to immediately perform a ritual penance where they apologize and grope for a French translation, whether sanctioned or improvised, and so this comes up all the time in that context.

Often this is sort of dry but when the English word is already stupid it has a lot of comic potential. I've previously heard "doomscrolling" translated as défilement morbide, which is already great -- you must understand that the speakers grab at these terms like drowning sailors grasping for floating debris -- but today I heard it translated as défilement funeste, which is just impossibly charming

WORLD'S STUPIDEST PROBLEM:

my mum loaned me her iPhone bc my android isn't working right, and I can't exit the settings because iPhones apparently no longer have home buttons, and there's no obvious other way to do it

I did, in fact, try swiping up from the settings, and nothing happened. Presumably I'm Swiping Wrong. It works from other apps, but not from Settings.

I'm increasingly not a fan of this "get rid of every button and only use gestures" thing, because I'm finding that my movements are apparently "wrong". I remember my friend with essential tremor who did many things on her phone with voice commands. Buttons are easy to use. A click from a button is something that doesn't need super fine motor control. But I cannot tell you the number of times my current phone thinks I'm swiping up when I intend to swipe down. It happens multiple times a day. The number of times when swipe text (because tapping a screen repeatedly makes the joints on my hands hurt) returns nonsense, because it didn't like the way I'd moved my finger across the keys.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that touchscreens are not the amazing boon they're supposed to be. I suspect they're something that is increasingly going to lock out disabled people, many of whom could manage switches or dials or buttons just fine. This is just one particularly obnoxious example of it.

I was also using an iPad when they added some other new swipe option where I had to remember to swipe up on my iPhone for something, and down on my iPad for the exact same thing. Or vice versa; I don't remember anymore. I've noticed that Apple has this tendency in their design these days where you have to memorise a bunch of secret handshakes to do anything, and if you stop using their devices and come back to them later, it's going to be completely unintuitive what you're supposed to do. I'm not a fan.

... I just had to look up how to turn off the phone.

I HAD TO LOOK UP HOW TO TURN OFF THE PHONE.

Can you imagine the kind of user experience FAILURE that is??? Pressing the same button I used to turn it on DIDN'T WORK.

WHY IS APPLE LIKE THIS. How is this supposed to be an improvement over before, when a phone behaved as you would expect, based on the previous twenty-plus years of experience with similar devices?

Blackberry were done dirty by a world who wanted the present to look like the prettiest future sci-fi had to offer.

A few weeks ago I accidentally trapped myself in a Corvette at the car dealership.

I was waiting around for non-Corvette-related reasons and decided to sit in the cool new supercar that they had unlocked on the display floor, got in, shut the door, enjoyed myself for a few minutes, went to get out and couldn't find a fucking door handle.

Cue about a minute and a half of me frantically trying to figure out how to open the door and weighing if it was worth the embarrassment of googling the dealership number and calling to ask them to come let me out, all while experiencing claustrophobia worse than in any cave I've ever been in.

Eventually I googled "how to open corvette door" because that seemed like the more discreet option, and, following instructions, discovered a tiny-ass button that, when pressed, opens the door. It was way too tiny and too easy to press for it to have a mechanical effect on the door, meaning it was probably electronic in nature.

A few days ago I got into my own car, shut the door, and found out the car wouldn't start because the battery was dead.

The trunk didn't have a keyhole and required a button to be pressed, which did not work because, again, the battery was dead; I had to fold down the rear seat to access the trunk and worm in and reach through to pull the emergency trunk release (again, less claustrophobic than Suddenly Trapped In Corvette).

Apparently it is now the fashion for any electrical problem in one's car to come with the Free Second Problem of being trapped in the car (or out of it, as I've seen cars with outside handles being clearly electronically assisted).

I do not fucking approve.

I just found the earliest email I ever sent from my email address, and it’s the funniest goddamn thing I can possibly imagine a fourth grader sending her teacher:

(Context - my fourth grade teacher was on maternity leave, and the state of the classroom fish tank was dire under the substitute teacher’s tyrannical rule. The class convened at recess, and decided to inform our (24yo, new mother) former teacher of the situation. I was selected as the duly appointed representative for this solemn communication.)

Further context: I am now a practicing attorney.

So Marvel will lampshade the whole "the world is filled with superhuman inventors whose tech should have completely transformed society" thing. Sometimes they'll gesture to non-scalable resources, sometimes they'll make a somewhat paternalistic attitude towards society an acknowledged aspect of a genius' character. Hell, sometimes they'll bite the bullet and give the NYPD sci-fi stun guns. But outside what-ifs and various one-off storylines, the majority of non-cape society is planted firmly in the technological possibilities of the contemporary.

What I love about Iron Man: Fatal Frontier is how it positions the genius inventors as being as upset about that as anyone else.

That's just a great direction to approach that detail of Marvel's worldbuilding from. Not explaining away why the great technological revolution hasn't happened, but being quietly disappointed that they haven't created a great technological revolution. It plays well with Ewing's tendencies to play with the whole "illusion of change" thing as something characters notice and react to.

It's worth noting how Ewing approached this idea from a different direction 8 years later in the wake of the first Hellfire Gala. For context: at this point in the continuity, mutants had created their own island paradise nation and pressured the international community to accept them as a sovereign state through the sale of cheap miracle pharmaceuticals. While the mutant nation of Krakoa is a sci-fi society of wondrous technology, its inclusion within Marvel's worldbuilding once again fails to cause a more general technological revolution—miracles like resurrection eventually see limited non-human use, but even the societal effect of panaceas being widely available for the average citizen isn't very explored. Iron Man and Mister Fantastic's level of innovation is available for a whole society, but once again not for the world.

However, a single society having an incredible technologic power advantage over everyone else is still a much more familiar set of circumstances, as is a society using such an advantage to claim territories and victories for itself. Hence, the first Hellfire Gala, where all the most powerful people on earth are invited for a celebration of Krakoan sovereignty and are surprised with an invitation to watch Mars be terraformed and colonized in a matter of minutes. It's one of my favorite moments within the whole Krakoa storyline, but my actual favorite moment comes from Ewing's follow-up in SWORD #6, when the attendees are reflecting on what they just saw.

I love this. The tie back to Tony's melancholy over Earth not reaching past the moon, referring back to a piece of characterization from over a decade ago. It's the type of consistency that shows how strong Ewing's conception of who these are as characters really is.

Speaking of which, this is one of the only moments where Steve Rodgers really worked for me as a character. Not as a coherent idea of an ideal America—"Oh, now the representation of USA is gonna lecture us about working with the larger international community" and all that. It's funny both in context of the history of the space-race and the USA's current fears of loosing their place on the cutting edge of technology. But it's excellent at selling Rogers as someone filled with a kind of naive wonder, someone who takes to heart Armstrong's "for all mankind" speech while ignoring the accompanying act of flag-planting. Further, it has Rogers acting within the "mortal among titans" role he's often given within the Avengers, and using it to give a bit of the perspective to how the average Marvel citizen feels—not just about Krakoan advances, but in general about living in a world where so much of the setting's progress just passes them by, inaccessible.

something I’ve seen in various fandoms now is young artists will draw flip phones with cracked screens. But in my experience, I have never met someone whose flip phone had a screen crack. Those screens were more like something on a calculator or a nintendo ds than like a smartphone. I was a klutz, and my first phone broke because the front half and back half came apart. Like you’d mayyyyybe see it on some of the later flip phones that only had large screens on the front because smartphones had already made them popular, but it was still way more rare.

If you wanna give a character a flip phone and show they’re clumsy, they’re more likely to have the paint scratched like hell or parts of the plastic chipped off. No more phone charms because the plastic loop broke. If the screen is broken, it would sooner not turn on anymore before the screen would have a crack in it.

why the fuck have so many people in the notes said their phones got run over by a car. why was this such a common experience

its so sad when u have a headache from looking at a screen and wearing headphones all day. bc its like ewwww i feel bad i wanna crawl into a bed and put on headphones and look at a screen. but actually what will cure you is going outside and staring at the mountains or something. terrible. awful

They should make a type of headache that only gets resolved by posting kinda-bitchy comments on reddit

file extension which answers the question asked by the file name

@theinfiknight incredible work, june. i'm not letting you keep this in the notes

What_do_furries_do.gif

caveman_sounds.ogg

my most controversial ship? heh...the Thomas W Lawson

motherfucker unlimited

you like that? I got more, how bout the SS Bessemer

This experimental piece o' shit, courtesy of Sir Henry Bessemer, had a stabilized cabin meant to combat seasickness. Unfortunately, due to the kinetic consequences of building a ship like that, it also combatted seaworthiness, and the instant this thing touched water it enthusiastically slammed itself into the pier with all the grace of a twelfth round boxer.

Not to be deterred, Bessemer repaired the ship, hired a veteran sea captain, slapped the stern and sent her out for a second go. The ship then proceeded to crash into the Same Fucking Pier even harder, demolishing it.

The SS Bessemer, her bloodlust satiated, retired from the cruise ship life and settled down in Swanley, where she became a billiard room, and then a lecture hall, and then rubble, due to an encounter with bombs.

This one's for the SS Bessemer. Rest in peace you wild bitch.

starting a counterpart tumblr blog to “shittycarmods” called shittypcbuilds and the first post will be this

@lycaanroc

Still waiting for a shitty build to be posted

Not to condone this tomfoolery but all of these rigs probably get incredible ventilation

Even the muskrat?

FYI iPhone users!

Oh... oh that's disgusting.

For emphasis - YOU HAVE TO TURN THIS OFF FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL APP

I am glad this is getting noticed, and also as someone who has been anti-siri for years … this has always been the case. You will have to do this every time you have an iOS update. Sometimes it toggles and sometimes it doesn’t. Even for “small” updates. You need to look every time.

I was curious, so I checked...

Artists, please note this is also happening to your iPad. TURN THAT SHIT OFF.