Heh, according to the guy who sold me the house, he had to put the grey vinyl flooring in because of water damage from a portable AC unit.

grey vinyl flooring

I hate that shit even more than I hated the fake wood paneling and shag carpet of the '70s. I bought a house last year that had the grey vinyl flooring in the living room and I’ve tried my hardest to fuck it up during the renovation so I have to replace it, but unfortunately it holds up to extreme abuse pretty well.

If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it
If ya liked it then ya shoulda put ring mail on it

Edit: before any nerds weigh in, I know that’s not ring mail.

while Superman himself is invulnerable, the rest of the world isn’t

Larry Niven wrote a great essay many years ago about the physical realities of being Superman. My favorite bit was about how him having sex with Lois Lane would have resulted in her head being blown off.

Star Wars where the X-Wings behave more like airplanes than spacecraft

My favorite part of Empire Strikes Back was when Luke takes his (presumably) short-range interceptor X-Wing and flies it to another star system to hang with Yoda. I dunno, maybe canon explained this one somewhere (was Yoda’s planet in the same star system as Hoth or something? are X-Wings capable of FTL travel for no reason?).

Thoo Faith

I drive a 2001 which is in that dead zone after cassettes but before aux plugs. I still had to be burning CDs a few years ago but eventually stumbled across an adapter that tricks the car stereo into thinking my phone is a 6-CD changer in the trunk.

My best friend in high school in the '80s had something on his home stereo I’ve never seen before or since: an 8-track tape recorder. We would make 8-track mix tapes and take them to parties … which we promptly got kicked out of because they were tapes of stuff like Yes, King Crimson, Laurie Anderson, Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and didn’t nobody want to listen to that kind of shit back then.

I have a giant oak tree next to my house, perfectly positioned so that my house is in direct sunlight in the morning but completely shaded by the tree from noon onwards, so even when it’s 100°F outside my house doesn’t get above the low 80s. I love that tree - except for right now when I have to rake the fucking yard.

Elon Musk’s vertical is horizontal.

I heard the older folks say that I would wake up and be old one day and it would feel like barely any time has passed.

I’m almost 60 and I feel more like I should be 100 or so. I’ve had many different careers and technology has changed so much that I feel I’ve lived through multiple lifetimes. I think people who do basically the same thing every day (and night) over and over again, with the same people, tend to perceive life as flying by because there’s no real difference between one day and the next.

It’s a slur for Asians, more specifically Vietnamese. I can actually trigger my coworker to say it, by merely mentioning that I like Chinese food.

I will never implement a sort IRL

My answer to “what’s the best sorting algorithm” is “the SORT BY clause in SQL”.

I retired as a programmer five years ago and now I drive a school bus. The difference in acceptable workplace behavior is pretty stark. In my software companies, nobody ever came anywhere close to saying anything even vaguely racist; meanwhile in the bus garage people routinely use the n-word and the g-word. And it’s not like this is Mississippi or anything - this is a suburb of Philadelphia where the entire transportation department would probably be sacked if parents were ever to become aware of how their bus drivers talk.

Congress is already a sea of color: green.

I have an app on my phone that plays rain noises for sleeping. It occasionally shows ads, like one that popped up yesterday that featured three pruney old women talking about why they were voting for Trump. Not very remarkable except that above the ad was a fixed label that read “JEWS ARE DANGEROUS” and the close button was barely visible in the middle of this. Never been so afraid of missing that button.

I’m a school bus driver and I had to ban the singing of Christmas songs on my bus before Thanksgiving. Naturally the little bastards ignore this, just like they ignore my injunction against singing Taylor Swift songs. Thank god T-Swiffer has never done a Christmas album.

Argo fuck yourself (speaking of bad movies).

If you want to see a good Titanic movie, check out A Night to Remember, made in the UK in 1958. Sure, it won’t have the dazzling special effects. It also doesn’t have a stupid as fuck plot.

Did it have a dude bouncing off a propeller while emitting the Wilhelm Scream? I didn’t think so.

For bonus points, the previous tenant in my house was apparently also running a 3D printer business of some sort, so there’s a fine black powder in all sorts of unimaginably impossible-to-reach places. And he did his own electrical work, making it a miracle that the house never caught fire.