Jackie's Fridge

I am with you on every one of these points. The image selection process is terrible now, where before it was quick & simple. And in the past couple of updates, sending larger images and gifs was sporadic until now I always get an error. I was happy when they added message reactions, then puzzled when they just stopped at six, half of which are rarely useful.

I’ve been a paid user for years, but now I’m causally shopping for something else. If they’re giving up on their app, so am I.

She vaguely thinks there may be something out there but it has zero bearing on her life. I think that makes her functionally an agnostic atheist.

A Mary Sue can fail, but those failures don’t usually have a massive impact and are easily reversed without the feeling that the MS had to struggle to earn the reversal.

The more flaws a character has, the more they have to work to balance them out. Readers are more likely on the side of a character that has to work and make sacrifices to make it through the difficulties the plot throws at them.

Random Example: Diana Rowland’s “My Life as a White Trash Zombie”. Protagonist Angel has a criminal record, drug addiction, abusive home life, and generally makes very bad decisions. Because of her life course, she has very few resources (she can’t go to the cops, nobody she knows has money or connections, etc) but she can think quickly and has a sort of desperate resourcefulness. Because everything is working against her, she has to fight for any positive forward movement, and one misstep can be a serious threat - and those happen frequently, undoing any success and forcing her to burn her resources to try a new path. IIRC in one of the books the B-story is her trying just to earn her GED as the main plot around her is utter pandemonium. Just that struggle to graduate high school is a herculean task given the deck stacked against her. Readers aren’t thinking “how will she win”, they’re thinking “well what’s going to go wrong this time?”

TL;DR: If every time your protagonist has a setback the readers shout “can’t she ever catch a break?” instead of “ah she’ll just breeze through this” you should be doing okay.

I have random stupid hangups and for who knows why profanity is one of them. I’m fine with it. I barely notice when others use it. But I just can’t. It doesn’t sound right in my context or in my voice.

Of course I hate my own voice with a fiery passion, but that’s another hangup.

It’s been around for a while. Over a decade ago Target ran a cheeky back to school advert featuring a slow pan across school cubbies with lunch pails all labelled with variant spellings of “Braiden”. I thought it was hilarious.

It’s a short series (six episodes so far) but with two more in production: The Devil’s Hour.

Go in blind, don’t spoil it for yourself.

If you like a series that gives you all the clues but none of them fall together until the last episode, this one is dark, brain-bendy supernatural mystery with an excellent cast.

Listening to other people, especially to women, is a skill. Don’t spend silent time in a conversation waiting for your chance to speak or be smart or witty, stay quiet and really process what you’re hearing. Imagine yourself in their situation. Accept that what they say is exactly how they feel.

The less time you spend talking, the more your conversational partner will tell you, and the more you will start to understand them, their lives, their goals, and their anxieties.

Knowing and understanding other peoples’ experiences will help you not only make better decisions in your own life, but understand why other people act and think the way they do. You’ll be less likely to snap-judge or make assumptions about others. And knowing more about your loved ones, co-workers, and neighbours will allow you to help them effectively if they need it.

And travel abroad as much as possible - listen to people from other countries and cultures. The human experience is wildly varied and endlessly fascinating.

It’s great being the one nobody suspects! A few people thought I might have done the baby thing but I was also “finding” babies in my work area and was decent enough faking confusion and offering up more plausible co-workers as suspects. I like your idea of getting creative with the hours sign!

I forgot - I also did a squished spider prank. I drew a “crushed” spider in a random spot on a sheet of copy paper - two sloppy body segments and broken stick legs in the general squished spider arrangement. I used just a black felt-tipped pen and even added a tiny drop of water to the body to bleed the ink and make it look juicy. Once it dried, I slipped the paper face-down in the paper feed tray (so the print would be on the spider side) under two clean sheets of paper.

When my supervisor printed a spreadsheet, there it was on page 3. Sadly, she didn’t have a huge reaction to that one, but I was still proud of myself.

You can get a bag of hundreds of tiny plastic babies on Amazon. I got a couple hundred of them and hid them everywhere in our office over the weekend when nobody was there (including in my own office).

It’s been a couple years, people are still finding them, and nobody knows where they came from. A few people blamed one of the HR ladies and a co-worker who’s addicted to buying tchotchkes on Temu. Hopefully none of my co-workers are on Lemmy, because I hope to refresh the baby population soon.

At my previous job I tied strings to a couple packages’ worth of Dove individual chocolates and hung them from the ceiling of a co-worker’s office when she was on holiday. She is short and loves chocolate, so they were tantalisingly out of reach. She liked how they looked and kept them there for a while, but eventually started pulling them down as she had chocolate cravings.

If you like twitchy reflex killers, two oldies-but-goodies from Terry Cavanaugh: Super Hexagon and VVVVVV.

Fun chiptune soundtracks, minimal graphics, and so much “I died already? Okay just ONE MORE try and then I really need to get some work done. ARGH - okay maybe ONE MORE try…” And when you finally succeed the dopamine is second to none.

The Room series are great games.

That’s fair.

I think we’re talking past each other but agreeing on the fundamentals. I’m approaching it from the angle of all government positions - absolutely if a progressive candidate has a chance to win any office from dog catcher to president, get them in so they can influence policy. But if they have no chance of winning, it’s just damage control.

Didn’t win? Dude’s a congressman. He’s in.

Voting for other candidates only shifts the needle if they win. If they can’t possibly win, nothing is accomplished by voting for them.

I would be interested in the Necronomicon’s chain of custody, since the first Evil Dead movie takes place in 1981!

The FXIII franchise always played fast & loose with how Jason keeps going, but I agree the Deadite angle really works in that regard. My argument for “what took Jason so long” is exactly the murder of his mother by a camp counsellor. He was R-ing I P at the bottom of Crystal Lake but came back for vengeance when she was killed. He even had her head enshrined in (I think?) the second film. Mama’s Boy.

That messes with the Pamela possession theory a little though. Interesting if he was agreeable to her setting up shop. Or maybe by the time one possessing soul is “killed” the other is powerful enough to come back. Like a tag team rampage.

I haven’t read it in a long time but I remember the lore being pretty faithful to all three franchises & cleverly executed. If Jason is a Deadite & possessed by Pamela, that would still be man (Ash) vs nature (Pamela’s vengeful spirit), though it very much leans into Jason being used as a tool, which implies that the puppet master has agency beyond a mindless force of nature.

(Just having fun here and am happy for my hypothetical to be shot down.)

That would also classify Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash as a man against nature clash. Groovy.

It’s a 3-way tie I think. Since the Steam Deck can emulate almost anything, that’s a winner. But for legacy consoles, the 3DS and PSP have probably eaten up most of my game time. Between those two, the 3DS has a massive catalogue of games unique to its dual-screen touch interface, so…I guess the 3DS?

The Moondrops are solid, and considering the price, they’re excellent. Not flat sounding by any means (they’re what Kids These Days call ‘fun’) but good quality and cheap enough that if they break I won’t feel bad.

The new Mini firmware sounds pretty solid. If you like the LSDJ style of tracking give the M8 a try. The next wave of Model 2s should start shipping toward the end of the month, so you might start seeing Model 1s for better prices on the local used market. Barring that, you could try M8 Headless for the price of a Teensy 4.1 board. That was how I started!