palordrolap

This was a long time ago. I think the replacement card I got was the first I got that had a chip in it.

Or I’m misremembering and it was the chip on the card that was acting strangely. Either way, the card was basically worn out.

Not strictly true.

If you have a card long enough (several years between issue and expiry, say) and you use it often enough, the magnetic strip can start to fade and transactions can fail. More and more often. Edit: It might have been a chip problem rather than a magnetic strip problem. I can’t remember now, but it makes no real difference to the story.

And sometimes there might be weeks with no trouble and then you’ll get that one card reader that’s particularly finicky and there’s a cold sweat moment as you realise you don’t have enough cash. “Try it again. It’s done this before.” Please work. Pleeease.

This usually happened to me in the supermarket, so that scene from InnerSpace was playing on loop in my head.

After the third or fourth time, I called the bank and they sent me a new one ASAP.

Surprisingly wholesome for Cyanide & Happiness, tbh.

Where are their communications? Who visits a government website without needing to?

To me it makes sense that they should cover as much ground as possible and have accounts on all major platforms as well as making announcements on TV and radio.

And in order to do so they should have their own accounts on there in order that their message gets across directly without having to go through a third party that has an account on there.

Now, when that site starts espousing “free speech” of the sort that only they like, then it might be a good idea to not use that particular platform any more, because that brings in the third party interference that wasn’t there in the first place, even if the site was technically third party.

But hey whatever, now let’s make, say, the BBC the mouthpiece of the government - it’s not like the Tories didn’t try really hard to do that when they were in power - and have everyone report on that. Far better.

6 bit, 6 bit, 7 bit? Huh. Only 5, 6, and 6, is needed for 24-hr binary-coded-sexagesimal… ohh. It’s binary-coded-decimal-coded-sexagesimal.

15:43:25 in the last panel. Or about a quarter to four in the afternoon.

I suppose the 5,6,6 BCS option would need a lot more mental effort.

Government creates announcement feed. No-one knows about it because they can only advertise it on their own announcement feed.

What now?

Terry Davis tried to do for the PC with TempleOS what the C64’s BASIC and KERNAL did for its hardware.

Terry was all the more a mad lad because he didn’t get to create the hardware spec he was working with.

Could you imagine someone doing the same as Commodore did but starting with 64-bit era hardware?

Taking it another direction, there are free and paid “easy programming” platforms that provide a sandbox not unlike a modern version of what it was like to program a C64.

At a pinch, DOSBox and a copy of QBASIC might suffice.

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

It may not be a public place per se, but it is a place where a very large cohort of the general public go.

Perhaps my analogy should have been “This is bit like saying that governments shouldn’t make announcements on television and radio stations not under government control.”

The same logic applies there. Of course they should. A large cohort of the general public watch television and listen to the radio (less so these days in the age of the Internet, but people do still watch and listen there.).

This is a bit like saying that governments shouldn’t post notices in public places.

Edward, the woman’s significant other, is a backyard scientist.

He is somehow able, with his rudimentary equipment, to modify reality itself, demonstrated by the bizarre alterations of the woman and her surroundings in the intermediate panels as she attempts to get to the shed in the back yard.

She then goes into his shed and tells him off.

Part of the joke is that reality goes through bizarre and unexpected changes. The other part of the joke is that a man with the power of a god is being told off by his relatively powerless wife.

Ecce Macdonaldus senex, qui fundum habet;
E - I - E - I - O;
Et in hoc fundo, nonullas porci domesticas habet;
E - I - E - I - O;
Cum grunt grunt hic;
Et grunt grunt ibi;
Hic una grunt; Ibi una grunt;
Ubique una grunt grunt;
Ecce Macdonaldus senex, qui fundum habet;
E - I - E - I - O

A test tube baby delivered by C-section had very little to do with the nethers of either of its parents.

Surely you’re not saying they shouldn’t have had a Twitter presence?

Or is this more of a “they should have left when Elon took over” kind of thing? In which case, they probably thought that the majority of people who follow(ed) them on there wouldn’t have left immediately - not least because there weren’t any good alternatives* at the time - so it would have made sense to maintain a presence, which I think is what’s actually going on.

* Yes, Mastodon existed, but you’ve got to think about the average person here. There’s a reason the first people on there were academics and tech folks.

This reminds me of a (specific) storyline in a once-popular strip by a now-disgraced author.

Which is a good thing.

Despite this very comment proving the similarity, it’s good to know there are at least oblique ways to replace it without being clumsy about it.

She has also styled the dog’s coat to match her hair.

I think the idea is that in panels two and three Nancy seems to be plotting something far sinister.

What spoils the joke a bit is that it’s an atrocious haircut for a dog, so expectations aren’t perhaps as subverted as they could be.

If that’s how it’s supposed to work, there’d be no point in the CC field at all, would there?

CC is not for ignoring. It’s for your information even if you’re not an intended participant in the conversation. i.e. you’re supposed to at least read it.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

I had a colleague who deliberately ignored anything that didn’t have his name in the To: field.

Sometimes it bit him on the rear, metaphorically speaking, but most of the time it worked. To everyone else’s annoyance.

Why did you post the same comic twice?

(I shouldn’t need a /s here but you get this parenthetical to, er, labour the point.)