:`-( I miss voting in the European elections! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇪🇺💪

I came across effect/affect swapping in university level textbook the other day, couldn’t believe it.

*littoral

What is funny? Jokes are weird to think about, but it generally relies on setting up an expectation and then surprising us in some way. Here it’s that when he uses the phrase ‘a perfect ten’, we assume he’s referring to a highly attractive (adult) woman, then in the next panel we see he means ten as an age, which gives our brains a little stumble, a mismatch between the pattern we were expecting/predicting and what happend. For some reason, this little thing of setting up am expectation then subverting it tickles our brain in a way that makes it a joke. Having the reveal also be a topic like child rape that is so taboo and so unacceptable just increases this effect of how unexpected it is, this is generally what ‘dark humour’ is going for (works for some people, for others it just takes it too far, to where their emotions/associations about the bad thing far outweigh any humour, and put them into a state where they’re not really able to find anything funny). Anyway, you don’t have to like it, but it seems pointless to try to argue that certain subjects are not suitable for jokes. Some people like these jokes, you don’t, and that by itself doesn’t make either of you bad people.

What do you think a homeschool diet is like? I’m imagining high in veggies, low meat, maybe organic… Maybe lots of beans.

That is the more common modern usage. I believe ‘factoid’ was originally used to mean a pseudo fact, or falsehood presented as a fact, but that usage is rarely found today.

No, their population peaked in 94 at about 150M. They definitely have a serious population/demographic crisis. Arguably it’s one of the reasons Putin decided now was the moment to escalate in Ukraine, before it’s too late. Also why they’re taking Ukrainian children.

We’re not all near enough to pick from the same hat, don’t want one person to be outside of the secrecy bubble, and if I could ‘create a webapp’ or ‘do the backend’, I probably wouldn’t ask strangers on there internet for advice, but yeah I’m sure that’s true too.

Since posting this I’ve come across www.secretsantagenerator.com , the most bare-bones and straight to the point version imaginable (holiday cheer definitely not included!), and exactly what I thought I was after. I’ve also remembered that one good feature of the terrible thing we used last year was being able to anonymously ask your giftee questions.

Get it to help you find 3 4-bit binary numbers each with a Hamming distance of 1 from the other two (only 1 bit changes value between them).

I wouldn’t say I’m entrenched, I’m happy to learn new ways of doing things as and when appropriate.

On the other hand, although I would like to migrate to Linux, it’s not one of my top priorities, and it sounds like the drawbacks in compatibility when submitting documents into university systems and working on group projects would outweigh the benefits for now, for me.

But I look forward to working towards never learning what windows 11 is like!

Thanks everyone for all the helpful replies. A lot of people mentioned the office webapps, personally I’ve always detested these. Things like keyboard shortcuts for sub/superscript and support for IEEE referencing were not available as far as I remember, and in general they were more minimal than the desktop version and so slower if you needed to use many features. I think the consensus is I will stick with Windows for my uni work for now, but I can try out onlyoffice, and use a bootable USB to start learning more about Linux for later on down the road. Cheers!

The longer I spend on Lemmy the more tempted I am to give Linux another try (had an old desktop with Ubuntu 10+ years ago, but never really got the hang of it fully, can’t remember the exact details but not everything worked properly).

What holds me back is I’m in the middle of an engineering degree, I need to be able to collaborate easily on documents with word, share folders with OneDrive etc because that’s what everyone uses. Even signing into the uni’s portal-type thing is managed through your MS office account and authenticator app. And also I don’t have a lot of spare time to fiddle around getting things to work and ironing out wrinkles, even if that only needs done one and it’ll be fine in the long run…I need to be able to get on with my work reliably (maybe over Christmas I will have a bit more time to do setting up stuff).

Can anyone convince me ask these worries are unfounded? Can you still easily interact with the MS universe, or are there ways around this?

My poor wee laptop is already full to bursting with MATLAB, stm32 ide, etc so I don’t think I’d be able to partition and dual boot…

Makes your skin feel weird how? When I was a kid I hated washing my hands because they felt ‘squeaky’ clean after, and it was uncomfortable to let my fingers touch each other. I’ve since figured out that my skin was irritated by the foaming agents in liquid soap (and most bar soap these days). Dove bars are better because they have moisturiser in them, but they are not true soap and still have foaming agents and stuff. You might find a true soap without things would feel good to you too. Searching for ‘SLS-free’ is a good place to start if you’re interested.

Even with soap I need to look hard for ones without damn foaming agents like SLS (which are literally irritants to skin). But at least you don’t have all the plastic waste that shower gels involve. Shampoo and conditioner are available as bars too, for people who use those.

Mate?

Illegal settlements? Two-tier justice system?

AFAIK, those ‘fleece’ type materials are directly made from recycled PET (like water bottles).

I think part of the problem is that alcohol itself tastes bitter. So I guess look for quite a low-alcohol beer, maybe a fruity one with not much hops…