alyth

I have a relative staying over right now and he has to have an opinion on.. everything. Examples:

"That's a nice watch.. How much did you pay for it? That much? That's too much money".

"That meal looks good.. You should add some cheese to it"

"What size is your bottle? Don't you think it's a bit large? it would be better if it was smaller"

"That would be better if they didn't add sugar to it. They put too much sugar in it." Me: "There's no added sugar". "That would be better if they didn't add sugar to it."

LIKE BRO????

I've been in a stable relationship for a while now so naturally the idea of being married to that person comes up. But I just can't think of any argument in favour of it.

1. The government is discussing equalising tax groups, so unmarried individuals are no longer disadvantaged compared to married couples.

2. I engage in a contract with high risk. If I don't get my legalese right, I risk forfeiting a sizeable portion of my belongings when the contract comes to an end. High risk should entail high reward but in fact I don't see any reward.

3. Getting married changes nothing about the relationship. Until recently, the government didn't even recognise same sex marriages. So if a straight couple gets married, should that make their relationship more valid because the government decides to put a stamp of approval on theirs and not on a gay couple? I hope not.

I've tried putting myself in other roles to imagine why I would want to get married. This is what I came up with:

1. I like labelling things and I like the sound of the label "married"
2. I want a big party called "marriage ceremony" that other people also understand as "marriage ceremony" (as opposed to just any party)
3. I like the way married couples are portrayed in films and books (Ignoring the fact that in real life, a lot of marriages are unhappy, dysfunctional and draining until they end up in divorce).

I've been reading "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami. I ploughed through the first 3/4 of the book but now I'm on page 478 out of 615 it's very much gone downhill for me.

Is the ending worth it? I'm reading the French translation, sorry if the characters have different names.

The template of this meme is that of the man who cheerfully points his hand at a butterfly, asking "Is this a pigeon"?. In this meme, the man has been covered with icons of the applications IntelliJ, VSCode, Chromium and Signal. The butterfly which he points to is overlaid with the caption ".config". He asks "Is this a trash can?" At the bottom of the image, we see the command du -sh executed on the directories .config/chromium/ and .config/Code, yielding file sizes of 1016M and 83M respectively.

A hiker in the Austrian Alps died when a herd of cows charged her, while her two daughters survived with injuries [...]. The woman was on a hike with her two daughters [...] and two small dogs yesterday [...] in the Salzburg region when the cow herd charged [...]. “It is still not clear what happened,” a police spokesman [said].

In an interview with recently deceased author Paul Auster, he says the following:

When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: “In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.”

This encouraged me to browse my bookshelf and search for those scintillating first sentences. As it turns out, many of the books that I loved the most really do pack a punch before the end of their first paragraph. Here's my personal selection. Unlike Auster's example, the ones I am sharing do not immediately drop you in the middle of the action, as the number of adventure books on my bookshelf is marginal. However, I do feel they capture a lot about the protagonist and set the tone for the novel.

I would love for you to share yours.

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.

Moon Palace by Paul Auster:

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future.

The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs

When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.

... and I can't even continue the chat from my phone.

When I try to submit a post or comment containing the string [slash]etc[slash] passwd, the submit button goes into a loading state and spins indefinitely. The request is blocked by Cloudflare with status code 403. I can't even search for the forbidden string. You have to check dev tools to find out what went wrong, this error is not handled in the UI at all.

So, if you've ever tried to reply to a tech issue and the UI just won't let you, maybe this is why.