My small company (~120 employees) got swallowed by a giant whale (rhymes with “Crisco”) of a company like this. Except that everybody in the original small company got laid off six months later, and we had no assets whatsoever except for the “talent”. Crisco even got stuck with the lease for our recently-renovated office and had to buy it out. Our C-suite got large stock awards when we were acquired but they all got dismissed, too. I have no fucking idea why it happened.

B’Thar has been hitting the b’ottle pretty hard. Demons should have abs.

a and o are on opposite end of the keyboard

Maybe the author has a Dvorak keyboard layout (a and o are next to each other there).

Blue Velvet was good, lots of fun weird shit but also a plot that moved along. It made me rent Eraserhead which in turn almost made me give up movies entirely.

From Here to Eternity is like that. The book is truly a great piece of literature, but the movie (made in the 1950s) excises pretty much everything worthwhile in the book. Just as one example, the book has a character who can’t get any contact with women in pre-war Hawaii so he starts getting blowjobs from gay men in parks. Eventually he builds up so much guilt from this that he shoots himself in the head in the barracks. I can’t remember whether the character was even in the movie but obviously no hint of those activities show up. There’s also the main character taking up with a prostitute who is magically not a prostitute at all in the movie.

The book has so much stuff like this in it that I can’t understand why they even tried to make a movie out of it in 1953.

Try Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. It’s great, it’s a classic, but you’re going die out of boredom if The Godfather is already too much for you.

And if you survive that you can move right on to Eraserhead.

Remember that this was the 80s, where you needed a publisher for comics.

IIRC Cerebus and Elf Quest were self-published. Of course, that may be why they’re utterly unknown today.

Is his castle anywhere near Enya’s castle?

We don’t have that in software engineering. And outside of critical software we don’t need it. When the audio fucks up in Teams and you have to leave and re-enter the meeting, people don’t die.

I had a co-worker who was writing remote control software for a baseball-throwing machine. Not exactly “critical software” but he ended up firing a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid’s head.

Lol I would give a kidney to have a high-walled cubicle like that again.

it’s not sustainable for centuries

It’s sustainable until the Saudis learn about your cheap water and buy the whole system for pennies on the dollar so they can grow alfalfa for their racehorses. This is what’s happening to my (currently cheap) water authority.

Yeah, my mom does all that, too. Does your MIL wash and reuse zip-lock bags as well?

Anybody else have a mother who saves all the wrapping paper? And gets mad at you if you unwrap your present in such a way as to make the wrapping paper un-savable?

If you’re the same age as me you might have watched the Roots miniseries. I recommend not rewatching that one. It had a huge impact on me as a kid as far as awakening me to some of the horrors of my country’s past. I tried rewatching it and couldn’t make it past OJ Simpson wearing some sort of pseudo-African clown costume.

I’m immune to all the new Star Wars stuff

I was 10 when the original Star Wars came out. I remember being emotionally crushed when I learned that Lucas intended to make nine movies altogether and realizing how long it would take for all of them to come out. Fortunately I stopped giving a fuck entirely after Empire Strikes Back. I only watched Return of the Jedi on rented VHS and the cackling muppet made me shut it off. I’m pretty sure I returned it without rewinding.

My childhood shows were The Incredible Hulk, Emergency, Hill Street Blues, Dallas, M*A*S*H, Cheers, The Dukes of Hazzard etc. I guess M*A*S*H was sort of OK but it’s not especially hilarious in retrospect (the movie still holds up, at least). The rest are all not that great.

“When you think about having the taskbar on the right or the left, all of a sudden the reflow and the work that all of the apps have to do to be able to have a wonderful experience in those environments is just huge.”

This is such utter fucking nonsense. They already have to deal with the concept of a “client area” that encompasses variable-sized screens and (worse) the multiple-monitor situation. Movable task bar is trivial.

I wish to god Visual Basic was still around so Copilot et. al. could get infected with ON ERROR RESUME NEXT statements. Or its under-appreciated but vastly more horrific cousin ON ERROR RESUME.

My favorite thing about the “all comments are bad” crowd is that their first example is almost always something like this:

// Add 1 to x
x = x + 1

Like, nobody that thinks comments are good and important would ever add a useless comment like that. The point of commenting is to add documentation (usually the only form of documentation that a future developer is ever going to read) only to code that would otherwise be inscrutable.

That long-ass horizontal scroll bar reminds me of how I used to put unfindable easter eggs into my Visual Basic apps. I would have amusing little messages pop up from time to time in message boxes. To prevent anyone from just searching for the exact text in the message box, I would reduce it to a series of concatenated Chr() statements and then I would put like 200 characters of whitespace in front of the message box call. The only way anybody would spot it would be if they noticed the horizontal scroll bar this produced and nobody ever did.

At least that’s my theory. It’s also possible that nobody ever used the software that I produced.