palordrolap

I burned out and can now barely look after myself let alone my property. Thus work for me is existing. Actual paid employment would literally destroy me. The medication doesn’t help much.

But if you want interesting shift patterns, I was once on a rotating days and nights schedule that was a lot tighter at one end than four-on, four off. Day shifts were eight hours but staff were staggered so all hours from 8am to 6pm were covered. Nights were always 8pm to 8am. (On-call and a different team covered 6pm to 8pm.)

The worst part of it was that you could finish a day shift at 6pm and need to be in work for a night shift at 8pm the following day. 26 hours to adjust. That was all.

The best part was if your night shifts ended and the recovery time led into a weekend where there was no day shift. That made for nearly a week off, which happened about three times a year.

But absolutely none of that made up for the way it messed with my sleep schedule. I thought being a night owl would make it easy. I was wrong and it severely weakened me.

And it took several years of a different but increasingly stressful (days-only) job before I broke completely.

My previous landline phone had a digital answerphone on it, and yes, there was a while where I took inspiration from the funny answerphone message lists that made it onto the early WWW from prior junk faxes and chain e-mails.

My current one - because I still get the occasional call on the landline number - might have a similar “record your own” feature, but I’ve never bothered. I use the prerecorded message that came with the base station phone.

As for my mobile… I don’t actually remember what the message is that I have on there, but it won’t be anything interesting. Also it costs money to check / make changes to it on my plan, so it won’t be getting my attention any time soon.

This.

Now, that’s not to say I haven’t slacked off in other ways, but to be so obvious as to sleep? No.

And I say this as someone who has worked nights and been on call and had severe sleep deprivation as a result, but I still never slept at work.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

I didn’t mention necessary evils in my main comment. With necessary evils, the pleasure is more of a secondary effect to relief of some kind. The fact we even have the phrase in our language for the concept and that it contains the word “evil” would seem to serve my point.

Also, consider that the harm is minimised by the fact that those bacteria cannot suffer in any meaningful way.

For where the harm is greater, tens of thousands of pages of law have been written about where the line between pleasure and relief falls. How evil an act is deemed to be is ultimately indicated by the severity of the enforced consequences (prison sentence, etc.). Or at least that’s the idea.

Maybe it was a man-on-man killing by someone in danger with no other apparent reasonable options. Maybe they just felt like it and are only saying that. Maybe they were clumsy or incompetent. Was that with malice? etc. etc.

And then there’s those enforced consequences. They’re also a necessary evil.

But these are all evils.

Eating flesh to survive is a necessary evil for those that are smart enough to understand they’re killing another animal, and it’s not evil for those that aren’t. It’s probably not an either-or, either. There might well be another sliding scale there.

It’s what they evolved to eat and they have no means of creating an alternative. Carnivory almost certainly evolved in parallel with brains increasing in size, which is a curious consequence. You eat flesh, so your brain gets big enough to try to tell you to stop eating flesh.

There have been instances of predator animals temporarily adopting the offspring of the adult prey animal they ate. I think it would be wrong to call that a guilty conscience in a non-sapient creature, but whatever the ‘merely’ sentient equivalent is, I bet in some cases, it’s that. In others it might well just be a snack for later, but it’s curious how they treat that child with care and respect before they do.

FWIW, I’m no saint here. I eat meat even though I could probably get away with not doing that.

Evil is knowingly causing harm in order to derive pleasure (or profit, but what is profit if not deferred pleasure?). How evil it is depends on how serious and lasting the harm.

Evil came into being when the first animal that was smart enough to know what it was doing did something harmful that it didn’t need to in order to derive that pleasure.

Humans happened long after that. (Or around the same time if you prefer your religion’s creation story.)

I’ve always been fascinated by the act of pushing a button to make something happen. Like since before I remember. Lift / Elevator buttons especially at first*. Light switches, even.

Then combine that with relatively high-functioning ASD or AuDHD or whatever’s actually going on between my ears, creating an affinity for things are logical and lack messy, confusing emotions.

*There’s one lift that’s been in service longer than I’ve been alive, was frequently used by my mother when I was in a pushchair / stroller to bypass the nearby staircase. I still yearn to go back to it, press the buttons for myself, see the way they light up and ride the lift. The last time I was nearby it was busy and in use by mothers using pushchairs / strollers, believe it or not. The nerve!

You’ve already experienced non-existence. 13 billion years of it before you were even conceived. Or a few thousand if you’re religious and don’t agree with the science, I guess, but either way, you didn’t suffer any meaningful harm from it.

FOMO is a good one, but the dead don’t care. They’re not even capable of caring. And some day we’ll be among their number.

Whenever it comes up, I’m generally vague about my age, though I’ve given plenty of hints and maybe even the exact number more than once.

It’s about equal parts anti-doxx and deep denial that I’m not still half my age.

Some people will be able to do this. Some people will not. Some will find it easy. Some will not.

What you have there is a bisexual homophobe who wants everything his way, and that’s just about sociopathic enough to be capable of detaching from any feelings he might catch.

It’s curious that he took you home to his family though. This seems to me like he might have been exploring how he actually felt about the situation and has discovered for himself just how detached his homophobia can allow him to be.

It might be worth you trying to get reassigned with respect to your room and move away from him, preferably quickly and quietly without his knowledge, because otherwise you’ll be under his control for the foreseeable future.

He might pursue you, but that can be read two ways. If it’s the sort of pursuit that puts you in danger, seek outside help. If it’s apparently romantic pursuit, then its up to you what happens next, but don’t move back in with him, and remember that he’ll drop you cold the moment the right girl comes along.

Good luck.

England - If we must have one, then Land of Hope and Glory is a good contender, but there are so many problems with the lyrics as they are that a complete rewrite of those would be necessary for me to be happy with it.

For Britain as a whole, I don’t know. The current dirge needs scrapping for sure. (And maybe the subject of the song as well, but that’s a different story).

Scotland and Wales already have their own (Flower of Scotland and Land of My Fathers respectively), and Northern Ireland actually use Danny Boy in some contexts.

It would be interesting to somehow blend all four into a secular hymn but that’s so far above my skill level it’s not even funny.

Well, I sure don’t support people not punching you in the face, but hey, at least I’m not the one throwing the punch.

Which Eich is doing by donating money to anti-LGBT causes.

Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.

Are you sure that’s not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost’s shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.

Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn’t one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)

Lucky you had a motherboard with a CMOS battery. Without that*, you needed to enter the time and date every time the computer booted / rebooted.

* Or a capacitor instead.

Bold of you to assume I go to them.

… or get invited.

I don’t make resolutions because when I did, I never managed to keep them.

That said, I do have an unwritten list of things I’d like to do in the new year. Like may be lose a little weight. And I really need to go for my eyes testing.

And then there’s the whole philosophy of “why next year? why not now?” and “tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life”.

For the eye test, I’ve no good excuse, but I don’t want to walk to the place and find they’re closed for the holidays. For the weight, I’d have to throw out a lot of food first. Not the greatest excuse there either, but waste not, want not.

(Can you see why I never managed to keep them previously? Yeeeah.)

Depends what you mean by “ability” and “travel”.

If you’re asking whether I’m able to move about within my house, then sure. Beyond that, things get murky.

Does agoraphobia count as a disability? What if, for sufficiently short periods, it’s bearable, but ultimately it crushes?

I’ve walked the 15 minutes down to the dentist’s office and back (I’m lucky to live so close) a handful of times in the last couple of years (not so lucky with my teeth I guess), for example.

Or is this more about “Can [I] afford to use those modes of transport which take [me] to far-off places on a regular basis?”

Now we’ve got to define “far-off”. In theory, I could probably afford to take the bus anywhere within the county on a regular basis. And if I did, there’s a travel pass I could buy that would reduce the cost somewhat.

Taxis? Maybe once or twice a week if they remain relatively local.

Airline flights to foreign countries (or distant ends of the same one), which is probably what this is all about? I’d have to dip into savings, and those should probably be spent on more important things. So, no.

LMDE’s system is the same as regular Mint. I’ve been on LMDE for a few years but was on regular before that.