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It seems to be pot luck.

The bad luck is very widely shared, sadly.

A bit too soon?

Leaving it till it's no longer topical would be too late.

Culturally I kind of straddle the divide

So does my family, and not just because my wee brother flew helicopters in N.I. and then married an Irish Catholic. He's a small minded bigot who managed to find an Irish Catholic woman who (for complicated family reasons) hates Ireland and the church. He'd say it was too soon, so it isn't.

hearing an actor read Gerry Adams’s statements.

Denying him "the oxygen of publicity". Oh yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOUeauLWEaE

Rewatched Four Lions at the weekend. Still great. I'd forgotten all the Malcolm-Tucker-level swearing: "useless, fuck-my-auntie-from-a-standing-position, pajama-wearing cockerel dicks".

Still an odd idea to make bottles in the shape of sandals. :)

Conspicuous consumption.

I'd never heard of that.

I do wonder if it's mostly or entirely a British myth. The Victorians left us with a lot of ignorant amateur history bunk: knights in armour needing to be winched onto their horses, not being able to get up if they fell over, our ancestors emptying chamber pots out their windows (there were laws against that kind of thing), didn't wash and so on and so on.

What an odd nonsense theory.

Medieval English glassmaking wasn't the most sophisticated; they made flattish bits of glass by spinning molten blobs into disks (with the obvious result of them being thicker at the edges and/or the centre) or blew glass cylinders (blow glass as normal but pull it through a metal hoop while you're doing it) and then flattened the result as best they could, but that isn't as interesting as "Did you know glass flows?"

One that most Brits have heard and many believe. I'm pretty sure it was a primary school teacher who first told me this. I believed it for a few years till I eventually went "Wait, what?"I do ask adult believers how the medieval glaziers knew precisely how much lead to put around the bottom of the stained glass pieces so that they wouldn't have dripped over the edge by the 21st century; I just get puzzled looks.

How would one use these as 'proof'?

As with conspiracy theories, when people have swallowed a piece of historical bunkum, they don't want to acknowledge they've been suckered. Anything will do to defend the stupidity, but since one of the clearest rebuttals of the flowing glass idea is all the ancient glassware that hasn't lost shape, I'd expect somebody still defending the notion to leap on these bottle shapes as a defense. Also, there's now a legion of social media accounts that happily make stupid fake history posts for the clicks.

Although I just shared the picture because those bottles are great.

Since Assad fell, Syria has already been bombed by America, Turkey and Israel, so I think they just don't want to give the Russians an excuse to join in.

The survival of so much ancient glassware is one of the best rebuttals of the silly "glass flows" myth, but some of the items don't always help. I mean, these (from the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne) are obviously sandal-shaped bottles, but I bet some "glass is a liquid" conspiracy theorist out there is using them as "proof".

The sequel really laid into the tech bros of the future, while not saying anything that isn't true of the ones we have now..

wrong window

"Hawk Tuah girl accused of runninng punp-and-dump scheme" sounds like a headline from The Onion but apparently it's real.

One of the worst things about corporate (and increasingly government) love of AI is the way it lets them dodge accountability. When people explicitly design and operate a discriminatory process, they can be held accountable for it, but now they can just say "Oops, somebody messed up with the training data". One topical example:

Another example is where Youtube's very error prone "copyright protection" AI algorithm is defunding Youtube's own content creators and often diverting their income to corporations that have no interest in seeing the mistakes corrected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lLVie8usfg

But if there's one context where you really don't want accountability to vanish, it's when decisions are made about whether or not to open fire. There should be an international convention to proscribe and police this, really. As it is, Horizon Zero Dawn comes ever closer to being a prophecy, not just a video game.

Is that your new theory for why his plane descended to ground level?

I'll be sure not to post it in the "Sort of memes that are exhaustively complete descriptions of the world" thread.

Bane of my life with APAC people.

I've worked for or with large tech companies from India, China and Japan; yes,it does seem to be a more common habit in places where the corporate culture is more polite, hierarchical and deferential. Corporate IM isn't the only thing that can be affected; video conferences with teams from Japanese companies can be frustrating and unproductive if you don't understand the protocols.

Assad reported to be in Moscow.

The Conspiracy Theories thread didn't die, it just became redundant.

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It was offensive slang

It was slang. Most people think it was just a shortened form of "German", which would have made it about as offensive as "Brit" or "Tommy". Even if the alternative theory that it was a joke on German army helmets looking like chamber pots (for which Jerry was once a slang term) were true, it'd reallty have been just a bit puerile (and if it was true, it was true in WW1 and by WWII most people just throught it was just short for German). The combatants in the world wars all had much more offensive terms for each other.

Calling Germans "Jerry" now is dodgy because it's usually "Daily Mail reader still fighting World War Two" xenophobia, and if you think that was the spirit in which @kimmo evoked the image, your objection should be to the whole paragraph, because taking "Jerry" out doesn't change it.

Comment of the week, at least.

Turkey is already making moves, sending its tame Syrian militias to attack the Kurds.

Seriously, though, I fairly solidly hate the whole IM etiquette thing. Not the concept per se, but the petty and irrelevant way it has evolved. "Don't just say Hi and then disappear for hours" - that's real etiquette., not bollocks about punctuation or whether to say U or "you".

Oh, right. Well, your punctuation is terrible.

it's IM etiquette.

At their best, etiquette systems are widely understood conventions that help people interact civilly. At their worst (and I'd argue this is much more common), they're a set of unspoken rules used by asshats to shame and exclude. Instant Messaging is a phenomenon that didn't exist in living memory, so people's engagement with it can be affected by their age, the time (and extent to which) digital comms entered their lives and many other things. People may consciously reject the etiquette you want to insist on, they may be entirely unaware of it, they may struggle to shake off learned behaviour from other forms of communication, they may simply have a different understanding of IM etiquette (which is something that emerged rather than being set down in a rulebook and there's more than one), to name just a few reasons why somone might type "No." instead of "no". If you think that observing what you believe to be IM etiquette makes you a nicer person, well, you'd be an even nicer person if you were aware of (and tolerant of) the varied circumstances of the people on the other end of the digital comms. Otherwise, you're the asshat. There's a convention long observed by people building digital comms technology that goes "Be tolerant of what you receive and careful of what you send", and it works just as well for people using the products.

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Is the new thing a useful set of rules that make the game possible to play in real life, or just the licensed artwork? Gwent decks have been around for years, but I do wonder how people actually manage with playing the game and not having huge arguments because some of the mechanics work fine when manged by a computer but really need extra processes to make them work in real life. The issue of spies and other mechanics that put one player's cards in the other player's hand or discard pile is just one example and that issue doesn't even break the game, it just means people may go home with fewer or more cards than they started with.

Some of the rules aren't even spelled out in the in-game documentation, just enforced by the code. Scope for endless arguments between human players if there isn't a very well-done rulebook to go with it - a reprint of the in-game documentation would be a fail.