palordrolap

Looks like Guerilla Mail still exists. Been around for years at this point. No idea if there’s any controversy about them, but there are reviews out there giving them high marks.

Christianity of all denominations is losing followers at a church-worrying rate. Yes, you’ll always get those who are zealous or make it part of their identity and will never quit, and of course, the quiet - if you’ll pardon the pun - masses who are ever faithful, but the churches don’t fill up quite how they used to.

By getting the kids hooked on an ideology through a relatable, maybe even exciting, child-like character, they’re hoping to (eventually) get people back into churches and get business booming again.

I’m imagining that your first name is something like Vijay and your middle initial is J, and so no wonder you wouldn’t notice.

Funny. I had a boss who thought that use of initials was pretentious. Or maybe I’m putting words in his mouth and it was specifically my use of a middle initial he didn’t like. Harry S Truman’s name would presumably have given him a headache.

Either way, I countered that having a customised number plate on a car was surely just as bad, to which he had no answer.

• Partial tip: There’s often the suggestion of concentrating on breathing, usually with some kind of regular pattern. This is an alternative to try.

You’ll need to have been in bed for a while, mind racing. Take how extreme that racing is and then taking a similarly extreme, almost uncomfortably deep breath to match it. This requires having been in bed for a while.

Hold it for a bit. Don’t count seconds - avoid numbers. As soon as you get the vaguest hint from your body that you need to let it out and breathe normally again, do so. Try to relax as much of yourself as possible as you do that. This is not a “hold your breath till you pass out” thing. You want to go back to breathing normally.

If the breath was too deep and that freaked you out a bit, try going a bit more shallow on the next one.

This has sometimes worked for me, especially if I’ve been asleep already and can’t get back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ve tried a regular breathing exercise after that.

Other times I have got out of bed and done something mindless for a while until I felt tired again. No doomscrolling.

• More traditional tip: No caffeinated beverages for at least 6 hours before you go to bed. Yes, six. Nine’s even better.

William would become king, but then things get weird. I strongly suspect there’d be a rushed act of parliament on behalf of the dead Charles, to whom the parliament was loyal, in order to - ahem - reign in this inexplicably power-mad William and perhaps even try to seek to apply some kind of punishment.

I could see a cross-party vote to not recognise William as king because of the grievous act and instead choose to recognise the next in line who was not in favour of that grievous act. This might mean that parliament chooses to recognise George as king and seek to appoint a regent in his stead until he was of age, for example.

Whatever was to happen I don’t think there’d be a civil war over it, but there’d probably be a referendum on becoming a republic fairly soon afterwards so the whole thing could be sidestepped.

If it turned out William wasn’t acting alone then I still think there’d be an investigation as to who was in favour and maybe expunge William’s line from succession altogether… but then I don’t think the powers that be would want Harry as king either. Or Andrew.

Edward would be unwilling, but I think he’d make a good, if quiet, king.

Anne would be f**king hilarious.

But all of this is moot. The chance of Wills becoming a homicidal maniac is about as likely as his gran coming back from the grave and doing the job herself.

Find yourself a language that allows negative indices to count back from the end of an array.

In those languages, index 0 is usually the first element, but if you’re particularly perverse and negate your indexing, you can start at 1, or rather -1, at the other end and work backwards.

0-indexing originally comes from needing to add to the array’s base memory address to locate elements. If you have an array at memory address 1234, you might expect to find the first element at that address, which would be 1234+0, and the next at 1234+1, etc.

1-indexing started as either a deliberate abstraction from that idea, and/or else there’s something else stored at 1234 that the array data type needs and the real elements start at 1234+1.

All that said, there’s at least one language that insists the indices of an array be of a subtype of some Integer type that must have a limited range. Then you can start and end wherever you like, and the whole 1 vs 0 business is meaningless (except to whoever writes the compilers for that language anyway).

Retired racing driver Damon Hill approves this post.

Watched a few back in the day. Wasn’t really my jam - I was too old for it even then - even if the tangentially related _asdfmovie_s are somewhat entertaining when they appear.

Oof. I’d never even thought about it in terms of race, but now you mention it, I have to wonder if I ever heard it in that context.

… and, not that I remember, probably have. sigh

Started by turning off adblocker, but not NoScript. Allowed everything except the obvious advertising domain “blogherads”, and no significant increase in usage.

Allowed that and it added a whole bunch of domains to the list, meaning that it polls all the other ad providers and tries to run their scripts. Tried enabling those a bit at a time and noticed nothing in particular. The ads did start taking up a small amount of extra memory but no runaway effect.

I didn’t get around to allowing them all, but I did notice that at one point I tried to scroll the page and it loaded ad section after ad section indefinitely as I scrolled.

If you have an extension that tries to load a page right to the bottom, then that would almost certainly cause a runaway effect. It would try to load an infinite number of ads below where you were viewing the page.

Massive overbite. Great for scraping off barnacles.

(In before the reinterpretation of that last word as a Greek name.)

The joke in my part of the world used to be “a black cat in a coal cellar at midnight”. That this is also a cat makes me think that the artist might be familiar with that idiom.

I have just watched the Legal Eagle video about the various law-related things that happened around the 2020 election.

It served as a reminder that the plan had apparently been to claim to have won before all the votes were counted - something about doing so in the interim between two sets of votes being counted (I want to say mail-in versus in-person, but I might have misunderstood) and then act as if Trump had actually won at that point, thus giving legitimacy to any later cry of foul that was almost sure to be needed.

Which is precisely what Trump did.

… my point being that it would be foolish to assume it wasn’t in the play book for this time around as well.

I assume it’s a parodic, non-copyright-infringing synonym of a certain “sparkly vampire” story that also contains at least one werewolf. The book has an apple on the cover, and I assume that’s supposed to be an apple on the spine of the book in this comic.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665

This might not be to anyone’s satisfaction though because it suggests he doesn’t refer to Vivian at all, considering her “dead”, not actually deadnaming her, per se.

I’m British, so black tea with milk (or substitute) and some kind of sweetener to taste is what most of us (and most of Ireland too) go for.

As for which black tea, we don’t really consider that unless we’re at least a couple of levels into serious tea drinking. Most supermarkets sell own-brand and name brand tea bags that we gladly grab every time we’re in a supermarket, but what’s in them is generally a blend made for taste more than anything else.

I am not sure how tea purchasing works in other countries. Sometimes what we drink is called “breakfast tea” or “builder’s tea”, if that helps.

The Internet suggests that caffeine might be interfering with your adenosine receptors, and may actually be making you more sleepy.

Try tea occasionally instead. It has other compounds that can offset caffeine effects, even if it also contains caffeine. Or try decaf coffee and see if it paradoxically causes you to be more alert.

The last panel reminds me of the “animator loses his mind and draws everything with his left hand” part of Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected, albeit without the unnerving undertones.

Who knows what data type they’re using. Based on the values given, it’s already getting close to 128 bits, and most languages don’t have a data type that large in their standards.

I figure it will be more like “Vasily! Print another page of zeros!”