S e n t e n t i o l a

voraciousfruits replied to your post: thespookinessoftheworms replied to your post: It…

That ALWAYS happens to me!!

Weary fistbump!

It’s a real problem at the moment because my operating system is so out of date that Chrome has stopped doing compatible updates, which in turn means that Chrome’s built-in version of Flash has stopped working and won’t update, so there are now big chunks of the internet that don’t work.  And in order to manually update Flash I have to turn off the built-in version, which means I need to open the Settings page.  But I’ve got so many windows open that the browser can’t cope with the Settings page and crashes whenever I open it.

So basically I can’t use this browser any more, but nor can I stop using it until I deal with all these windows!

(But Jamie, why not update your operating system so Chrome will start automatically updating itself again?  Because apparently my operating system is so out of date that I can’t download the new version, I have to actually buy a physical copy of the new one or something.)

(The moral of this story is that apparently you have to upgrade stuff before it stops working, because if something is old enough to need an upgrade it is also too old to upgrade.)

(Bah.)

thespookinessoftheworms replied to your post: It would be so nice if I could close all these…

Press Alt+F4 a bunch. Apparently that closes windows but I’m not sure how well it works, since there’s still a solid breeze coming through mine and I’m cold and Alt+F4 is doing nothing :(

:D

Unfortunately it isn’t the mechanics of closing them that’s the problem.  They’re all open because they’ve got web-pages in them that I want to read or comment on or link people to or otherwise not forget about.  But I haven’t got the time and / or will to do those things, so they just sit there waiting to be dealt with, slowing down my browser and generally getting in the way.

I could bookmark them and close them but that would make it 95% inevitable that I’d never ever do what I intended to do with them.

Eheu.

peanutbutterandjamzee replied to your post: (Also it’s just occurred to me to wonder why so…

I wouldn’t think so. I’ve been drawing dwarves with roundish big noses ever since I learned what a dwarf was. I mostly associate it with stoutness, sternness, general dwarfiness. Not greed or money or anything like that.

Ah, okay, I’m not familiar with depictions of dwarves so I didn’t know they were often done line that.

stayinbedgrowyourhair:

nuditea:

stayinbedgrowyourhair:

“WHAT IF THE WHITE HOUSE WAS LIKE THE PRAIRIE”

you guys i’m sending drunk-style messages and i’m not even drunk

which begs the question: why am i not drunk? it’s 5:45 and i’ve got tomorrow off. what a waste of sobriety. 

if anyone was curious as to why i was reading the wikipedia article on canada-united states relations, it was because of minor shots fired in this conversation

EVERYONE

WHAT IF THE WHITE HOUSE HAD TO BE BURNED DOWN BY CANADIANS EVERY FEW YEARS SO IT COULD GROW BACK STRONGER AND HEALTHIER

WOULDN’T THAT BE SO WEIRD

‘I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-hall, and churches,—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.’  (Holgrave in The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

David Lowenthal’s book The past is a foreign country has some fascinating stuff on how many of the founding generation of the United States strongly rejected the idea that the past should have any influence over the future and thought that every generation should junk everything the previous one had done and start again.  Jefferson wrote that the constitution and all other statutes should expire automatically every nineteen years.  Which, as Lowenthal explores, created the paradox of later generations admiring and heroizing ‘founding fathers’ who deeply objected to the idea of admiring and heroizing ‘founding fathers’.

So Canada could quite reasonably argue that periodically demolishing the White House is a valuable contribution to the American dream.

(via nuditea)

nuditea:

there’s possibly no-one i trust less than someone who says my name too often

I very rarely address people by name, and I often wonder why that is.  Like, even when I want to attract someone’s attention or greet someone — that sort of situation where using someone’s name is highly convenient and / or socially expected — I have to make a conscious effort to do it.

It’s probably just one of those childhood things.  I’m an only child and I tended to socialize with other children one-to-one, so there weren’t many situations where I needed to use names to make it clear who I was walking to, and maybe I just never developed the habit.  I dunno.  Stuff.

pareidolalia replied to your post: pareidolalia replied to your post: (Has anyone…

(this happens to me with all sorts of posts)

I follow so few tumblrs in comparison to (as far as I can tell) everyone else that I have basically no idea what’s already been done.  But it has the up-side that if I post something that has basically already been posted, I’m not likely to find out!

That doesn’t always work, though.  The other day Sparkles posted that photo of a TARDIS drinks cabinet on Facebook and I commented ‘Boozier on the inside!’ and carried on internetting feeling reasonably content with my moderately amusing comment until a few hours later when I caught up on Tumblr and saw that this was exactly the caption the Daily What tumblr had given the picture.  Weuargh.

Other things that help me not worry about originality too much are that:

• I just have a fairly resilient ego about this sort of thing;
• I post at such unfashionable times that few people read what I post anyway;
• the people who do read me are pretty cool and not the sort of people who would scoff at me for accidentally making a joke that’s already been made.

pareidolalia replied to your post: (Has anyone already done that one? Someone must…

That awkward moment when you think of a really good awkward moment and are then swamped by the anxiety of influence.

Hee hee!

sistermagpie:

peanutbutterandjamzee:

sententiola:

What puzzles me about the phrase ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is the ‘in the same room’ bit.

Does it add evidential value? If someone has seen two people together outdoors, is that insufficient proof that they aren’t the same…

I do use it to mean something different? I thought I used to to mean the same thing—a joking suggestion that two people might be the same person? Like you’re referring to Superman and Clark Kent never being in the same room together at the same time—more likely Clark Kent would show up just after Superman left?

Yes, but I thought you’d said earlier that you use it a different way, the same way you might say ‘have you ever seen them eat a hamburger?’ when trying to help someone work out whether someone else is vegetarian.  In other words, ‘in the same room’ is not the crucial location that clinches the argument (which is how I think most people use it, in which case it doesn’t strictly make any sense), but is just the first and most obvious in what could be an almost infinite series of places where they might have been seen together.

If that’s how you use it, then you are literally asking whether the two people in question were in a room when they were sighted together.  Whereas Alex is suggesting that most people who use the phrase are not actually enquiring about whether the two people were literally in a room.

peanutbutterandjamzee:

sententiola:

What puzzles me about the phrase ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is the ‘in the same room’ bit.

Does it add evidential value?  If someone has seen two people together outdoors, is that insufficient proof that they aren’t the same person?  What if they were together in a car?

Hmm.

—·—

(NB:  This isn’t, and shouldn’t be used as, a criticism of people who use that phrase.  There are expressions people use because they’re already well established as having a particular meaning and particular implications, and the actual combination of words doesn’t really matter because the point is that I say it and you know what I mean by it and stuff.  It’s just funny how sometimes arbitrary and slightly nonsensical assumptions seem to get embedded in these expressions.  And stuff.)

It strikes me that you may be thinking too literally. It’s an example of whatsit. Synecdoche? Yes. “A specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class”. YES THAT’S EXACTLY IT

This phrase is synecdoche. Using the specific class of thing (“room”) to refer to a larger, more general class (“places where two people might be together”). It’s not literally and only referring to rooms.

I disagree that it’s an example of synecdoche, but even if it is, my point was precisely that the inclusion of ‘in the same room’ is nonsensical if you consider it literally.  Which is why I was considering it literally.  Obviously when we use that phrase we don’t mean it literally, as I noted in the last paragraph.  (Except Sister Magpie, who apparently does mean it literally but uses the expression in a different way entirely.)

(via tiny-puppy-teeth)

sistermagpie:

sententiola:

sistermagpie:

sententiola:

What puzzles me about the phrase ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is the ‘in the same room’ bit.

Does it add evidential value? If someone has seen two people together outdoors, is that insufficient proof that they aren’t the same person? What if they were together in a car?

…

I don’t think it’s nonsensical, though? Because seeing two people in the same room together at the same time would actually be good evidence that they are not the same person. 

Absolutely, but so would seeing them having a picnic in the park together or riding a tandem together.  The fact that they’re in a room when you see them together adds nothing to the evidential value of the fact that you’ve seen them together.

Whereas the implication of the question ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is that if you haven’t, you can’t be completely sure that they aren’t the same person.  Meaning that if you have seen them together but they were navigating a hot-air balloon across the Alps at the time, there would still be some doubt about whether they’re separate people: because you haven’t actually seen them in the same room together.

Maybe I’m explaining this badly?

Right, but maybe I was explaining it badly. The “in the same room” is arbitrary, but it doesn’t imply that they must be in the same room, it’s just a starting place. Like, if someone was wondering if someone was a vegetarian I might say, “Well, have you ever seen them eating a hamburger?” Obviously it could be any kind of meat, but I made it specific because that’s a common type of meat to eat. Like being the same room is a common place to see people together, plus it’s a confined space. If they were just in the same house they could be switching costumes between rooms, which often happens.

So the added detail of it being a room is arbitrary, but since it doesn’t imply it has to be a room so I wouldn’t say nonsensical. It’s intentionally using a specific example to underline how ham-handed the secret identities are usually handled. 

Apparently I have thoughts about this phrase. I think I just like it!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t like it!  And if that’s how you use it then I guess it isn’t nonsensical when you use it, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t how most people use or understand it.  If you google the phrase (and similar phrases like ‘have you ever seen them in the same room’ and ‘have you ever seen them in a room together’) you don’t find people who seem to be trying to start a conversation with the sincere goal of ascertaining whether X and Y are the same person by eliminating various locations they may have shared, starting with ‘a room’ as the most likely candidate.  They’re generally saying it with the clear (though tongue-in-cheek) implication that, if the answer to the question is ‘no’, this alone means that their interlocutor cannot be sure that X and Y are not the same person.

sistermagpie:

sententiola:

What puzzles me about the phrase ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is the ‘in the same room’ bit.

Does it add evidential value? If someone has seen two people together outdoors, is that insufficient proof that they aren’t the same person? What if they were together in a car?

…

I don’t think it’s nonsensical, though? Because seeing two people in the same room together at the same time would actually be good evidence that they are not the same person. 

Absolutely, but so would seeing them having a picnic in the park together or riding a tandem together.  The fact that they’re in a room when you see them together adds nothing to the evidential value of the fact that you’ve seen them together.

Whereas the implication of the question ‘have you ever seen them in the same room together?’ is that if you haven’t, you can’t be completely sure that they aren’t the same person.  Meaning that if you have seen them together but they were navigating a hot-air balloon across the Alps at the time, there would still be some doubt about whether they’re separate people: because you haven’t actually seen them in the same room together.

Maybe I’m explaining this badly?

nuditea:

i hear some people don’t create and abandon blogs on the flightiest of whims but i’m not sure i’m convinced they exist

I have a main tumblr and then a tumblr that I created so I could try to figure out how to solve a Tumblr-theme problem Ashe was having.

I’m not sure why I haven’t deleted that one.

… I’m not sure I’m convinced I exist either.

Suddenly the plot of “The Producers” has entered this episode

hypotheticalthalamus:

Ie overselling the show to backers so that if it’s a flop the producer can pocket the difference

It is literally
Just

The plot of the producers

And now I find myself devising a new murder mystery series in which the plots are all just old comedy films but with added murder.

When the silent movie he’s working on is turned into a talkie mid-way through filming, the star and his old pal team up with a young undiscovered singer to make it into a musical, but then — MURDER!

A paleontologist meets a young woman on a golf course and they soon find themselves trying to look after a tiger named Baby, but then — MURDER!

An awkward Englishman steadily falls in love with an American woman whom he meets at a series of friends’ weddings, but then — MURDER!

Brian of Nazareth is mistaken for the messiah and and becomes involved with a shambolic Judaean independence movement, but then — MURDER!  (Oh no, wait, that’s actually pretty much what happens already…)

Alex submitted:

Q: Why did the bike store raise the price of their tires?

A: Inflation.

Q:  Why did the finance minister’s hair start getting thin at the front?

A:  Recession.

dinoquark replied to your post: At work at the moment I’m doing an urgent but…

The people thinking about the year 2000 were doing a much better job than early programmers and computer engineers I guess.

So it seems!  I guess it’s forgivable in a way — computer technology develops so rapidly that you can sort of understand people not expecting their work to last more than a few years, whereas legislation can remain in force for a very long time indeed (as we’ve seen!) and the people who draft it try to make sure it keeps working for as long as it’s needed.