When I was a kid I saw Birdo in the Super Mario Bros 2 manual and the bit about how she thinks she's a girl.

And I was like "Oh, interesting".

When I was a kid, I had no idea how many mysteries would this universe hold. A new one? Guess I learned something new that day.

Elon Musk before: "Oh, these old Twitter executives were so dumb. When number go up, you've gotta show it everywhere!"

Elon Musk now: "Number not go up? For cripes sake, don't show it!"

My gosh that Reddit app icon is horrible. It looks like a terrible meme NFT or something. ...Which was probably the aesthetic they were going for, to be clear.

It's apparently $50 a month, but based on one recent video from a guy who looked into this, there's apparently a hard sell to "commit" to the program for a year, and if you do commit, it won't let you cancel or refund, because you committed to the program, bro, that's a sacred vow, bro, you can't violate that, bro.

I'm a trans woman in Europe. Got traumatised by public restrooms in the 1990s way before my transition when one fucking coin-operated bathroom lock on a train station malfunctioned and I almost missed a train until some dude entered. Why the fuck do people use public bathrooms. Scourge on humanity. Especially coin-operated ones. Fuck them. I always hold until I get home, no matter what. Yet, glad our trains have gender neutral bathrooms. And they're free of charge. SEE, AMERICA? TRAINS GOOD.

Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).

Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.

In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It's not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can't sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They'd probably just not work with that author again.)

Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.

So no, authors don't really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.

In my opinion, as an outside observer, I'd say it is the duty of every patriotic American to mass produce signs that say "THIS COUNTRY IS RUN BY IDIOTS" and post them everywhere.

Also some sites ask for email addresses.

I give them my .fi address.

The sites then go "did you mean .fr?"

And I'm like "No actually I'm in Finland. It's a whole different country. Don't get me wrong, I love the French, great country. I love our EU brothers and sisters and enbypals. Just don't buy a nuclear reactor from them."

The way publishing industry has been for a very long time, authors (especially first time ones) don't get to pick whoever pays the best deal. Just whoever pays the first.

Edit: Also, theoretically, publishers should accommodate author wishes once a publication contract has been made. Actually not unheard of that a publisher would do something cool for their up and coming star. But this? Sloppiness on the publisher's part, plain and simple.

I'm in Finland and it's always mildly weird when these country lists have "Aland Islands" right in the top. I'm not entirely sure in which circumstances the folks from Åland even pick that option. But, I mean, it's an autonomous region, they do have the right to mildly confuse the people who collect user statistics.

(There was also that one incident when some Google product wasn't available in EU as a whole due to regulations that had to be sorted out, but it was somehow available in Åland because Google did an oopsie.)

Anyone remember the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover?

"I don't know what this 'microservice' nonsense is, I'm gonna remove it"

"...Sir, everything is fucking broken now, could you please stop messing with the system"

"Ur fired lol"

...Expect more of that.

ACAB (All Cops Are Ballooning)

Why hello! 🙋🏻‍♀️

I think I saw some quip by Linus Torvalds about how Finland has such long winters with nothing to do, so it's no wonder we have so many great information technology nerds.

I have the DVD. It's somewhere in the pile.

I need to one day develop a DVD/BR/book catalogue app to get even vague idea about what exactly is on my shelves and boxes. It has long since gone unmanageable. At least I know what's my next major project after NaNoWriMo.

[old woman memories mode]

I remember registering my CD key of HL1 on Steam and was surprised when they gave me the expansions for free. Cool, because I didn't have them.

I remember buying The Orange Box on Steam. I remember it because Steam gave me a warning because I already had Portal - it was free at some point. Was a bit miffed when TF2 went free to play later on.

And I somehow still haven't played HL2 on Steam, I think? I played it about 1/3 way on Xbox 360. Played the shit out of Portal on 360 though.

Debian user here. Checks out.

Though I use Windows (and Debian WSL) as desktop daily. The fact that I mostly drink instant coffee is possibly related.

Ah, this will be the Department of Dunning-Kruger. The workers are idiots who think they are supergeniuses. Led by an idiot who thinks he's a supergenius.

During Trump's first term, this was just a metaphor, suggested by random comedians. Now, life will imitate art to its full extent.

I'm an enthusiast amateur photographer with nice DSLR and a few mirrorless cameras. And I shoot a lot on automatic. It's fine. Semiauto and manual is usually only needed if you have specific ideas about exposure.

Also you can fix soooo many mistakes in the post. When people tell me their cellphone photos look naff, I tell them to just try levels / curves / white balance tools, and those are in every photo editor. Will help a lot.

I post photos online, and despite the fact that the platforms (Tumblr, and I think Pixelfed too?) scrub exif data, I do it manually anyway.

Pro tip:

exiftool -overwrite_original -All= file.jpg

For me OneDrive "memories" are from my wallpaper folder or Xbox screenshots.

Google "memories" are food diary photos (on days when my food budget is spent, Google loves to show me photos of the massive pizzas I ate years ago, because it knows) or random sunsets. (Except for that photo collage with cheery music from my grandma's funeral. Why did it have to do that specifically. Just asking.)