femtomanagement

The palantiri (plural) were made by the elves during the First Age when they lived with the Valar (gods), so yes they were made during a golden age long ago. They were gifted to men of Numenor who remained loyal to the Valar and Iluvatar (The God) and kept friendship with the elves. This was during a time (Second Age) in which the rulers of Numenor were being hostile to the elves, disrespectful towards the Valar, and just generally being assholes. The elves gave the palantiri to the “Faithful” of Numenor so they could still communicate with each other despite the opressive politics on the island. Elendil, fore-father of Aragorn, took them (and a fruit that grew into the White Tree of Gondor) when he fled Numenor for Middle Earth. (Elendil’s son, Isildur, is the one that cut the ring from Sauron’s hand.)

But the palantiri were not corruption artifacts. They are seeing stones. The “corruption” you see in the movies is not inherent in the stones. It is simply that Sauron has a stone also, and you really don’t want him to get inside your head.

I’m actually kind of OK with that b/c it pushes it to the bottom of the comments, so it’s out of the way but still easy to find if i’m curious.

dammit, franklin! i told you to lay off the beans!

I shared the actual PDF with my mother and father, and they told me it was “liberal propaganda”. Funny thing is, they aren’t uneducated or stupid. They’ve just had Fox News and conservative talk-radio playing in the background of their lives for 20+ years. It’s actually really sad. They used to be Hank Hill type conservatives, now they refuse to even entertain opinions (or facts, for that matter) that they don’t already believe.

Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been “Americanized” and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i’ve run across uses single-quotes.

wouldn’t it be awesome to get a case pushed up to the supreme court or something arguing that trump is ineligible to run for president because he “won” in 2016? it would just so perfectly highlight the hypocrisy of it all

For real. I’m over here having a mid-life crisis since I was 27.

i’m a big fan of “hectomillionaires” (the term, not the system that allows hectomillionaires to exist to the detriment of us all, of course)

unlike that window…

welp, there goes my Tuesday.

I use FiraCode Nerd Font Mono instead, but it also does not have a specific italic font. In my config, only the “normal” section is defined, but all my bold and/or italic text looks like it should. Apparently, alacritty will apply a heavier weight or slant to the “normal” type face if you simply omit the “bold” or “italic” sections. So, what you have right now should Just Work.

Allegedly, you can omit the “style” specification in the “italic” section (ie: just add "italic": {"family": "FiraMono Nerd Font"}, to your config snippit above), but i haven’t actually tried doing it that way.

I truly appreciate the pic! They’ve been putting in a new housing development nearby, and apparently have no idea how to NOT knock my power out at least once a week (which as a work-from-home programmer is… not ideal). So I am just gonna wait until the blasting calms down before i try to figure it out again lol

Same here. It was a life-changing discovery. Until the power went out and all the settings got reset… Too bad I’m a lazy asshole. Those were some good ol’ days…

Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.

or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new “jumbo size” that’s as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the “standard” size.

He wasn’t even done giving the deposition that he literally volunteered to give…

i honestly think that would work…

I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!

That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills… Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn’t there like it is in landfills since there’s so much poop to eat, haha.

Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we’re at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

I’m actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I’m a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug – so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it’s much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.