Carl Muckenhoupt @CarlMuckenhoupt@mastodon.social

I repaired a broken chair! It is now nice and firm where it was creaky and wobbly. This is doing wonders for my mood.

When I learned that there was a tech hub in California called "Menlo Park", my first thought was that it was obviously named after Menlo Park, New Jersey, where Edison had his laboratory.

But oddly enough, it turns out to be the other way around. Menlo Park, NJ was named after Menlo Park, CA in the 1870s, for no particular reason other than that a real estate developer liked the name.

Sudden horrifying realization:
One of the symptoms of depression is no longer finding pleasure in things you once enjoyed.
The business model of the entire games industry is based on the premise that this will happen to their customers routinely.

I Have No Pants And I Must Scream

"Bald eagle" is jut a euphemisim for vulture

Pointing out that some rando said something stupid about an issue proves nothing. There are stupid people on every side of every issue. Anything, even things you agree with, can be believed for bad reasons.

It only becomes important if:
- You can show that lots of people agree with the stupid claim, or
- The person making the stupid claim is in a position of power or influence, or is a candidate for such a position

My least favorite perceptual illusion is the way that, when you get something in your eye, you can still feel it there after you get it out

"We’ve been told nonstop throughout this about how we must treat 'consumers' or 'potential customers' a certain way... [T]he people using the terms consumers and potential customers here are doing so specifically because we’ve never actually sold them anything and don’t owe them anything at all... Whenever I’ve mentioned that we, as random people happening to be making a game, don’t owe these other random people anything, they become absolutely enraged."

https://medium.com/@perplamps/regarding-whats-been-happening-3af0f27d863c

Just a thought: What if Tarantino isn't actually a foot fetishist, but deliberately panders to foot fetishists in his films because they're an easy audience to pander to? That would be totally like him, wouldn't it?

Hot take: Robots in sci-fi are symbols for dogs.

It's kind of incredible that birds work.

Me: Salted caramel is a recent innovation and was an unexpected combination when it started to gain popularity a little over twenty years ago.

People responding to my toot: On the contrary, salt has been a popular food additive for a very long time. I am very clever.

A reminder: The destruction of the Earth in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was audacious and unexpected at the time. Audiences had been thoroughly trained to expect that any attempts by aliens at destroying the Earth would always be thwarted by the protagonists. I think that's kind of gotten lost as other works, from Red Dwarf to Homestuck, have made the demise of the human race into a normal premise for comedy.

Few things will make me distrust your server's security more than imposing an unreasonably small maximum password length, like 16 characters or something.

Not because 16 characters is too short for a secure password, but because the obvious explanation for caring about the length is that you're storing the passwords as plain text instead of salted hashes.

The Roger Corman Cinematic Universe

Vague game idea: An adventure game with a crossword puzzle in it, with clues that refer to things elsewhere in the game, and some clues refer to things that you can change. Like, if there's a clue "Resident of the master bedroom", and the words crossing it give you the answer "LLAMA", you have to get a llama into the master bedroom somehow or the answer will be judged as incorrect.

Graham Nelson famously called interactive fiction "a novel at war with a crossword puzzle", but my favorite works of IF are more like a novel *in cahoots* with a crossword puzzle.

To some extent, I feel like Hypnospace Outlaw is a fantasy about lower standards. It shows us a world where people are enthusiastically unashamed about their embarrassing art and makes us long to be similarly shameless.

Toffee is for toasters

So I keep seeing claims that crows are really smart and can recognize individual human faces, but scarecrows seem to be predicated on the idea that crows are stupid and can't tell the difference between a human and a dummy. What's up with that?