palordrolap

None of Northern Ireland, England, or Scotland are countries

This is false. Every single one of those is a country. They’re considered constituent countries of the larger country.

Even Wales remains a country despite the fact that, for certain royal and administrative purposes, it counts as part of England. That’s why there’s no dragon or other Welsh indication on the Union flag, to the rightful annoyance of the Welsh, when there are English, Irish and Scottish flags blended into it.

Further proof they’re all countries - not that this is strictly necessary - is that they each have their own parliaments.

White, rich guy from apartheid South Africa accuses country of tyranny after it locks up a person white supremacists look up to.

Hmm. Hmmmm.

Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

Kind of relevant

“I’m not touching you I’m not touching you la la la la I’m not touching you”

Something something former one-child policy preventing people from learning how annoying this is as children and so do not realise they are acting childishly as adults.

(NB for China fans: Yes, other countries act childishly too, but China’s supposed to be better than that, right? Right?)

The thing is, for about 50% of those people you could talk to them like they were three years old and they’d be glad someone was communicating on their level for a change. The other 50% would think you’re the idiot. But they still wouldn’t read the sign.

I am reminded of that one guy who retyped an entire credit card agreement with clauses in his favour, formatted it to look like the original, then signed it and sent it back.

But at that point the stories diverge because he got away with quite a lot of “abuse” before they cancelled his card… and were required to pay his cancellation fee.

… or do they, because this Cop29 story seems to suggest that the Saudis have not only done this in the past, but they’ve been given secret permission to do so.

“Aw. Did you think we were friends? Haha. You’re brown. When we said we didn’t have a problem with racism, we meant we have lots of it and don’t think it’s a problem. Even if you were to fully embrace Russian values as well as worship Putin, we’d still despise you. Still though, do you have any weapons you’d like to sell?”

I never said what he did was right, only why he might have done it.

We like Linux, but not to the point we’re aping Steve Ballmer.

(If this is lost on you, search up “Developers developers developers” along with his name.)

Rumour has it that Charles is incredibly angry about the whole thing and Andrew is very much in danger of being cut off completely if he doesn’t keep his head down, so while Charles has paid people off, he has not forgiven or forgotten.

There’s also that he wasn’t king at the time he made those payments and may have been protecting their mother rather than his brother at the time. Andrew, idiot though he is, was the Queen’s favourite.

Had the Queen already been dead and Charles been king at the time the news broke, he might well have let Andrew suffer the consequences.

“We could have shut them all down immediately but too many rich people might have lost money, and even though that wouldn’t have caused them any appreciable hardship whatsoever, we absolutely had to give them a chance to prepare.”

That’ll be me fixating on the grammar of one panel and forgetting everything else then.

Bold of you to assume, etc.

With open source it’s either someone incredibly dedicated to doing things for other people (unicorns), someone being paid by a company to do it (workhorses. Some might have a horn, it’s hard to tell. Or the company’s the unicorn), or it’s someone with programming knowledge who also needs and wants to use the software they’re writing (hobbyists).

Outside of the horse analogues, you probably need to look at the demographics of the users of said software and put the programmer somewhere within that bell curve. As to precisely where, I’d guess not at the low end as they’ve had to gain at least some programming experience along with the knowledge of the topic the software is about.

For the unicorns and the paid devs, well, they could be anyone.

There are bound to be systemic skews not accounted for here. More men tend to go into programming than women, for example, or at least that used to be the case.

Mine eyes!

Don’t know about mobile, but on desktop, that website is an unnecessarily bright yellow.

But I guess the tune was kind of catchy.

Nitpick time: File this under “wrong usage of -eth when trying to sound medieval”. That particular usage became “-es” in modern English, and if you make that replacement in this comic (cometh → comes), it’s immediately clear that it’s wrong. “Come onward” would have been just fine, but that, of course, looks far too modern.

I mean, you could read it as being deliberately demeaning or objectifying - she is being a hard taskmaster - but I don’t think that was the intention here.

If she has permission - or dares take the initiative - to use the familiar form of address, she could try “Now, come thee onward!”, keeping both that “th” that was wrong before, as well as the syllable count. Might still be a bit weird in context, but not grammatically.

Hm. I’ve definitely seen this one or something like it during an exceptionally rare sleep paralysis episode, but the question remains whether it was outside, or technically on the inside, projecting out, but looking back in again. It was stood at the side of the bed, which was considerate, given that they often like to sit on people.

One of the few times I did not intentionally start into the abyss, but it decided to look back anyway. And I made a very funny “wuU-Uur!” noise as I roused myself out of it and watched the thing melt away. I now assume that’s the noise comic characters make when the speech bubble reads “oo-er”.

If I see it again, and I remember, I might ask it if it wants tea.

Carbon dioxide. A metric [emphasis]-ton of dust. Other waste.

Sometimes I write small Perl programs or Bash scripts, but that’s rare, and it’s mostly for my own benefit or amusement; even more rarely do I share them.

Sometimes despair. Sometimes happiness. Hopefully a sense of being informed and/or entertained if not also a (weak?) sense of camaraderie by means of weird little text interactions with people online.

Conan O’Brien went on to write for The Simpsons and later had his own talk show or something.