This isn’t what the dialog says verbatim, but if you read between the lines this is what they are really telling you.
Note to Microsoft: My computer is a tool, which I use for many things. Running Windows is simply means to that end, not an end in itself.
Clowns.
Back in 2001 I wrote:
Sadly, things don’t always go this well. Fuzzygeek has a different sort of story about a tooth gone bad.
Ouch.
I read far more than I converse, and so I may see a word in print years before I hear it spoken. More to the point: I may end up saying it before I hear it pronounced correctly. This means if my first guess at the proper pronunciation is wrong I will read it many, many times and that improper pronunciation will be deeply ingrained before I realize my error. The risk here is that if I drop my incorrect usage into conversation I risk making a fool of myself.
This happens alarmingly often.
I saw the word “meme” years ago and have typed it and read it many times since then, always pronouncing it “mem” in my head. Yesterday I saw a Wiki on memes and found out it’s pronounced “meem”. Now I wonder: How many times did I use this word incorrectly in conversation and the other person was too polite to let me know I’m an idiot?
I spent most of the early 90’s thinking “cache” was pronounced “catch”. As in, “This system has 8kb of catch memory, that’s huge!” If I had guessed that I was saying it wrong, my next guess would have been “cashay”, to rhyme with “sashay”. Saying “cash” was not obvious to me at all.
Same goes for “Chasam”. I once earned a bit of riddicule when someone caught me pronouncing it the way it looks, instead of saying “kasam”.
Some people don’t have this problem, and I don’t know how they avoid it. Are they better at intuiting words? Do they run to the dictionary every tme they see a new word?
Since I seem to be blogging about music today, I just have to mention Party Ben, a mashup artist. In mashups, someone takes two very different songs – the more different the better – and overlaps them in such a way that they sound like they belong together. I heard some mashup via a FARK link a couple of years ago and I wasn’t impressed. It sounded more or less like you’d expect: Like listening to two different songs at once.
But Party Ben actually pulls it off, and the results are amazing. Some of the mashups sound even better than the source material. The most impressive is the one where he combines Green Day, Oasis, Travis, Aerosmith, and Eminem. And he makes it work. Check out “Boulevard of Broken Songs“. (About halfway down the page.) Then he mixes Snoop Dog with Led Zepplin, if you can believe that.
Remarkable. Normally I think of popular music as cool, but this has a certain “getting Linux running on a toaster” Geekyness to it.
In the comments of this post I found out about Shamus Dark, which is about the most awesome name for anything. Ever. He’s a singer, but I’m not going to try and categorize him. You’ll just have to look and see for yourself. Check out the off-beat sense of humor he has.
I love it.
The tagline on this site claims “Geek culture ephemera”, but obviously there are many aspects of geek culture I don’t cover. I really only concern myself with a little corner of the subject. It’s just too broad, and any blog that really tried to write about all aspects of geek culture would be too unfocused. The world of geekdom is larger and more inclusive now than it was twenty years ago. Part of this is likely due to the fact that the term “geek” hs changed a great deal.
The original geek was a carnival performer whose act consisted of bizarre or grotesque feats, like biting the heads off of chickens. The term was roughly analogous to the term “freak” as we use it today. It was often used as a cruel slur to denote someone who was socially inept, repulsive, or otherwise unlikeable. From there the term lost some of its “freak” overtones and came to mean people who were simply social outcasts. Then it came to mean a very particular type of outcast: someone who avoids or shuns others because they are too busy with a cerebral or esoteric pursuit. Now geek is a label applied to many differing types of people who have no other common thread besides their interest in using their brains to amuse themselves. The “outcast” meaning is all but gone, and all that’s left is the stereotype that geeks have trouble dealing with the opposite sex.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “What’s in a Geek?”
Den Beste is at it again, this time fencing with some lunatic Castro supporter in a metafilter thread.
The Castro fan is going by the name “Mayor Curley”, and he has some posts that are both shocking and hilarious once you realize he’s dead serious. To simultaneously champion the cause of the little guy and support Castro is quite a mental challenge. I can’t imagine the sheer force of will required to bend one’s thinking unil understanding is so totally at odds with perceptions. This isn’t like trusting flimsy economic data or anecdotal evidence. This isn’t buying into urban legends. This isn’t starting with a false assumption. This is believing that the sky is pink and everyone who claims it to be blue is a mindless brain-washed puppet of The Corporations. He’s not just divorced from reality. No, he divorced reality, then reality got the house, and took out a restraining order against him. His posts would be less alarming if he just wrote “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over and over.
I know I said I try to avoid politics, but I don’t think I’m going to offend anyone here by saying that this guy is screaming, poo-flinging, drooling, howling-at-the-moon, raving, loco insane.
Good luck with that, Steven. And don’t get any on you.
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
A big chunk of the internet went down in October of 2016. What happened? Was it a hack?
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
T w e n t y S i d e d
