My emotion I well can remember
  O'er a "promise" that somewhere I'd seen
One night, away back in December
  Anno Domini 1918.
Happy tears in my orbs began wellin'
  As I read how the England-to-be
Would become a fit messuage to dwell in
      For heroes like me.

Refreshed by an access of ardour
  I returned to my business in town;
But, as life seemed each day to grow harder,
  I despaired of its joy and its crown;
Till, fed up with a "tale" for poor Tommies,
  My temper I finally lost,
And pronounced that oracular "promise"
      A palpable frost.

But I've tumbled at last to my error;
  For, although I am far from content,
I know that this era of terror
  Is just what the Government meant;
When through England so bell-like and clear rose
  That eager, that passionate vow;
Since none but a race of real heroes
    Can live in it now.

--Punch, December 1st, 1920, commenting on political promises

... or rather, I should say that I have solved the system issues which have plagued me for far too long, and I can finally return to playing COH without my system spontaneously restarting at inopportune times.

Now I just have to deal with the fact that my 64-year-old hands are a bit stiffer than they were when last I was playing regularly. I have some new characters I created for My Apartment Manager Is Not an Isekai Character (long story, which we haven't even started to write, and no, it's not about displacees from Paragon), so I figure I will use them to get my fingers back into fighting trim before I attempt any large scale group activity with the gang.

Speaking of which, thank you to whoever kept reupping Evangelia's big boss bit over the past nearly two years. You honestly didn't have to do that, and I would have gladly taken whatever demotion my inactivity left me with.

you cue up The Necromancer Boogie by Dominik Witka


link

Since it's specifically and repeatedly called out in the lyrics, the undead animated by this one might keep going until the next day rather than only for the duration of the song, but if so they probably can only be given orders while it's playing and then follow them until the dawn - or possibly they can only dance and don't interact in any other way regardless. Still a very good distraction, but not actually threatening in the sense of applied violence.

Prefer Linux but have to use Windows? Still use the command line?

Grep this: Microsoft grafts (most) Linux commands onto Windows

Yeah. Windows finally gets an official implementation of grep. And other Linux commands.

Back in the 1980s, London Life ran a series of commercials designed to interest people in retirement planning (and, preferably, London Life's financial planning service). The package was called Freedom 55 – as in, if you did your financial planning, you could retire at age 55.

With changes in the economic climate and the average lifespan, "Freedom 55" isn't possible any more, and in 2010 only 28% of Canadians expected to make "Freedom 66". But it's still one of Canada's most iconic ad campaigns; as an ad slogan, "Freedom 55" is up there with "Just Do It".

So... what's all this about "Freedom 250"?

My User Subscriptions on AO3:

• ASWCanuck
  
• DartzIRL
  
• DenSeraph
  
• KanriKyaraProject
  
• labster
  
• Mal3
  
• Matrix_Dragon
  
• mp3_1415player
  
• pixelwriter1
  
• STMPD
  

I know it can be done. The ones that have sat under a heat ;amp on the convenience store roller machine for a couple hours are usually pretty good, even. Alas, regardless of whdther I pan fry them, boil them, oil-fry them, boil then pan fry, or even bake them in an oven on low heat for an hour, I cannot get rid of the strong, harsh chemical taste of the things, and a well-meaning relative-of-uncertain-degree (about a third of the town has the same last name, after a while you just default to "cousin" or "auntie/uncle") has given me a case of the damn things. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Chapter 1 of Gardening Leave is now posted to AO3.

The story is still in the process of being outlined, let alone written (it has a beginning and an ending; it just needs some middle), so I can't yet be sure how many chapters there will be. Definitely more than three chapters, though.

The Register: Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer

Quote:The late great Grace Hopper used to hand out 30 cm (roughly 1 foot) lengths of wire as physical examples of a nanosecond: that's how far light can travel in one billionth of a second. If Google considers a 4 GB model to be "nano" sized, then it puts Hanff's hyperbolic comment about the climate footprint into real perspective. It gives a hint of the size of the real gigantic models in the datacenters metastasizing across the world.

A recent study led by Grace Liu at Carnegie-Mellon found that regular AI use caused measurable cognitive impairment. It's worth thinking carefully about what we trade away when we outsource our thinking and, separately, what the planet pays to power the systems we're outsourcing it to.

This vulture suggests you turn it off now, everywhere you can.

A mere 11 years after the last major release, NetHack 5.0 was released last weekend.