The following are references for use in articles that have not yet been created. I intend to eventually use them in an article either here, on Wikipedia, or on All The Tropes. Links may be bare at first, especially when pasted in using a tablet, and some of the writing is inherently "sloppy".
No, Two and a Half Men is not about a poli living with two baseline humans. I am disappoint.
Why I have a strange feeling when cosplaying as a poli: EIO[1]
Tent for kids with no legs: Photoshop fail or poli acceptance?[2] Yet NPSF3000 says a marooned pod of polis would return to the trees.[3] Hence the HugglePod HangOut hanging play tent.[4] Or other bamboo tech that Stone Age forest dwellers might invent.[5]
Compare Natalie Dee's "Chesterball" and Jake Barlow's Puddin' Don't. What is stealing?
On forgiveness: "Life is too short to quarrel." --"Little Never-upset" by Abbie Phillips Walker
There's a difference between impairment and disability. Sure, not having legs is an impairment. But if Spencer West hiked up Mount Kilimanjaro on his hands, and Jennifer Bricker is a tumbling champion (video), and Italo Romano can do skateboard tricks, and Vinod Thakur can breakdance (video), how is it a disability?
Sir Douglas Bader of the (British) Royal Air Force was a flying ace during World War II, with 20 victories and four assists. Because of a double amputation (AK/BK), he could stay conscious longer during acceleration maneuvers because less blood would drain from his brain to his residual legs. It's sometimes claimed, based on fan interpretation of the box art of Star Fox for Super NES and the cover of the Nintendo Power magazine article featuring Star Fox, that members of the Star Fox team had legs amputated for the same reason.[6] An episode of Game Theory explores this possibility. But there's no evidence for this amputation after Star Fox 64 rebooted continuity.[7]
One comeback to "What happened to your legs?" is "What happened to your tail?". (Parodied by C&H.[8])
Polis living alongside other races would need to adapt strength training regimens.[9]
PC games are more likely than console games to let you remap controls if you have a limb difference.[10]
Does the existence of Sad Sam and Honey, Betsey Clark, etc. mean that Precious Moments Inc. has no monopoly on PMI style teardrop eyes? On the other hand, compare the PMI-licensed Prayer Pal by Nûby/Luv n Care to the later non-PM Prayer Pal by Nûby that has a rounder, more generic upper lid. (It also has different clothes on non-angel characters and a different voice actor who doesn't merge /θ/ in "through" to /f/ or /ð/ in "their" to /d/.)
And if there is a line between ordinary tareme and "teardrop shaped eye design", how close do the eyes of the character in the "color-changing shirt" anti-meme (via Reddit, via Know Your Meme) come?
To an extent, a big brain helps a species avoid extinction. (Nature, via Slashdot) But there is a limit to this. Babies are helpless because a newborn's brain has to fit through the hole in mommy's pelvis, which is as big as it can be without losing the ability to run. It's called the Obstetrical dilemma,[11] and it appears that an obstetrician in a chibiverse would need to cut the mother's hip open with a chainsaw.[12] On the other hand, Caesarean sections are weakening the cephalopelvic disproportion (CPD) constraint on birth, and this has led to smaller hips in the human species.[13]
Owl monkey skulls have huge eye sockets to hold their huge eyes to see YOU in the dark. [14] Tarsier eyes are huge too, as are those of several other species.
Large eyes have one drawback: Neanderthal man may have died out because their eyes were 6 mm bigger to collect more light in higher latitudes. These eyes' signals needed more neurons to process, taking brain power away from social grooming and engineering. (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, via BBC, via Slashdot)
Pop-Tarts toaster pastries in the hands of kids are deadly weapons.[15] Try these homemade pastries similar to Pop-Tarts[16] that don't make your head swell up like the virulent monstrosity[17] that is heavily refined carbs.
"My First Trick" on "Precious Moments Make Me Puke" by Winklepots reminds me of a lyric from "Reptile" by Nine Inch Nails.
A smock/vest with one button? You may laugh, as Garfield readers did[18] and as the Cracked Photoplasty judges did,[19] but it's good enough for Sarah Lynn from 2000s Fisher-Price Little People.[20]
AuntieMeme's entry "You're my sugar daddy", which placed #4 in a Cracked Photoplasty about Valentine's Day greeting fails, shows a Precious Moments drawing of a girl serving tea. A comment by MissFluffyPants suggests that super-deformed characters' clothes fasten with a back zipper or buttons.
Reportedly, a hydrocephalic head filled with 10% brain and 90% cerebrospinal fluid can still think properly. [21]
Cyanide & Happiness #2037 shows the kind of stretching needed for removing a shirt in a chibiverse.
Matt Cowan of Cracked probably sums it up the best.[22]
A video released in November 2020 explores the sort of anatomical changes needed to bring about the exaggeration typical of anime.[23]
French bulldogs are expensive because of CPD, a head so big that it must be delivered by C section. The flat face also contributes to breathing problems.[24]
At this point, given all the acai spam in the early days of Pin Eight wiki, figure out how to include blueberries and other similar plants that don't especially grow on trees. And work in "come" linking to these NAR posts: "Seedless, We Promise" and "Don't Make Me Clean Up This One".
About character names: "Mortimer isn't a name for a children's cartoon, it's a name for an old British guy or his pet tortoise."[25] So the name Tortimer for the mayor in the first three Animal Crossing games seems especially apt.
This gecko is a walking advertisement for Tom Nook's store.[26]
Back in the early days of Nintendo DS flash cards, SD card adapters didn't support SDHC and were thus limited to 2 GB cards. So people aren't entirely unjustified in preferring 2 GB cards.[1]
RAID will not save you from disgruntled employees trying to delete everything. Get a real backup.[27]
Unity has its own synonym problem.[2]
As others have said,[3] next to nobody has an HTPC because non-geeks think they're for trailer trash.[4]
Slashdot users have suggested over a dozen alternate names for the paint program GIMP.[5][6]
"Nobody wears a watch anymore." They do if they don't want to get punched in the face and get their mouth wired shut for two and a half months.[28]
I'm told that in recent Windows, the administrator can turn off kernel mode code signing in recovery mode.
A U.S. person holding a foreign retirement account must file the U.S. Treasury's Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) annually. There was a claim that this form could be submitted only through proprietary Adobe® Reader software, which is available only for proprietary operating systems published by Microsoft and Apple.[7] This is partially true: the FBAR "is only available online through the BSA E-Filing System website"[29] but is available in both Reader and HTML formats.[30]
But the United States Government does insist on use of proprietary software in order to comment on regulations. [8]
As of April 11, 2017, Internet Explorer prior to version 11 is no longer supported. This is the result of Microsoft's decision in January 2016 to support only the newest version of Internet Explorer compatible with each version of Windows,[31] combined with the end of extended support of Windows Vista.[32] Thus you might not need jQuery.
Some people need long PC uptime in order to simultaneously satisfy customer service requirements to store customers' orders in progress and legal requirements not to store certain information on a nonvolatile medium. Windows 10's policy to automatically download and install updates and reboot the computer has caused problems for them.[9][10]
Some people actually carry a NAS box around with them instead of streaming video.
The consensus in replies to this post is that work ought to be done on desktop computers, and someone with a substantial transit commute ought to borrow a paper book from a library and read it instead of attempting to do gainful work during the commute on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
The Windows tax that the user sees can be negative. This is the case when Dell charges more for an XPS 13 laptop with Ubuntu than for the same hardware with Windows, or when System76 laptops with Ubuntu cost more than entry-level Windows laptops from other brands. High-volume proprietary software, such as Windows, can be cheaper than low-volume free software, such as X11/Linux, when the cost of product testing and support is amortized over more buyers.[33] In addition, makers of laptop PC chipsets offer drivers for Windows without charge but charge big bucks for the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) exception that allows a laptop maker to submit a driver upstream to the maintainers of Linux, X.Org, etc.[34]
Obfuscant thinks an iPad is a general-purpose computer because anybody who doesn't already own a Mac on which to run Xcode presumably doesn't want to program it bad enough.
The three hard problems in computer science are excessive indirection, cache invalidation, and naming things.[35] The word "Manager" in names of classes or other software components is rarely if ever clear. In most cases, something like "Builder" or "Balancer" or "Pool" better expresses what the component does.[36][37]
Employers reportedly expect college graduates to have known more than one programming language before high school.[38] This isn't practical if parents have a mindset to strictly limit screen time to encourage outdoor activity, stranger danger be damned.[39] Even allowing unlimited screen time after completion of homework imposes a deadlock if said homework includes AP Computer Science homework or a term paper that must be typed.
Eevee, author of a widely cited rant against PHP and member of the gbdev Discord server, also wrote a case against Zed Shaw's "The Case Against Python 3".
Need to run a Mac-only application and a Windows-only application? If it's for an employer, then it's no problem to carry two laptops, one for a set of applications that run on one operationg system and the other for another on another.[40]
By letting bug 1325692 linger unfixed for years, Firefox passes the buck on disabling data-losing keyboard shortcuts to window manager developers. See sasawat/firefox-ctrl-q-workaround
Some sources claim that "dumb" TVs (those without built-in Internet video streaming) <a href="https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/19/01/10/1354210/taking-the-smarts-out-of-smart-tvs-would-make-them-more-expensive">would be more expensive because of kickbacks paid by networks to preinstall their streaming apps on "smart" TVs</a>. (Others, pointing to <a href="https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=17999150&cid=60949322">smart TVs that have a dumb counterpart</a>, don't see this effect.)
Some people, such as Noah Draper, recommend replacing a smartphone with a dumbphone and a laptop computer. There are two reasons behind this: laptops have better input devices for creating substantial works (as opposed to viewing works created by others), and laptops come closer to respecting the user's freedom. This has led some users to seek out netbooks, or low-cost compact laptops. But after the discontinuation of netbooks in December 2012, commonly mentioned alternatives are alternatives are a Chromebook with x86 CPU running NaCl Development Environment, a Chromebook running Crouton (with a conspicuous warning taped on the screen bezel not to reenable OS verification), a sufficiently new Chromebook running X11/Linux apps in a Crostini container, and a tablet with clip-on keyboard running Android Nougat.
Runaway's netbook replacements
Netbook recommendations: Anonymous Coward, first quarter 2017; bhetrick, first quarter 2017; wjcofkc, first quarter 2017; vux984 recommended Pinebook. Slashdot user knorthern knight reports that the Dell Inspiron mini 1012 has been replaced with the Inspiron 11 3000 series, which works with Linux. Anonymous Coward recommended a 2 in 1 Dell laptop at Walmart. Another Anonymous Coward recommended stockpiling the dwindling supply of netbooks and learning to repair them yourself,[11][12] even to the extent of remanufacturing rechargeable lithium ion battery packs with fresh cells.[13] (The same is true of repairing the DC power jack on the dwindling supply of pre-SCPH-90000 PlayStation 2 consoles that can still run FreeMcBoot.[14])
The latency of cheap VoIP causes hesitation, which may be misinterpreted as being unsure of what to say,[15] and may cause the participants to interrupt each other.[41]
Some Slashdot users call cell phones a luxury,[16][17][18][19] claiming that people who need a ride home ought to accept the inflexibility of planning an entire day in advance.[20] Others are more reasonable and recognize them as a necessity in the era of dwindling availability of public pay phones,[21][22] unless you can borrow one from someone else in the area.[23][24] Others concede that a flip phone is a necessity, while calling a smartphone still a luxury.[25] However, Wayne Gladstone of Cracked is under the impression that voice calls shall be used only for the most urgent purposes, leaving texting for everything else.[42] This means people in the industrialized world are expected to own mobile phones with at least a QWERTY keyboard, not land lines or 10-key flip phones, and to subscribe to a mobile phone plan without an excessive fee to send and receive text messages. And providers of web-based services from Google to Facebook to Yahoo! are demanding that users hand over a unique mobile phone number that can receive SMS. Some impose this as a condition of signing up in the first place (Yahoo!), others as a condition of continued use of an account after a certain period of time (the Facebook "roadblock" and Twitter's verification in case of automatic detection of conduct that may violate its rules), others as a condition of adding more privileges to an existing user account (Google's Gmail, YouTube's longer uploads, and Facebook's verified status, which web sites using Facebook Connect login can see), and still others as a condition of using 2-factor authentication through TOTP (Twitter until November 2019).[43] This fails for land line users and for households whose members share a mobile phone.
Some Slashdot users call home Internet access a luxury, claiming that anyone who needs Internet to find a job, file a tax return, or whatever can do so at a public library. Others claim that relying on a library like this is inconsiderate.[26] Still others claim that the next library is in a different town due to budget cuts,[27] and this is unacceptably inconvenient because of the overall lack of public transit in rural areas.[28][29]
At one time, AT&T Mobility and other U.S. carriers had a "standard practice" of cramming a data plan onto a cellular bill if the subscriber inserts a voice-only SIM into a smartphone. (Joel Runyon, via Slashdot) Later, users figured out how to work around this by buying a SIM online and activating it through a web browser on a desktop or laptop computer.[30] Over time, some MVNOs stopped cramming,[31] as did T-Mobile USA, whose $36/yr pay-as-you-go plan works on a Coolpad Catalyst phone running Android.
Android allegedly infringes Microsoft's patents, and China required Microsoft to disclose these patents as a condition of buying Nokia.[44]
There are practical problems with OAuth client credentials, especially as used in OpenID Connect (OAuth 2) and Twitter clients distributed as free software (OAuth 1). The documentation for Amazon Marketplace Web Service, whose authentication process closely resembles OAuth 1, recommends that each user of a desktop application register as a developer.[45]
Netflix's upstream ISPs, such as Level 3 and Cogent, have had disagreements with major home ISPs over settlement-free peering. The problem is harder for the public to understand because ISPs manipulate the perception.
Popular web browsers don't support DANE, a way to distribute TLS certificates through a DNS zone, for two reasons. First, DNSSEC used 1024-bit RSA keys until October 2016,[46] which browser publishers determined to be unacceptably short. Even since then, use of DNSSEC and DANE remains negligible because many registrars have made DNSSEC impractical for domain owners. Some charge extra (such as GoDaddy), while others require a support ticket to make DNSSEC configuration changes (such as eNom).[47]
Google Search has a policy against "cloaking", or presenting different documents to human viewers and search engines.[48] Under some circumstances, Google indexes sites that require a subscription to view, as an exception to its cloaking policy. This process was first spotted in 2004 with the Google Scholar program, which indexed articles in paywalled academic journals for use by students and faculty of subscribing universities, and critics decried Google's lack of transparency with respect to "approved cloaking"[49] and the frustration that non-academic or otherwise non-subscribing viewers face when search results from pay sites are mixed in with results that can be viewed without charge. It took over a decade for Google to publish a policy that explicitly distinguishes paywalls from other forms of cloaking,[50] including how to indicate to Googlebot that a document is behind a paywall.[51]
One advantage that some fans of proprietary web chat (such as Skype, Slack, and Discord) tout over IRC is that an IRC server by default is incapable of logging messages sent to channels. There exists third-party plug-in to produce m_chatlog in InspIRCd, but it is unknown whether corresponding plug-ins exist for other IRC server software, and the major IRC networks (EFnet, Freenode, Esper, etc.) don't offer it.
Some people consider JavaScript in the browser to be evil. See Web applications.
Cellular carriers in the United States typically keep only two air interface generations in operation at once, ending service on the older air interface to make spectrum available for a new air interface. For example, AT&T shut down its GSM ("2G") network in January 2017, and Verizon shut down its own 2G network in 2019.[52]. AT&T expects to sunset its UMTS ("3G") network in February 2022 in favor of 5G NR.[53] This means that cellular communication can be considered perpetually patented, as by the time the essential patents encumbering an air interface expire, there typically are no carriers left to offer service on that air interface.
Team Fortress 2 has hats. Lots of them.
Pointy hats are cute,[41] but top hats are three times as good for carrying things[42][43] because πr2h (cylinder volume) > 1/3*πr2h (cone volume). Fantasma Toys sells an illusion prop kit (Abracadabra Top Hat Show, UPC 850550002876), which includes a collapsible top hat with a pocket and a rabbit hand puppet. In cultures where top hats are commonly worn, pulling a pet from your hat is probably not considered a "trick" as much as a lead-in to an animal act.
An herbal medication whose formula resembles that of a stereotypical witch's brew is as of 2015 the best hope for controlling MRSA. So don't be surprised if phytotherapy technicians start wearing pointy black hats.[54]
When fictional woodland animals civilize, they start wearing clothes, and outsiders become victims of nudity bans.[55]
Are "hipsters in unnecessary scarves"[56] any more weird than businessmen in unnecessary neckties?
Another reason to wear a long jacket is to cover up post-micturition dribble, that last drop of pee before you put your trousers back on.[57]
"Don't wear a hat wider than your shoulders."[58] I guess that gives a good limit for practical Plop or Witcher clerk cosplay.
Hoop skirts had passed out of general fashion by the end of the 1860s but survived for some special occasions. The increase in the cost of wire due to World War I caused a cemetery association in Missouri to abandon hoop skirts in its December 1916 festivities.[59] Wartime restrictions on fabric also ended up being how hemlines rose in the twentieth century.
Quote-mining to comically miss the point:
"Spinal Tap sucks."[60]
Game Theory has an episode titled "Super Smash Bros. Tragic Hidden Lore", which claims that the end bosses of the first four Super Smash Bros. series tell Mr. Sakurai's autobiography through allusion. About halfway through, it refers to the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS iterations collectively as Super Smash Bros. For.
Who is Rosetta Stone?[44] I know Mavis Beacon is as fictional as Mario, and Rosetta is the Japanese name of Rosalina from Super Mario Galaxy, but where's the link to language teaching other than a cheap pun on the name of a hieroglyphic inscription?
Reportedly, all signed protolanguages are SOV.[61]
An English noun phrase places the color adjective before the noun ("blue cup"), but color words after the noun are easier to learn from a "surprise" standpoint. An article by Michael Ramscar suggests teaching colors in English as predicate complements, such as "the cup is blue".[62] This means constructions such as the Koine Greek "and divine was the Word" end up counterproductive. Other adjective ordering rules can be analyzed using game theory.[63]
When you lose your pOnOs (see "Jam It In"), you lose your ponos (Croatian for pride).[64]
There is speculation that ablaut morphology, from the three-grade system of Proto-Indo-European to the more intricate root-and-pattern system of Semitic, may have begun as morphemic stress with unstressed vowel reduction, followed by reanalysis of the reduced vowels and possibly vowels of suffixes as part of the morpheme, combined with umlaut (anticipatory fronting of the last stem vowel to match a suffix vowel that is later lost).[65]
A lot of languages include a lot of things other than sex in their gender agreement systems. Bantu languages have eight or more genders, for instance. It makes me wonder if any languages include sexual orientation in their pronouns, or if any have different forms for object pronouns or object definite articles based on whether the gender matches or differs from that of the subject. I know Dutch isn't among them despite het.
Fu Go: Japan got balloon fever during WWII[45] (and I don't mean the gay kind): bomb-carrying balloons. (This makes Thwaite unintentional truth in television.) But on the other hand, hot air balloons are "totally gay anyway".[46]
In RPG world they have flightless birds as big as bison. But that still doesn't make their fried wings "buffalo wings".[47]
In real life, spiders have a hookshot to catch prey, and they spin-dash.[66]
Years ago I had planned to include a local currency denominated in hours of labor in a hotel management/desert exploration simulation game. (This was one of the predecessors of the DX Town concept.) It turns out I was by far not the first to think of that: Ithaca Hours, all the way back to Cincinnati Time Store. And the concept is still kicking around according to the Center for a New American Dream.
Indie means the developer is doing its own financing and promotion, everything but distribution, without access to venture capital (ceoyoyo, Anonymous Coward).
Video games may be too narrow of an industry to get into for those who worry about paying rent during a housing bubble. (mrchaotica)
There's one PC game with more bunny hopping than Counter-Strike: Lugaru.
It is the 2010s, and Tetris isn't cool anymore.[67] Rust is cool, but falling block games aren't written in Rust for a good reason.[68]
Even the PlayStation 2 was outselling the PlayStation Vita in 2012.
Bob's Game gives you "1 to 2 servings of eyeballs"[69]
Samsung TVs are good at receiving 240p video according to a comment by an anonymous Slashdot visitor. Ask Shmups, NESdev, etc. if they can confirm.
"I'm making a Genesis game. How do I shot FM instruments?" Yamaha published a guide.[70]
Stranger danger hysteria exists.
Pet raccoons (Here kitty!)[48]
Citation needed that Monster.com will have jobs. (#2)
Did the Teal Deer get that way by dyeing?[49]
A pixie's brain is so small it can't hold more than one emotion at once (source: Peter and Wendy). To what extent does this apply to similarly-sized Lilliputians? In any case, chickens are the same way.[50]
Everybody poops, even iPhone.[51]
One Mario Limit: Averted. Mary is not the only Poppins. [52][53]
Things to dispute: wikipedia:Talk:AC#not_asserted_in_articles
Sparlock the Warrior Wizard from episode 2 of Become Jehovah's Friend, published by Jehovah's Witnesses, has nothing to do with the interlocking concrete blocks of the Sparlock Building System. Yet one of Cracked's 5 Shockingly Advanced Ancient Buildings That Shouldn't Exist is almost as advanced as Sparlock. But both pale in comparison to Mark Pivac's "Hadrian" robotic bricklayer that builds a house in two days.
It's healthy to tell lies, not only because there are situations where you're supposed to stretch the truth[71] but also because big noses give more protection from pathogens.[72]
How a 3 ton elephant seal moves: YouTube
Not everybody has the same luck with a rice and beans diet as Dave Ramsey.[73] Others think Dave Ramsey's debt-free bootstrapped adulthood is inefficient, such as david_thornley.
The character Norma Desmond, a fictional silent film star in Sunset Boulevard, is known for expressing emotions with her eyes. But humans aren't alone in this capability; canids (wolves, etc.) do it as well. Japanese researchers found a correlation between visibility of eyes and social behavior: species with light irises tend to hunt in packs.[74] In canids, contrast between the iris and pupil helps members of a pack follow each other's gaze. In humans, the white sclera performs the same function.
"Yo dawg, I heard you believe in the sanctity of life. So God put a body in your body so you can live while you live." It's not Inception; it's conception.
Being nice is good for you.[75]
Live ornamental garden hermit, related to tiny house movement? In fact, at one point, people used to build a small house for a homeless man and pay a stipend for him to live there.[76]
Some people claim[54] that a work visa is worth it.
To fund an orphanage, start a day care.[77]
Anecdotal evidence can prove that something is possible, but not that it is common. Lack of usage share makes something academic.
A bicycle ought to be able to substitute for all personal use of an automobile if to this comment by johannesg is to be believed. Parents ought to have the right to carry a small child on the front and back of a bicycle, minor children ought to have the right to ride unaccompanied, riding with rain gear during a thunderstorm is practical, and housing within 10 km of work ought to be affordable.
A 2020 article in Housing, Theory & Society concluded that a sustainable home is no larger than 215 square feet per person, which was typical of the 1950s. This is far smaller than the 754 square feet seen in practice in the United States. But it leaves little margin given building codes as of 2020 that require at least 150 square feet per person.[78]