Buster: “It’s not the pronunciation that I’m worried about.”

Have you ever seen a calzone?

how many ways can you really communicate with a cell tower?

Analog encoding assigns each device in a cell its own frequency range.

Time-domain multiplexing assigns each device a fraction of a second to transmit.

Quadrature phase-shift keying alters the timing of a signal to convey data.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has each device transmit the same signal over P out of Q bands, such that each device’s signal can be reconstructed by knowing which bands it transmitted on.

There’s a fucking reason your phone is faster now than in 2010.

How cell phones work is ridiculously complicated. Going from analog, to time-domain shenanigans, to binary wizard math, is why you can watch 720p video and whine that it’s not 1080p.

In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight "" style is all anyone actually types, and it’s unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.

The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that’s insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who’d care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.

This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.

The em dash as a concept is a relic. People now communicate those uses with a dash between spaces, or with two dashes.

It’s like worrying which direction your quotation marks curl. They don’t.

“This is just a quick message to anyone out there who might be thinking of one day become an adult. I would personally advise against it.”

Extra fun on a laptop.

Listen honey, you’re going in a bag for three hours, immediately fucking now. You can either turn off nicely or get smothered by the power button.

I mean $_.

“We wanted it to work like Perl,” said someone who should have been killed on the spot.

Search “Macintosh skydiving game.” Skydive! from 1999? You mean Skydive!? Don’t scroll down, it’s all Skydive!.

Search “classic Mac skydiving game.” Skydive!'s an iMac-era classic, so you must want another twenty of the same thing.

Search “classic Mac freefall game.” Ohhh, you mean Sky Diving Simulator, from the same year.

Deep sigh.

Search “classic Mac game where you can drop a guy on a horse.” Stunt Copter, yeah.

FINALLY.

Wittgenstein essentially said there is only counter-evidence. You cannot support an explanation; you can only disprove competing explanations. This was famously expressed as a conversation about heliocentrism. His friend said, “To ancient people, it looked like the sun went around the Earth.” Wittgenstein replied, “What would it have looked like if it looked like the Earth went around the sun?”

A high-effort shitpost that almost predates microprocessors.

Still signed by Noah, at a spry 413.

Ibid.

Engineers don’t let engineers design interfaces.

God Awful Movies covered Boondock Saints a couple years back, and one of the hosts demanded to know who replaced the movie they loved in college with some intolerable horseshit.

The sequels were all fanfiction. But they’re all distinct kinds of fanfiction.

7 is written like the characters are also fans of the movies: Finn is shocked by hologram technology he’d see every day, people parrot lines that were once clever, the camera lingers on a broken astromech droid, et very cetera. The returning characters are living legends famed for their transformative effect on the whole galaxy but also haven’t changed one iota since we last saw them.

8 is an anarchist deconstruction of Star Wars that somehow got turned into an actual Star Wars movie: a rebel soldier becomes disillusioned after her sister died for nothing, the good guy and bad guy agree the current conflict is a pointless sham, and details throughout scream that no mere organization could ever own the magic that belongs to all living beings. And then a surprise fourth act goes “whoops nevermind.”

9 is a toddler telling a story: “and then… and then… but no he didn’t?.. and then…” It’s like a child learned about fakeout deaths yesterday and expects it to be equally shocking every single time. Then the big battle needed to involve every toy in the toybox, especially the horses, because spaceships can’t look up. At least in the end we got the Rey x Kylo connection it all built toward, and their kids are gonna be the most powerful nevermind.

Reflective LCDs would have been equally blurry, in full color, and still tolerated optional tennis-ball-green frontlights for playing under the covers.

The real surprise came a decade later when everybody except Nintendo missed that active TFTs made color a decent option.

Oh god, Ni-Cd. Six hours of charging for fifteen minutes of use.