Amazing #IFComp development:
As those of you who follow the Comp will know, there's an unofficial award called "The Golden Banana of Discord" for the entry whose scores have the highest standaed deviation. My own game, The Gostak, set a record in 2001 with a standard deviation of 3.05 -- a record that stood for 25 years, but HAS NOW BEEN BROKEN

Hot take: "Unalive" is fine. It's a neologism, but it's etymologically sound. It is not in the same category as "grape" and "pdf file". It isn't even a euphemism: it says exactly what it means, extremely directly. The only reason to object to it is that it is new.

Has anyone ever tried making an X-men themed chess set? If so, did they include Bishop

Anyway it's on my mind right now because I just unexpectedly encountered a pholcus in my kitchen, right on the drawer I was about to open

I remember some time back coming across something that said something like "The term 'daddy long-legs' properly refers to the Opiliones or harvestman, but some people apply it to the crane-fly"

And I was like (A) What the heck, man, you do not get to declare that one colloquial regionalism is more proper than another, and (B) neither of these creatures is the daddy long-legs I grew up with (the Pholcus or cellar spider, which is imo much more deserving of the title than the harvestman)

AI-generated mathematical proofs raise philosophical questions about what counts as a proof and whether it's actually fulfilling the function of a proof if it's never passed through a human mind and whether being computer-generated should affect our confidence in a proof's correctness, but these aren't actually new questions. They're exactly the same questions that were raised by the computer-aided proof of the Four Color Theorem back in 1976

The spider has an important job to do. You don't have to like the spider but you should at least respect the spider;

I suspect this is one of those things that makes more sense in Latin than in English

The way the parts of speech were defined for me back in elementary school always seemed a little suspect. You have adjectives, which modify nouns, and they're distinct from adverbs, which modify... verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Those get lumped together despite the set of verb-modifying words and the set of modifier-modifying words being basically disjoint, but noun-modifiers have to be kept separate. This is Borges-style taxonomy.

Heck, maybe the solution is just to use fewer berries. The recipes all say to use 6 cups. Can I cut that down to 5 without reducing quality?

I'm trying to perfect my blueberry pie technique but I have yet to overcome the problem of the filling bursting the crust and leaking all over the place. I think I need to de-liquefy the berries somewhat.

The reason I like escape rooms is that the only time I feel connected to other people is when I'm solving something with them

One thing I think people outside of the New York metropolitan area don't fully understand is that Trump was already widely disliked in that area long before he entered politics. New York doesn't vote against Trump simply because he's a Republican. They vote against him because they had to put up with with him for decades before the rest of you, and during that time he was the one thing that New Yorkers hate more than anything else in the world: a New York landlord.

What if Batman wore cargo pants instead of a utility belt

Sometimes I really get the impression that the extremely wealthy don't even know that the rest of us haven't even been offered the kool-aid they've been drinking

What pair of existing movies with the same title are the most different from each other?

This question was prompted by comparing IF (2024), a whimsical yet bittersweet fantasy about forgotten imaginary friends, to If... (1968), starring Malcolm McDowell in his breakout role as teen who starts a violent insurrection at a British boarding school.

But I still think the greater gap is between any adaptation of Stephen King's IT and the 1927 Clara Bow film that defined the term "IT girl"

A semantic shift that does not bother me:
"literally" uses as an intensifier

A sematic shift that does bother me: "reality" used to mean subjective experience

I think one of the most beguiling things about LLMs is that you never have to explain the broader context to them. You can just launch in on completely esoteric subjects in full confidence that it has access to all the necessary background information. If it were a person, that would mean that it's part of the same subculture as you.

ENABLE lists 35 words consisting entirely of dots in Morse. "Sissies" and "hissies", which are tied for greatest number of letters, but "hissies" beats out "sissies" for number of dots, at a whopping 18.

There are only 18 words made entirely of dashes, probably mostly because the only vowel available is O. The longest in both letters and dashes is "motmot", which is the bird family containing kingfishers.

There are 28 words in the ENABLE word list whose representation in Morse code consists of alternating dots and dashes. The one with the greatest number of letters is "entente" (. -. - . -. - .), but the one with the longest Morse representation is "tartar" (- .- .-. - .- .-.)