The other day I was at a second hand shop. I had some questions about their kitchen appliances and the staff was friendly and helpful. Then when he walked away, I read that the back of his shirt said "Abortion is dead wrong."

Many people around here don't speak English. It's very possible the guy had no idea what his shirt said.

What a predicament, right? I mean, what were the possible scenarios?

First off, asking if he knew what his shirt says would come of as condescending either way.

If he didn't know, it would be awkward for both of us if I'd had to inform him. (Though perhaps better for him in the long run)

If he did know and held such a strong negative opinion he needed to wear it on a shirt to work, uhh... that would surely become awkward too.

Well, I was just perplexed and walked out of the store. Not sure if it was the right decision. Perhaps I should have bit the bullet.

I saw these Pokemon marketing materials at McDonalds. Look at how round Pikachus head has become. It's a well documented phenomenon that Pikachu has changed over the 30 years of its existence. The head used to be a lot more plump and angular.

It's as if Pikachu is haunted by its younger self, Pichu, with its cute and perfectly round head. So maybe the only solution was cranial surgery.

Look at that Pikachu winking, tumbling and playing innocent. It had cranial surgery!

#pokemon #pikachu

This coke is "human made", what kind of joke is this?

I was literally talking to someone about how people are tired of technology and looking for more human contact etc when someone brought these coke cans that all said "human made" on them like the cans are delivering the punch line.

And it is funny. Not only because it conjures up a mental image of workers in a Coca Cola factory hand-pressing coca leaves into a large tank of Coca Cola or something.
The sheer bluntness of this marketing is funny too. Sure it's on some level human made, but so is depleted uranium. So what!

But the best thing is, it means the marketing executives are aware that people prefer human made things, too. That validates the sentiment we were expressing in the conversation right when we got the cans. It's like a written statement by the Coca Cola company that says "yup, people are tired of tech" delivered on a can of Coke. Amazing.

#marketing #coke #funny

I gave the Studio 2AM website a makeover, and uploaded another short story.

https://www.studio-2am.net/the-unfaithful/
It's .. uhm... if you channel all the jealousy you ever felt and turned it up to 11, something like this will be the result.

The page now has a premade theme, so it looks nice and not like the shoddy thing I had made myself before. Light mode and dark mode and everything.

#shortstory #writing #fiction

I just discovered, when during breakfast you use your knife to stir your coffee (instead of, say a spoon) the knife becomes hot and that makes it easier to put, for example, peanut butter on a toast. Wow, such a lifehack!

Steam is showing a calendar view of upcoming games. It shows two games for every day of the next two or three weeks. With a few exceptions, this is the respective release day.

Of course not all games are going to be for me. But even taking a closer look at each of these and considering whether I'd want to play them... it's too much @.@

#steam

A friend who's a teacher said she wanted to make the class (physics class, maybe?) more interesting to the kids, and started the lecture something like "Imagine Spiderman throwing the Joker off a building..." and all the kids started protesting "That's impossible!"

It's funny how we think about "canon" for fictional worlds. For example, we agree that fan-fiction isn't canon, but what does that mean? "It didn't really happen", but we're talking about fiction to begin with.

It's like we have a model of a world, and whether that world exists or is fictional doesn't matter. It's still a model and it needs internal consistency (or we call it plot hole), and we agree that fan-fiction is more like a "fork" of that world. We use it as a basis for conversations, and it shapes our expectations when we consume media that takes place in that world.

Not sure why I'm trying to formalize "canon" in fiction, but I always find it interesting. I mean, think about stuff like "Han shot first", when people start to question whether the original author still has the right to decide what's canon. Things become muddier the more people are involved.

I think as humans our thinking probably revolves so strongly around this "consensus model of the world" (as in, our reality) that we feel a lot better if we have a clear model of a fictional world as well, and so try to pin down what's canon or what isn't.

Mommy Simulator 2: Twins
Double the tears. Double the rampage.

Also, on a semi-related note: I sometimes get the feeling my posts on here are too long and they would be better fit for a blog.
But when I try to write it as a blog post or so, I always feel like I have to do thorough research, reach some conclusions etc as if I'm writing a thesis.
On here (snac2 or I suppose for most people it's seen as "Mastodon") I'm fine with just typing out some #showerthoughts and seeing if anyone has an opinion, hmmm.....

There has to be a better way to enter text on a phone than writing or swiping on a miniature QWERTY keyboard.

The qwerty layout is made for 10 finger typing. Some people go as far as calling qwerty ineffective in the first place, because it was created for typewriters, where a concern was that those little hammers that put letters on the paper didn't get stuck on each other when you're typing too fast. How strange that we're using this to type on phones now.

Consider for example the standard input method for Japanese: You have roughly 4x5=20 (except enter is double size, so 19) buttons, and on each one you hold and then swipe in a direction, or press and release. This gives you 5 different outputs for each key, and it works well because in Japanese there's no single "k", but "ka, ki, ku, ke, ko" etc.
In the end it's similar on how you would type on a flip-phone, but instead of repeating the same press you can swipe.

A Japanese phone keyboard also has latin input, but it's annoying to use because you need to "finish" each word manually, which is the equivalent to converting some hiragana to a kanji. Also I guess Japanese has an advantage because words consist of way less syllables than English words have letters.

But for example, how about this: For a language like English, have a look at the frequency of letters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
Now put only the top half number (or less) of keys on the keyboard for direct access. The less common half (or even two thirds) can still be typed, but via a hold and swipe, similar to what you do in Japanese.

The flip phones had letters mapped to buttons based on their order in the alphabet, but of course we want to make the 9 most common letters more easily accessible and the rest are hidden behind a press and swipe.

I'd also propose a vertical list of suggestion words that are based on a fuzzy finder search from the current word (with the easy option to remember custom words) making it quick to complete longer words.

I can't be the first person to come up with something like this, but looking for alternative keyboards in the app store, I didn't find anything.

#typing #keyboard

I played some Minesweeper on a Windows 11 computer, and when I activated a mine it offered me a chance to keep playing if I agreed to watch an ad. Hilarious! XD

Some years ago I lived in the greater Tokyo area which if you've ever been there, there's no clear line between Tokyo and Not-Tokyo. But I saw some old photographs taken from helicopters or so and it used to be all farms and woods.

I guess I knew and talked to some older people back then, and that's why I wrote this bit of fiction or short story:
https://www.studio-2am.net/pinetree

It's not really "finished", but it wraps up more or less. To be honest I had forgotten about 80% of this, so digging it up and re-reading it now feels like reading someone else's writing.

I think I had more in mind, but I'll post it as it is. If you decide to read (1500 words, about 6-7 minutes according to readtime.io) it would be nice if you'd let me know what you thought!

#fiction #writing #shortstory

Some people I follow post about electronics and the topic is really fascinating to me. I have these two remote control for air conditioners from the attached picture, and of course they don't work just by putting batteries in. So I thought why not give it a try to repair them?

Perhaps some fedi-people can give me pointers and we can have fun talking electronics. (Better than asking you-know-who, right?)
If you'll humor me, I'll outline my newbie approach below.

The beige one on the left I could not pry open. Removed two screws, but it's like the case is a single piece of plastic. I tried using a multimeter on the contacts, but it only beeps on what I assume is the "back" connection of the batteries that wires the plus and minus together.

On the "CAR-26P" it looks like the circuit board has some corrosion.
When I try the multimeter on the battery contacts it gives a short beep. And then when I switch the black and red thingies, it beeps again.

I tested the behavior on my working AC remote and it does the same: a short beep whenever I switch the needles.

With my high-school level knowledge of electronics (that is, close to zero), I'm assuming this is because it takes a short moment for a capacitor to charge and after that... idk I guess the resistance becomes too high? And if I switch the needles the polarity becomes reversed and the capacitor discharges or so, allowing some current to flow which makes the multimeter beep.

That's my theory at least, and that's where I'm at. I put the multimeter in random places and here and there it beeps, but that's about it. I wonder if the remote could work again by cleaning the corrosion... but how? Citric acid?

By the way a little background: These remotes are inherited from an elderly couple who are more or less recently deceased. They didn't have any descendants.
A while ago I posted about some old newspaper I found while taking care of their things here

I didn't really know them, and the wife died a few years earlier leaving the husband behind for a while. Now I'm going through tons of old clothes, books, tools, tableware, futons, blankets.... just generally tons of stuff.

It's strange, going through a dead person's private things. They had a habit of writing their name on a lot of the boxes and things. But without any descendants, the name now marks the items as belonging to a person that no longer exists. And I'm throwing most of it in the burnable trash and erase their last traces.

I don't mean to sound negative. It's the way things go for all of us eventually. But until then, let's try to keep our things in good shape.

So, any idea about the remotes?

#electronics #repair #diy

Anyone else had such a bad experience with the "pomodoro method" of time management?

It's really common and a lot of people seem to like it. I'll explain it just in case: You set a timer for like an hour, do focused work and then take a break for 5 or 10 minutes. Then another hour, then maybe 30 minutes. The lengths can be adjusted and generally get smaller as they go on.

As soon as I set the timer, my mind constantly goes to it. How much time left on the timer? Hm, 20 minutes? But if I start doing x now the timer will ring in the middle of it? Oh still an hour, oh no a random unrelated question just popped up in my head, but I have to wait an hour until I can look it up!?

It's easy to draw the conclusion that maybe pomodoro isn't for me. Of course not every method has to work for everyone. But maybe I should work on building mental muscles that allow me to push these doubts aside and learn to focus let the timer be the ultimate guide.

#pomodoro #timeManagement #showerthoughts

Something I always found remarkable about Fahrenheit 451 is how it explicitly says the book-burning situation didn't come about due to a dictatorship or similar, but "bottom-up" because the people lost interest in books. Here's a quote:

"It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God."

According to Wikipedia it seems Ray Bradbury changed his mind, or at least the way he explained his inspiration for the book several times over the years.
I have no idea about the political climate of the 1950s, but it wasn't long after WWII, Nazis and everything, so that seems like it might have been a prime motivation.

These days of course, the mentions of technology and media consumption habits seem far more relatable:

“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

It's like he foresaw Tik-Tok!
As a 2020s person I find it mind-boggling to think about someone from the 1950s being concerned with "condensations and digests".
I mean, color TV only just became commonplace in 1953. Wow.

In Fahrenheit 451, comics are mentioned like some sort of abberation. Well, Bradbury is talking about 1950s comics, but the medium has developed since then and comics aren't just 4 panel strips.

Video games weren't around, but I can see how people from the 80s would be concerned with kids playing Space Invaders all day. But games have undergone a development in the opposite direction, to taking a good deal of investment (both with respect to time as well as emotionally and I'd say also intellectually)

In acoustics there's a phenomenon called the "shepard tone", which consists of several rising notes overlaid over each other and fading in and out to give the impression of a continually rising note.

I guess what I want to say is, by all means we should be vigilant about how we use our media, but perhaps part of our impression of how media is changing or worsening is like a shepard tone? After all we're still here having mostly civilized and dare I say it profound discussions, even though we're not writing paper letters or publishing in journals, but using the horrible "social media", offshoots of a service that at it's launch allowed posts of at most 140 characters in length.

#fahrenheit451 #socialmedia #enshittification

Some of the most baffling time-travel mechanics can be found in early Doraemon.
Sewashi is Nobitas great great grandson, and in his timeline he's poor due to Nobitas failures, and Nobita married Jyaiko.
Sewashi travels back in time to give Doraemon to Nobita to help him out. This will result in Nobita being successful as a person, marrying Shizuka, and Sewashi becoming rich.

In the chapter, Nobita even points out like "wait, if I don't marry Jyaiko you won't be born" but Sewashi brushes it off, saying it's like if you go to Osaka, it doesn't matter if you go by boat or train, the result will be the same. So he, Sewashi, will always be him. This seems to be destined, but whether he's rich or poor can be changed? Hmm.

Even for a super patriarchal "male bloodline" reading it's a stretch that the mother would be so insignificant as to result in the same exact Sewashi multiple generations later.

But then, let's cut Doraemon some slack since this is from 1969 and back then it wasn't yet widely understood how time travel works. Not until 1985s Back to the Future did we get a truly scientific take. If these chapters of Doraemon ever get remade, Sewashi should properly become more and more transparent as things go wrong and his birth is endangered.

#doraemon #manga #timeTravel