Thanks, yep! The transcribers they’ve got sometimes aren’t the best

I think the joke is just “so organic that the birds use the cashier’s hair as a nest”

I think that does stand for “Before Christ”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

Anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC) qualify years in the Gregorian and Julian calendars, whose epoch is the traditional year of the conception or birth of Jesus. AD counts years since the epoch, BC the years before the epoch.

The modern terms are called Common Era:

Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are conventions used in the Gregorian or Julian calendar to specify whether the year is before or after the epoch. They correspond exactly to Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC): “2026 CE” is the same year as “AD 2026”, as are “400 BCE” and “400 BC”. BCE/CE are used to avoid religious associations by not referring to Jesus as Dominus (‘Lord’).

Personally, I think we should pick the start of the Holocene as year 0

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

I tried it and didn’t like it. Maybe I was expecting it to be more like Elder Scrolls games and it’s not; I haven’t played other games in the genre either. The combat felt clunky to me, though I’ve heard that it’s better to think of it as a rhythm game. I like dark fantasy, but didn’t quite connect with the worldbuilding either, maybe because it felt like a zombie game dressed up as fantasy. It’s also a minor thing, but was also obviously made for console and ported to PC so felt a little weird.

Some context on this comic:

Transcript (sketch):

“Mr. Caldwell… There’s a gentleman out here who claims an ancestor of yours defiled his crypt, and he’s here now to place his fingers around your throat & squeeze until your quivering body is forever still… should I send him in?”

Some context on this comic:

Transcript:

I felt like the first version of this was actually better, in the sense that, if the adult Grim Reaper carries a sickle, then as a kid he must have carried scissors. I worried about it for some reason and ended up changing it to the bottom version.

There’s !malefashionadvice@lemmy.world, which seems active

You do run the risk of ending up with lots of glass shards in your beer that way. Or at least I do, maybe it’s a skill issue

Some context for this comic:

Transcript:

Drawing God in any context, let alone a cartoon, poses some obvious risks.

In the upper left cartoon, I was careful to do two things; First, I made God look the way I think most of us are pretty sure he looks. Secondly, I made sure he was really winning hands down. Even if Norman had only ten points it would have meant that he beat God to the buzzer at least once, and someone would have gotten mad.

“In God’s Kitchen” was fairly benign, since the emphasis was mostly on the earth and the suggestion that things aren’t quite normal here and why.

I was mostly worried about the last cartoon shown here. Not because of readers, who for the most part found it to be a light and silly drawing, but because I started to feel like I was bucking for a lightning bolt to come out of the sky and turn me into something like the kid here.

It would be doable, and libraries have been amenable to this sort of thing, like not handing over records about checking out books. This is even easier than checking out books, since you don’t actually need to record who is attached to the account. Libraries could obfuscate information that could lead to invasion of privacy. And because it’s distributed and local, it’s much harder to abuse. If someone tried creating 100 accounts, the librarians would start remembering them and refusing to give them more. Going around to 100 libraries would also be much harder than spamming a new account page on some website.

becomes easier to dox if you have the person’s location

Yeah, I guess “take over” is too strong vs “provide the option of”. It shouldn’t be the only way, but would be one very good option. They don’t need to actually keep any records of who they gave an account to, and can take steps to obfuscate any privacy-violating processes. Historically, they’ve been very amenable to this, such as not handing over records about who checked out books.

How many libraries

That’d be a great thing IMO. More skills like that should be distributed and federated. Libraries should be community centers of learning, including learning how to run servers. Information isn’t just books anymore, and libraries need to adapt.

It’d be nice to see public libraries take over this sort of thing. They can do community-based physical verification, without cost. They can assert that someone is legit, without revealing any private info. They’d have to be low-drama, boring infrastructure, in that they merely assert “This person is real”, without getting into “This person is good”.

It’s not sexy like a new protocol or blockchain or whatever, but IMO it’s one of the few ways to really handle the problem, and also is a good way to help build local community.

Reminds me of this short from a while back. It didn’t quite predict the focus on smaller, cheaper drones, but still pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyMNIFZTQkg

This is also some good context about drones being the future of warfare, including in space. Star Wars having fighters duke it out with human pilots will almost certainly not be a thing:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php

Yeah, they rotate through the comics periodically at thefarside.com. There’s only so many comics to post, it’s probably about time to start seeing more repeats

The Godfather basically invented the modern idea of gangsters as sophisticated:

Gangsters reportedly responded enthusiastically to the film. Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss in the Gambino crime family, said: “I left the movie stunned … I mean, I floated out of the theater. Maybe it was fiction, but for me, then, that was our life. It was incredible. I remember talking to a multitude of guys, made guys, who felt the same way.” According to Anthony Fiato, after seeing the film, Patriarca crime family members Paulie Intiso and Nicky Giso altered their speech patterns to imitate that of Vito Corleone. Intiso was known to swear frequently and use poor grammar, but after seeing the movie, he began to improve his speech and philosophize more. In 2025, The Times reported that recruits to the Sicilian Mafia in Italy are now urged by mafia bosses to watch The Godfather so they can learn the trade and because mafia bosses fear that new recruits “lack a code of honour”.

There’s a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you’re reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I’d better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture’s quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person’s sex in Marain, but they’re not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it’s brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he’d think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

Kind of a combination of skull and open mouth emojis

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Another example of when a cartoon’s intent was lost on a lot of people. Very simply, I just meant that we all look a little longer and harder at things that fall upon our particular interests.

Interestingly, different in The Complete Far Side: