ABCD

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And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

It me, your father.

I know they said this change is permanent, but surely when they hear how much we're complaining someone will find a way to change things back.

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

Of course, "Number of times I've gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out" is still at 0.

Technically DC isn't a state, but no one is too pedantic about it because they don't want to disturb the snakes.

If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, "How did this situation happen?"

[bzzzt] "REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON." "My wha-" [bzzzt] "YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES."

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.

DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: "If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table."

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

We can do this.

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--" / "Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?"

But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

I got to check off 'Make something called xkcd' early.

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

Whenever you see a video of birds doing something weird, remember: Birds are a small subset of dinosaurs, so the weirdness of birds is a small subset of the weirdness of dinosaurs.

"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures." "My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat."

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

'Copy and paste from a random thread on a website' is the hardest to predict, and depends on the specific website, programming language, tone of the description, and current phase of the moon.

Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

* Mad about jorts

"I've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

I still don't understand why the Sun paid the extra money for Transitions lenses.

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.

Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...

The New Worlds Mission is already trying to get funding for this, but NASA sponsored their proposal, so it will be hard to catch the telescope people by surprise with it.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

Take THAT, piece of 1980s-era infrastructure I've inexplicably maintained on my systems for 15 years despite never really learning how it works.

They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.

I'm excited about the proposal to add a "brontosaurus" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.

The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.

Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...

Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!

This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.

*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

They CLAIM honey was found in the chambers under the pyramids, but this conspiracy goes all the way to the TOP, where the GIANT EYE is!

'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'

To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.

It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

"Ok, I lit the smoke bomb and rolled it under the bed. Let's see if it--" ::FWOOOSH:: "Politifact says: PANTS ON FIRE!"

For obvious reasons, the prize is awarded at a different time of year from the others, while it's still fresh in the committee's memory.

A childhood spent walking while reading books has prepared me unexpectedly well for today's world.

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.

Still waiting for the Pokémon Go update that lets you capture strangers' pets.

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'

TinyURL was the most popular link shortener for long enough that it made it into a lot of printed publications. I wonder what year the domain will finally lapse and get picked up by a porn site.

These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word "meh."

Lambda calculus? More like SHAMbda calculus, amirite?

It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

Later, walking out of jail after posting $10,000 bail: "Wait, this isn't the street the county jail is on."

Calm down--there were lots of arthropods living on your skin already. These ones are just bigger.

For even more info, see blarbl(2)(3) and birb(3ahhaha I'm kidding, just Google it like a normal person.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil, so to start this project I'd better come up with a system that can determine whether a possible optimization is premature or not.

'List of helicopter prison escapes' and 'List of sexually active popes' are both entertainingly long, but sadly there's no 'List of helicopter prison escapes involving sexually active popes.'

I can't get any work done because my friend Catherine is sitting on my keyboard.

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

I hate how the media only ever uses the first part of this quote, stripping it of its important context.

'How long are you going to keep this up?' 'Statistically, only four or five more decades.'

My optimizer uses content-aware inpainting to fill in all the wasted whitespace in the code, repeating the process until it compiles.

Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.

“If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover text”!

If a wild bun is sighted, a nice gesture of respect is to send a 'BUN ALERT' message to friends and family, with photographs documenting the bun's location and rank. If no photographs are possible, emoji may be substituted.

ERRORS: HAIR JAM. COLOR-SAFE CONDITIONER CARTRIDGE RUNNING LOW. LEGAL-SIZE HAIR TRAY EMPTY, USING LETTER-SIZE HAIR ONLY.

It also brings all the boys, and everything else, to the yard.

BREAKING: Channing Tatum and his friends explore haunted city

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users