ABCD

'Wait, why would you think a movie set in 1984 would do drive-ins as a retro promotion?' 'You know, 80s stuff. Drive-in movies. Britney Spears doing the hustle. Elvis going on Ed Sullivan and showing off his pog collection.' 'What year were you born, again?'

It's frustrating to calibrate your precautions when there's only one kind of really definitive feedback you can get, you can only get it once, and when you do it's too late.

Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'

I can't wait until this is all over and I can go back to riding my horse through the mall.

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

I'll never install a smart home smoke detector. It's not that I don't trust the software--it's that all software eventually becomes email, and I know how I am with email.

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.

For those of you also taking Game Theory, your grade in that class will be based on how close your grade on this exam is to 80% of the average.

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

He also broke the streak that incumbents with websites are unbeatable and Delawareans can't win, creating a new precedent: Only someone from Delaware can defeat an incumbent with a website.

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

Call me, MAYBE.

Doing great here in the sixth and hopefully final year of the 2016 election.

New phone OS features: Infinite customization (home screen icons no longer snap to grid), dark mode (disables screen), screaming mode (self-explanatory), and coherent ultracapacitor-pumped emission (please let us know what this setting does; we've been afraid to try it).

The state has had so many contact tracers disappear into that shop that they've had to start a contact tracer tracing program.

[Six months later] "Well, our 'worst ladder' subscription series was a surprisingly lucrative success, but was completely canceled out by the losses from the disastrous Home Depot merchandising tie-in."

I'm proud to announce that as of this year I've become a world-class expert at chewing.

Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.

Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?

Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.

You'd think it'd be easy to just bet money against these people, but you have to consider the probability of them paying up.

Changes with this update: If you use the combined scan-shred function, it now performs them in that order instead of the reverse, saving a HUGE amount of CPU time.

Your point that the world contains multiple problems is a real slam-dunk argument against fixing any of them.

Haunted Halloween masks from a mysterious costume shop that turn you evil and grow into your skin score a surprisingly high 80% filtration efficiency in R. L. Stine-sponsored NIOSH tests.

I told her I'd take her address off the packaging if she'd stop submitting anonymous food safety complaints about my bakery to the health department, but she sent me a note that said NO DEAL along with an extra large batch of cookies.

SMS is just the worst, but I'm having trouble convincing people to adopt my preferred system, TLS IRC with a local server and a patched DOSBox gateway running in my mobile browser.

Bloody Mary is made of antimatter. It explains so much.

(c) You can have a scooter when you pay for it yourself, and (d) if you can't learn to start a new thread rather than responding to an old one, you'll be banned. [thread locked by moderator]

Phylogeneticists are working on identifying and notifying its next of kin.

'Wait, our state has mail voting. The forms are literally on the kitchen table.' 'Not now, I'm busy researching which channels have sharks in them.'

This article is about Eta Carinae, a luminous blue hypergiant with anomalous Fe[ii] emission spectra. For the 1998 Brad Bird film, see The Iron Giant (film).

Both too cautious AND not cautious enough: "I'm skeptical that those are aliens, so I'm going to try pulling off their masks."

The most important attributes of a vector in 3-space are {Location, Location, Location}

Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.

It's rare to get both astronomers and astrologers equally mad at you, but apparently I've messed up both a bunch of star location databases AND the will of the fates.

I admit this is an exaggeration, since I can think of at least three parties I attended while doing my degree, and I'm probably forgetting several more.

It may remain in equilibrium for some time, slowly growing, and then suddenly become significantly redder.

Our flight gathered valuable data on whether a commercial airliner in the eye of a hurricane can do a loop.

We need some grub to munch--I'll go slouch over to the kitchen.

Bugs are spin 1/2 particles, unless it's particularly windy.

When my great grandfather designed the Titanic and it hit an iceberg and sank, he didn't sit around moping. He took those lessons to his next job designing airships, and he made the Hindenburg completely iceberg-proof!

Washington state is seeing great success with reintroducing the Columbia River Basin subpopulation. We cannot allow them to further widen the interstate bun gap.

'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'

Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.

I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.

Congratulations to whoever wished for revenge on a forest near the Tunguska River, a 1980 Chevy Malibu in Peekskill NY, Alabama resident Ann Hodges, every building in Chelyabinsk with glass windows, and the non-avian dinosaurs.

There are some papers arguing that there's a volcanic component, but I personally think they're just feeling guilty and trying to cover the trail.

Oh no, a musician just burst in through the door confidently twirling a treble clef.

I don't see why everyone is so hungry for BAD news, but fine, I'll give in to feedback and add a dark mode.

I vaguely and irrationally resent how useful WebPlotDigitizer is.

Inflationary cosmologists call all music from after the first 10^-30 seconds "post-"

Canada's travel restrictions on the US are 99% about keeping out COVID and 1% about keeping out people who say 'pod.'

I asked them if it was safe to be running tours during the pandemic. They said, "During the what?"

I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"

Oh no, my marshmallow became tidally locked!

It's okay, they scan the serial numbers and make sure you can't deposit the same bill more than once.

Remember the CPS 2000, the super soaker that was discontinued because it was too powerful? Relatedly, can I borrow your tuba?

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

The Wirecutter staff called the Herman Miller Siege Perilous "the most cursed product we've ever had to fight" and "nearly as immortal as it boasts."

The worst is being teased by responsible, mask-wearing teens. They even spritz the hamster ball with disinfectant before rolling it, carefully avoiding the filter vents.

Good thing I'm not already prone to overthinking everyday decisions!

There are plenty of finer gradations. I got 'critically endangered/extinct in the wild' on my exam, although the curve bumped it all the way up to 'venti.'

My shooting will improve over the short term, but over the long term the universe will take more shots.

We're underwater on our mortgage thanks to the low price of water.

My other (much harder) hobby is trying to engineer situations where I have an excuse to use more than one of them in short succession.

My biggest fear is that colonial engineers will try to flood me to generate electricity. My biggest hope is that I'll develop sailing stones.

The git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.

You've got questions, we've got assumptions.

The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.

The only effect on the history books were a few confusing accounts of something called 'Greek fire.'

The hard part about opening a hole in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture is that Grigori Perelman will come out of retirement to try to fix it by drawing a loop around the hole and contracting it to a point.

10^13.4024: A person who has come back to numbers after a journey deep into some random theoretical field

Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word.

The other side of USB-C is rotationally symmetric except that the 3rd pin from the top is designated FIREWIRE TRIBUTE PIN.

Hourly haircuts would be annoying, but they'd be easier to do yourself, since you'd have adjacent hairs as a guide. Growing it out would be a huge pain, though.

Later I'm going to get a head start on the heat bath.

Nature abhors a vacuum and also anything that's not a crab.

Deep in some corner of my heart, I suspect that real times tables are wrong about 6x7=42 and 8x7=56.

Hello and welcome to Millibar Millibarn Attometer, an advice show for the Planck era.

The worst part is that's the millisigma interval.

Living in the southern hemisphere was nice because I could jump extra high, but I like it here too. Besides, if I ever want to move back, I can just curl up in a ball and wait!

The worst is when you run out of monospaced fonts and have to use variable-width variables.

It's a good mountain but it really peaked in the 80s.

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

Not even metapneumovirus, easily the common cold virus with the coolest name, warrants our sympathy. Colds suck. No mercy.

If you want to see the polling questions we agree on MOST, you can check out Chapter 24 of my book How To, where I got the Roper Center on Public Opinion Research to help me design the world's least electable political campaign platform.

DOWNSIDES: Adobe people may periodically email your newsroom to ask you to call it an 'Adobe® PDF document,' but they'll reverse course once they learn how sarcastically you can pronounce the registered trademark symbol.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

As the 'exotic animals in homemade aprons hosting baking shows' YouTube craze reached its peak in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo announced he was replacing the Statue of Liberty with a bronze pangolin in a chef's hat.

It's possible the bread and shell can be split into a top and bottom flavor, and some models additionally suggest Strange Bread and Charm Shells.

If enough people uphill decide to try the rolling strategy, they can make the decision for you.

[moments later, checking phone] Okay, I agree my posting it was weird, but it's somehow even more unnerving that you immediately liked the post.

Spellcheck has been great, but whoever figures out how to get grammar check to work is guaranteed a Nobel.

One of the things of bear spray says that, and I'm not one to disobey safety instructions, but there are no bears around here. Guess it's time for a camping trip where we leave lots of food out!