It depends on the context. If I’m home alone I’m likely to be somewhere around relieved to neutral to laughter, because sometimes I find it impossible to be mature about it.

Making such noises in public is a different matter. Embarrassment, first or second hand, would tend to override any and all other reactions.

Also, the fear of what I might be about to breathe in after other people’s.

No close friends. The family that the stuff is from are unrelated to the majority of my relatives. Those who are related will get first pick, no doubt, but I know them and I suspect there’d be very little interest or attachment.

They might get a few quid on eBay, or whatever exists by then, I suppose.

I have a couple of things already from relatives who have already left us and expect I might get a few more when others pass on (not for a while yet, I hope). None of them are particularly valuable, but they mean something to me because of who they’re from.

I have no descendants, so I expect everything will be discarded when I’m gone.

They already do that, sort of. The last I heard, people watching with an ad-blocker also blocked the mechanism that incremented the watch counter. This may or may not have been deliberate. The interesting thing is that the video appears in people’s Watch History ad-blocker or not, so there was always an easy fix sitting in plain sight.

They told creators about the watch count problem along with at least one other secret thing that they said they weren’t allowed to talk about. Charlie / Cr1TiKaL / penguinz0 said as much as he could about it a few months back.

I think the secret thing was probably “we’re working on a way to get those view counts back, but don’t tell anyone because we want to discourage people from using ad-blockers and if you tell them they’re costing people views, it might convince them to turn it off.”

Assuming true, that’s all now out of the window because they’ve “fixed” the problem.

I expect another fierce attack on ad-blockers in Q4.

For the sake of ethnic origin, white South Africans are European, but I grant you that things are getting to the point of being somewhat complicated there too.

Butyric acid smells like vomit, not farts. Fart-type smells are usually sulphur-containing compounds like hydrogen sulphide.

I note that this page gives sodium sulphide as one of the chemicals used in paper making, which readily turns into hydrogen sulphide in wet, acidic environments, so that would be my best guess.

I suppose that means it’s possible that if there’s butyric acid vapour coming in from elsewhere(?), then sure, that could be the trigger, but you’d smell vomit first.

Either way, a cheap thing to try would be a homemade baking soda deodoriser. That would neutralise acids as well as hydrogen sulphide (by turning it back into the sodium sulphide).

The main caveat is that if any of the other smelly compounds are alkaline nitrogen compounds (skatole, long chain diamines), baking soda won’t help with those.

Black for Sub-Saharan African descent, sure. Things get a bit more difficult if you want to talk about north Africans.

Start with “NOPLATE”, “NCC1701”, “XXX” and “NULL”.

There might be others that have ended up in the news as a result of human (police or programmer) error, but just those four over fifty States is a good 200 to start with.

I’m getting the impression that Mimi might be schizophrenic, or at least schizotypal, but counter to expectation, she’s evil by default and the compulsions make her do nice things.

Had AI inflation not taken hold, I think most budget builders would still be opting for DDR4, so this headline feels like a non-sequitur to me.

Assault and battery is illegal, so therefore if you kick him in the shins, that didn’t happen either. It’s win-win!

What’s the cactus done to deserve that?

It looks like Clickhole either deleted or moved that article earlier this year at some point in 2025. And if they moved it, they didn’t update their link in their “best of 2018” post from 2024.

They’re also still selling the t-shirt with the headline quote on it.

Anyway, here’s an archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250517005853/https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/

House smells can build up or become stale in the absence of people, so it depends on how much the actions of the cat sitter and cat affected the air when they were away.

Their house probably smells a little like what it does after their trip away, but not exactly.

Anecdotally, I remember coming home to a smell when we’d get back from holidays as a kid and it wasn’t the same smell as when I’d get home from school, even if I arrived to no-one else there.

I know. While I didn’t explicitly say so, I chose my words very carefully.

The one I tried was DuckDuckGo’s, and it provides links to what are supposed to be sources and it can also search the web for itself.

I checked each of its apparent sources and couldn’t find its claim in them, and when I asked it, it did its own search - something it has successfully* done in the past. It found more potential sources and could not find the claim in those either.

My phrasing was then “I was able to get it to tell me that it made that statistic up”. That doesn’t mean that it did make it up, or that it understood, but it was able to join the dots from the conversation and conclude that it, or a previous instance of it, might have made it up, and so one of its probable responses, especially given my inputs to that point, was an admission, and it was all but forced into giving that one.

* - A while ago, it actually found a source for an answer it gave when I asked it to do so. It had misunderstood (or misread, or some other more suitable word for what they actually do) the source and was wrong, but it at least found a page that was very likely where it got the information from in the first place.

(Ironically, I misread a source and was wrong about something very recently. I would say I know how it feels, but you and I both know that would also be wrong.)

Yeah, I know it matches the description of one of those. I’m very glad it wasn’t one of the chest-sitters.

I’ve told this story before.

I cannot fall asleep on my back. Or rather, I find it incredibly difficult to do so.

One night, I was dead tired and laid on my back as I normally do to get the bed warm before turning on a side to try to sleep, and I began to drift off.

It was at that point I became aware of the dark shapeless form about as tall as a person stood at the side of my bed. The room was dark. It was darker.

I made a very weird “oo-er” noise, roused myself and it melted into the regular darkness.

I didn’t feel at all threatened by it, and assume it was my mind playing tricks, but it was definitely creepy and unwelcome.

Sorry, I never meant to imply you were stupid. Only that you didn’t seem to be of a high enough technical level - right now - to be able to solve your PC problems.

As for (non-committal) further advice: Backups, backups, backups. And then a tool like WinDirStat to track down what’s using all your space. There are YouTube videos that show you how to use it.

I believe they are exhibiting denial that YouTube could possibly be old enough to have videos uploaded 18 years ago.

This denial is being done mostly in jest to cover the true, creeping, dripping, existential despair that so much time has passed, but at the same time to commiserate and laugh with others who are similarly affected. Drip, drip, tick, tick, tick.

Also, the video turns 19 in a couple of months. yaaaaay

Given your apparent technical level, I think you need to get your PC to someone who can work on it in person.

If you had space and better technical skills, there are tools you could install to help you track down where all the space is in use, but I don’t feel confident that things would go well talking you through that on an Internet forum.