Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Someone smarter than me once pointed out that there could be a universe where magic is real only because there’s a group of people who have never had a magical incantation or action fail, purely by chance.

    I liked the idea of that to the point that I went on to imagine that there’d be universes where that magic just suddenly stopped working one day because of well overdue regression to the mean and no-one there would have any idea why.

    And then you could take that to the extreme: That one universe where the day they finally work out that magic had been random, incredible happenstance the whole time, only for it all to start happening again, just to mess with them.




  • You just reminded me how my local Co-op downsized (basically walled off the back half of the store) and they did rearrange everything to accommodate that. They used to sell electronics and all sorts of things and suddenly they had none of that and a whole bunch of products also vanished. I’ll grant you that it didn’t change much before or after that though.

    But then I’m talking about the company known as Co-op here in the UK, who are excessively fond of charging no less than 10% more than other supermarkets for the same products, then close their stores in confusion when people shop elsewhere, so maybe this is a different thing altogether. They started out as a co-operative, but they stripped all that back and they’re just another, expensive, mini-mart chain now.




  • Most often it’s done because of a developmental problem where one leg segment has come out slightly shorter than its counterpart on the other leg, affecting gait and posture. Only one or two bones need to be lengthened if the patient is lucky. Shortening the other leg is probably also an option, but I figure people would want to do something to the affected leg, rather than muck about with the “healthy” one.

    There is at least one instance that I recall where someone born with a form of dwarfism had all four limbs - all twelve bones - extended to “normal” length. As to whether it was strictly ethical to do that is an entirely different matter, considering the patient was a child.

    I mean, it’s definitely the best time of life to have the lengthening done what with bones being greener and still growing anyway, but the patient wasn’t exactly in the position to be making an informed decision about whether they wanted to go through it.




  • Orcas are in the dolphin family which is a branch of the whale family, specifically those with teeth rather than baleen. Compare how humans are in the ape family which is a branch of the primate family, specifically those that are less arboreal and lack tails. If we can say humans are primates, we can definitely say that orcas are whales.