palordrolap

Ciphers are easy to invent, and if you can’t read the cipher-maker’s mind, it’s going to be an order of magnitude harder to break simply because you don’t know the rule(s).

So you could play tapes back-to-back of course. Any decent system could pause the second deck until the tape in the first got to the end, auto-stopped and auto-unpaused the other side. That was an almighty kaCHUNK noise when it happened though so you wouldn’t want to be a light sleeper trying to sleep to music with it.

There were also logistical problems with how you chose to play tapes, especially if part 2 of an album was on the other side of a tape.

Or you spent an absolute fortune on a deck that could play the other side without needing to take the tape out. They didn’t make many of those.

But yeah, I get your point, one side of those double decks could also record from the radio or the other tape. Which is why in some countries taxes were levied on blank tape media to “reimburse” the poor, struggling music industry for the rampant piracy, where curiously, literally none of that went to the artists. Hmmmm.

I don’t think we got one that tracked back to lunchtime specifically, and those tend to be slightly less well aligned or frequent anyway, but the one that was being caused by a freight elevator’s motor was a devil to track down before we knew what it was.

And we may not have found it if the engineer had used the stairs to come back from the basement where the router was. Lazy engineer plus angry motor = DSL died when engineer still present. “It died again! What did you do?” “What did I what now?”

Reminds me of when I did DSL customer service. Once every few months we’d get a customer (never the same one twice) calling up saying that their connection was terrible, and when we checked the logs, their connection would dropping at incredibly regular intervals aligned well with human units of time. On the hour (or a few minutes past) every hour, for example, or every 10 minutes.

We figured, and told them, that it had to be something on a timer causing an EMP or other interference at their end because there ought to be nothing outside their premises acting with such specific regularity.

The caller usually went away and we’d see the connection stabilise not long after, leaving us none the wiser, but hey, fixed!

“… as foodstock for the Hhftss Diregulum”

Their word for us translates roughly as “crunchy”.

I think most people are able. Knowing how to act on it and being willing to do so are the two real problems here.

So what they’re saying is that if you’re going to show up, you might as well be part of the protest because you’re going to be arrested as if you were. Very Yoda of them. Do or do not. There is no try help.

It probably does. To my knowledge they’ve never deleted old accounts, though you might have an issue if you’ve forgotten your password and the e-mail address you used to sign up is no longer accessible to you.

If I was to learn that the “they’re not going to release it” hype around Coyote vs. ACME was, at the root, a deliberate, well guided marketing campaign, I would not be the least bit surprised.

The same may not be true of Batgirl because that was shelved first, and merely provided the powers that be the idea for marketing the ACME movie.

You can do most if not all of this in Perl if you’re twisted enough. Some hoop jumping may be required*, but I can think of ways to do something that looks like each of these.

*: The braces are especially tricky if warnings are turned on. I’d probably abuse the deprecated multidimensional syntax and tie a hash to the actual function.

And thus was birthed… the horse.

The more you think about it the more it makes sense.

Fandom shipping is not normally something that enters my head or generally appeals, but I think Pumpkin from Baman and Piderman needs to get down to that disco pronto. With his dancing feets on.

Jam-filled donuts usually aren’t the sort with a hole, and these look like they might be rings. I am conflicted.

It is possible to jam-fill a ring donut, and the ones pictured might not be rings, only sunken, but either way, something here tells me there’s not a lot of jam in them and it’s bothering me far more than it should.

… I’d say I was hangry, but it’s not long since I ate. Maybe I just really want a donut.

It’s all fun and games until you snag your favourite sweater on a Gibbs spike.

It doesn’t happen at the docks. They get loaded into shipping containers on trucks and on freight trains, so by the time it gets to the ship, it’s well hidden. And they don’t get on a ship bound for Russia either. The destination is more likely China or the Baltics.

Docks don’t have time to x-ray everything so some always get through, especially the ones where well-practised crime has generated authentic looking documentation for what’s supposed to be in the container.

Many men will remember the first bit of mail they received with Mr <Surname> on it and it wasn’t for their father, but I also remember being cut to the core being referred to as the subject of “watch out for that man” as a child escaped its parent and barrelled obliviously in my direction. To them I was merely an NPC.

My thoughts were along the lines of ’ “That man”?! Me?! Well… I suppose so. But, “man”? What? No. I’m just me. ’

I mean, I’m sure as heck not a woman, nor am I non-binary, but “man” is way too strong a term. “Adult male human” doesn’t even feel right, because much of the time I’m who I was at 7 years of age, just in a shell that’s 7 times that age.

But er, maybe that’s just me.

The repeated division trick has a quicker counterpart, which is to create a separate variable and repeatedly multiply that by 10, comparing to the original as it goes. Probably not as fast as anything beyond the repeated division trick, but I mention it because its rediscovery was likely missed by jumping right to clzl tricks.

It also generalises a lot more readily to numbers in other bases. Kind of a “jack of all trades, master of none” solution.

It’s close, sure, but actually no. That standard currently requires the letter T (and no white-space) between date and time when both are present, and, frankly, that’s ugly and a space should be allowed.

An old version of the standard allowed the space, and GNU’s coreutils seem to have carried on the tradition, so I’m not alone in thinking this.

the Russian alternative

You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.

Alternative retort for the last panel: “I’m already doing it”