And what is wrong with a few pages of 50% general PC griping? If we were actively arguing about it, yeah, I could see... but this is just good-natured water-cooler talk, and unlike most such chatter, it didn't devolve into virtual cat-calling or chest-beating. Smeesh. It is EXACTLY the same as the above "Shed talk"; in fact it IS just that. It's just venting; everybody needs to do that, and they need to do it in the company of friends for it to help.
Nice string of "P" words there, though. Well-played.
It's just saying "Oh God, do we have to talk about that, again?" which you will hear down the pub. Just as pub conversation here in the UK now comes with an implicit "no brexit" rule there are topics that we've all heard too much about.
The problem is that it's not a seed that has been planted, but a tree that has grown through various threads and now creeps into this one. Enough is enough, we don't need the same discussion in 14 threads.
Oh, FFS... that's like saying talking about water or air is an offshoot of discussion from another thread. Ontogeny does NOT recapitulate Phylogeny, no matter how many times you read such in dusty old tomes that were wrong. They were STILL all WRONG.
This subject matter was born here of honest discussion, it belongs here, and getting bent outta shape because you've seen any or all of it in a dozen other threads is really a matter of tuning your personal annoyance filters rather than anything really wrong with the content. If you think that random good-natured venting about OSes should be a "Third Rail" Godwin's Law type thing, then there's something seriously wrong with the SNR in your own perspective matrix.
Don't exaggerate lad, nobody's "bent outta shape", except perhaps the guy who's moved on to "smiley punctuation" and all bold sentences or sentential clauses (which is pretty much the WYSIWYG version of "all caps").
All one needs to complete the trifecta would be green ink*.
To change the topic (slightly), the late, great Bill Hicks - a comedian much loved here in the UK but sadly largely ignored in his native America - coined the phrase "tooth to tattoo ratio", whereby he suggested that you could judge a lot about the sanity, ability to hold rational political views and propensity to violence of a person by counting their remaining natural teeth and comparing it to the number of tattoos they had.
May I suggest an online equivalent, which is the ratio of normal, correct punctuation to smilies, tentatively to be called the "Hick's ratio". You all know what (and who) I mean - there's one antipodean contributor whose electronics contribution is vanishingly small, can be seen in every argument and writes without capital letters, commas, full stops, paragraphs and congenitally can't post a single message without at least two smilies for each sentence, or sentence fragment.
* I don't know how well the green ink phenomenon is known outside the UK, where it's had a fair airing in the popular media over the years. It dates to the time when people would write longhand, real letters to the editors of newspapers. All newspapers get "letters to the editor" from persistent, often monomaniacal, nutters; it was popularly held that these 'contributors' wrote in all capitals and in green ink. From my time as a journo I can say categorically that this is true. I have opened the post and found letters composed longhand, in all capitals and green ink, filled with rambling, unhinged complaints often completely unrelated to the subject matter of the magazine they were sent to. Moreover, not from one person but several different individuals, and this was on an organ with a mere 80k-100k actual physical circulation.
None of this is to be taken to imply that I think mnementh is unhinged, even if he has named himself after a dragon from a series of fantasy books. I, a man who chose the name of a small, drunken, apricot brandy swilling, warlike cartoon aardvark as his nickname, would be skating on very thin ice.
"Skating away-ay,
Skating away-ay,
Skating away-ay,
On the thin ice of a new day-ay-ay-ayay,
Aya-aya-ayay" - Ian Anderson
Well, no... it sortof stopped being "Oh God, do we have to talk about that,
again?" when you dragged the cluebrick into the discussion; then
it became (IMO) premature moderation. That is when I decided to take up the discussion; I am no more bent out of shape over it than I am the weather. I've worn the mantle myself more times than I can count; I know the pressures involved intimately and I was speaking as such. You can take my comments as meddling or friendly kibbutzing if you prefer, but please don't take offense as none was intended, I promise.
You misunderstand my use of bold text sir; and I can speak with authority of experience when I say that it is your misunderstanding, not my usage at fault.
Bold text merely indicates the salient point you're trying to emphasize, not raised voice. I do this as a courtesy to the reader, as I know I'm prone to pontificate and it is reasonable to feel a certain level of TL/DR. The bolded text is for those folks who, not unreasonably, instinctively gag on sight of the kind of WoT I tend to generate, nothing more.
You place too much extrinsic value on a name. mnementh is a creature of the internet; he was born on BBSes and UseNet in the days of dialup, he has grown older and hopefully wiser over the decades, and he will die when his time comes. Just as there are times when the name my own mother gave me doesn't seem to fit, there are times when I consider changing his name; however, that wouldn't change the creature that appellation belongs to, any more than my choice of when to wear that skin online changes the person under it.
The name has history belonging to that creature of the aether which has evolved independent of its wearer; I see no good reason to change it just because someone else makes assumptions and places value upon that name which doesn't exist. It's not like you're the first, or even the thousand and first, to comment on the origin of that name. };=)~~~~<
I'm sorry, but alas and alack, paper periodicals have not been a part of my daily life since I gave up the corporate rat race; and now, they are very nearly extinct. If I wanted to know about the distasteful phenomenon known as
green ink of which you speak, I suspect it would require considerable forensic work which I have precisely zero interest in pursuing.
We all take our turns going unhinged; if we didn't, we wouldn't be human. If you're suggesting that I strike you as a bit off, then thank you for the compliment.
Just think of me as the comic relief; I have no quarrel whatsoever with that assertion, and
I will happily play that role.
I was born in the age of the British Invasion; my lullabies were crooned by the likes of Ian Anderson and Rory Gallagher. In fact, (and I'l swear this to you in person, if we ever meet)
my very first words were a squeaky "JOE COCKER!!!" in response to my mother bringing out "Mad Dogs & Englishmen" to play.
Long may you live, Mister Anderson.
mnem
" 'es gawt spiders in 'is hair!!!" ~ My mom, speaking on Ian Anderson