Relevant xkcd

That is a meaning for the phrase, yes

I suppose it could go either way. That would be true if we see stardates as a universal system that applies anywhere and everywhere. If we instead imagine them to include encoded information about local space time, it makes sense that they might be inconsistent but always moving forward.

I am, of course, using “makes sense” extremely loosely here.

I guess when you’re traveling around faster than the speed of light, time and date stop meaning the same thing as they do back home, so it stands to reason that you couldn’t map stardates to any standard calendar.

At least, that’s my new headcanon.

Normally I’d say it would be ridiculous for a company to push legislation for such a small demographic, but since Korea has mandatory service still as far as I know, they basically get to put a Samsung in the hands of every male citizen. And they’ll most likely keep using the same brand of phone after.

Relevant XKCD

I know historically “deaf and dumb” meant deaf and mute, but, at least in the classes I took in college, I was told we don’t use that terminology anymore, for hopefully obvious reasons.

Szeth-son-son-Vallano, truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.

Isn’t that just how sponsorships work? Most every major stadium is named after some company or another, because they paid for it.

Wanted to not do my actual job for a few minutes, so I had time to read some Wikipedia pages, haha.

Also, Seattle should be a reference to Microsoft. It seems IBM and Microsoft started an operating system collaboration in 1985, but somebody more knowledgeable is going to have to weigh in.

Isekai is a popular genre of manga and anime involving a character being reborn in another world, or more recently as some weird item or monster. Often this is initiated by the character dying. (See “truck-kun”).

In this scenario, after incorrectly pronouncing ASCII, the American character encoding standard, as isekai, the speaker is hit by an IBM truck (a company famous for its early advances in computing, among other things), and is reborn around the time they had market dominance in personal computers.

I don’t think IBM had much of anything to do with the creation or popularization of the ASCII standard, but memes can’t all be perfectly accurate.

Hope this helps!

If only it were so easy to banish the night-spiders. Nope, suburban US has more than you think.

You get a very similar effect if you go outside at night and hold a light up at your eye level, except it’s reflecting off the eyes of all the spiders around.

Sometimes routing can be weird, and a VPN can change that. I’m not sure how they’re ever supposed to do it consistently though. I use express, and have in very rare occasions seen reduced latency while connected vs. not. I’ve never managed to make it happen on purpose, though.

Edit: I also live within spitting distance of one of the largest server hosting locations in the world, so that may factor into my experience somehow.