I wonder what the Polish, Monégasque, and Indonesian folk do when they win a flag competition?

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2001

Ah I’ve not made it to the lv20 Pun Deployment threshold yet. I’ve been finishing my runs at the end of the route like a clown all this time!

Man when I’m a few miles in to a run, the last thing on my mind is having any form of meaningful conversation, particularly something that needs a bit of time and effort put into it.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to keep putting one foot in front of the other, stay upright, try to not die, and still have to come up with a gentle way of letting someone down.

Next time on “Time and a Place”: asking a pilot out to dinner during an emergency landing.

Absolutely. Chris Brown is a prime example. I quite like some of his collab tunes, but I absolutely refuse to give any money - a percentage or not - to that wifebeating spunktrumpet.

In fact, the fact that I’m actively screwing him out of money makes me enjoy the song more.

How am I going to wreck the heels of my trainers or give my fingers ungodly numbness and pain then though?

Not to try and think in too much of an abstract sense, but I used to watch bus doors open in town (or even see glimpses of the world beyond the train station entrance) and wonder what was beyond those strange portals to different parts of the world with different surroundings and different ways of life and different priorities in the world.

Now I think I’m less wanderlust and more Dee Dee.

fuckin

I was going to say something similar. Step One sounds like a lot of effort if you’re going to do Step Two anyway.

I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world, but daytime TV in the UK is full of programmes where people want to move house to somewhere a little nicer or chilled - whether it’s to escape the rat race, bring up kids outside of a city, to retire, whatever. They have the strangest “contestants” though, like (and I’m pulling these from my arse but I doubt they’re far from the truth) meeting Tarquin, 44, a part time artist; and Helena, 49, who volunteers at the local farmers market.

“Their budget is 1.2 million pounds”

what the actual fuck

I fucking love AI.

I’ll qualify that with a small personal story on it: I have a colleague in a nearby office the other side of the city, who steps into supervise his team when the actual manager isn’t there. Nice bloke, not much banter, but pleasant enough.

You can fucking guarantee though that when a division-wide email has gone out, or a change of plan comes in… he’s right on the phone to me asking what to do.

The first few times it was cute. A guy must really love his job or hate himself to go into junior management, so walking him through routine tasks he may not have been exposed to may be beneficial to him in the long run.

The problem is, it’s near constant. Every single time something changes, he calls - not for advice, not for opinion, but “can you do this for my team too?”. What really pulls a hair out of my arse is that there’s a 50/50 chance of it being something I’ve already showed him. I’ve spoken to his actual manager at exasperated length but it’s just a can kicked down the road with a “well he’s still learning, isn’t he?”

I suppose he is, and I’m no teacher. When he phones now, I just tell him “mate our org has access to that fancy new Microsoft Copilot, it’s fuckin’ mint bro, solves all your problems”, knowing fine well the disaster that’s about to happen - partly to expose him to new technologies, but mainly to be a smug cunt.

Invariably, he gets solutions that don’t quite work, or ideas that don’t quite fit the brief… and it’s satisfying as fuck getting the follow-up call and saying “sorry bruv, Copilot is smarter than me, which isn’t hard” or “nah sorry dude, it gives you a personalised response so that’ll be outside of my domain, making my suggestions worthless”.

Fucking love it. It has reduced my workload immensely.

Not nearly on the same scale, but one of my favourite photos of me in a proud moment is me kneeling beside a local beach holding an oversized PR cheque for two hundred quid (my back-of-a-fag-packet maths suggests that’s around US$266) for a charity I ran for.

Now, two ton is next to fuck all in the grand scheme of things, and I was only expecting my colleagues and pals to empty their pockets of smash; euros; washers; and the odd Drachma into the tub - but for folk to think so highly of me and break my own target many times over in an era not too far after the credit crunch… well even now I look back and think “fuck yes past me, you did a bit of good there bro”.

Granted, I’ve given more in monthly GAYE donations (lol) off my top line in UK taxation dodges than that figure, but I absolutely get how the opposite is true - a relative minnow getting a cash boost that guarantees their R&D (and livelihoods too) for another fixed period of time.

Fuck yes. (sorry for the anecdote.)

Yeah 100% on board with that. I think it’s a great thing.

I’m just struggling to get my head around the police department’s objection when Seattle-area cops generally generate more chill news than fuckups (not that good interactions make the news in any departmental arew really); and the introduction of this social work unit would likely take a huge chunk out of their workload (again an assumption based on UK style policing, apologies).

All very bizarre but yes, a huge step in the right direction. Love it.

That all sounds awesome aside from the last sentence - I’m keen to know the rationale for their opposition.

I can only imagine that there’s a concern that the Portland Street Response may be putting themselves at undue risk with the most volatile of clients… but even I can feel my back twitch from the amount of reaching I’m doing there!

I think you’re right but for the wrong reasons - I think it would be an absolute net positive effect but I still think the lines should be drawn between policing and social work and healthcare issues. Fair warning, I’m from the UK which has it’s own issues with policing but nothing on the clusterfuck scale as it is across the pond.

Sending police officers (and ambulance staff, maybe even coastguard - in the civilian sense, not the American branch of the military) to do two or four weeks of social work attachment would work wonders. It would provide a great insight into the difficulties and behaviours of those in social or mental crisis, and give more soft tools to recognise and resolve issues.

That said, it shouldnt be policing agencies going to social work or mental health calls in the first place. People in crisis are often acting irrationally or unpredictably due to the very nature of the crisis they’re experiencing, and when a lethal weapon is an optional available to the responders, then you’ll have a less than spectacular outcome on occasions.

Ideally, additional funding should be centered around social work and mental health teams - perhaps having first responders for both so you don’t have cops wading in with the best of intentions, and confronting something they aren’t the best people to be dealing with - where a mental health ambulance or a social work rapid response team would bring a welfare call to a far safer conclusion.

I absolutely get that my view is very UK-skewed but if you keep putting armed cops into situations like that - then the public will get hurt, cops will get hurt, the taxpayer coughs up a fortune in legal costs … all of which could fund better ways to respond to the homeless, the stressed, the neurodiverse, and other non-criminal issues that people phone in with good intentions.

Even then, Trump isn’t the root problem.

I agree with everything you’ve said (for whatever that’s worth, being from outside the US) - but the primary issue is the 30%+ of folk who are voting for this arsehole, along with the 30%+ of folk who didn’t care enough to vote against it.

Following that logic, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Trump, Hitler, Musk, Orban, Putin or whatever going for the post - it doesn’t even matter whether they’re constitutionally permitted to stand for office, if there’s an overwhelming number of folk who don’t give a fuck and vote that way anyway, then there’s your bigger problem.

Now that’s something I’d have expected to see a wave of now, and a comm called jesuswithajob or something. lols.

In the late 90s, there were some monitors in our school library that had some serious grounding problems. You could literally touch the screen with one finger, touch your victim with the other hand, and have your pal repeatedly turn the monitor off and on rapidly at the physical spring-loaded switch - and at some point, they’d get an uncomfortable-but-not-painful shock.

Highly entertaining, guaranteed a bollocking, and after that it was back to the degaussing CHUNNNNNNNGUNGUNGUNG sound. Satisfying as fuck.

The HAMBOTVER of the 2000s!

My first thought was: “I must try this”. I need to read my house insurance policy first.

Curiosity got the better of me when I waved an alcohol wipe over an open flame. There’s still a dark mark on the office carpet tile from where I had to stamp it out.

That’s beautiful. I love a bit of personal standards to fuck someone else’s day up.

I typically change my responses on the form to Calibri if using MS Office. It’s not enough to pique anyone’s interest, but it’s different enough to spot what I’ve added to a form rather than the usual Arial additions if you’ve been told about it.

Someone at my office tried to say I’d said something on a form when I hadn’t, and took great delight pointing out the slight difference in typeface on the field that wasn’t my edit.

It’s satisfying as fuck coming back at someone with receipts.