1840s, actually. The patent was granted to a Scottish man named Alexander Bain.

First thing’s first, the telegraph. An electric circuit which can be energized or not energized at the push of a button called a telegraph key. At the other end is a solenoid which is spring loaded up, and an electromagnet on the circuit pulls down when the line is energized. Originally this was supposed to cut into paper tape to “print” the morse code message, but telegraphers quickly learned how to hear the letters in the clicks, a good telegrapher just…hears words. So they did away with the tape.

Morse code telegraphs require a single circuit to transmit an on/off keying message, the following aparatus uses five:

If I understand this right, the message would be written on non-conductive paper with conductive ink, and then wound around a cylinder that featured a whole bunch of insulated conductive pins, each kind of forming a “pixel.” A mechanical probe would check each one of those pins in turn, each pin in a row, and then shifting to the next row at the end. if it was conductive it meant there was ink there so click. So it would perform a raster scan. At the other end was paper that was coated with an electrosensitive material that would darken with the application of current, so at each pixel if the conductive ink on the original completed a circuit, current would be applied at that pixel on the copy, producing a low quality probably unusable copy. It was difficult to get them truly in sync plus it would have been hilariously low resolution. But it did somewhat function.

Paint me a picture of what you think that looks like. Here’s my painting: Everybody marches on their capitals, everyone gets gunned down with 30mm cannonfire, the Americans are gunned down holding pistols and rifles everyone else is gunned down holding pitchforks and torches.

Retirement is bad! You should keep working even if you’re worn out and not fit for purpose! Keep laboring!

Like, Tom isn’t a defective human like Zuckerberg and Musk are?

I’ve been saying it, but I think there’s also a factor that people simply want somewhere new to go. I can’t think of a time when people went back to an older platform while abandoning a newer one.

I think there’s a simple desire to move to pastures new. “Use Instagrmam or Youtube Shorts or Snapchat” No, we’ve been there and done that.

It is a video game console that I have ever seen.

Well okay,

Having my significant other draw a gun on me would end the relationship. Should we both survive this encounter I would take fairly drastic action to make sure we never encounter each other again. I was once in a bit of a dry spell, and I decided to datamine my sex life up to that point to collate what kind of things lead to success, and the thing I realized was more than half of the women I had dated were violent with me. And because sitcoms think that woman slaps man is a punchline, I thought that was normal. I don’t accept violence out of a romantic partner anymore and this is a comic depicting a threat of extreme violence between romantic partners.

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Now seeing that the art style gets more abstract in the last two panels, I won’t take the gun literally but more as “she lets it be known that she will make it a major problem if he doesn’t comply.” Whether it’s about her insecurities about her own looks or a desire to control his opinions, the fact that she’d rather threaten to scream or cry or pitch a fit or turn a cold shoulder or make him sleep on the couch or whatever if he doesn’t say what she wants him to say rather than talk about it…doesn’t really allow much room to build a future with this woman. He’ll probably stick around until she stops putting out, probably because she blew up about something.

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On the third hand, there are ways to play this as flirty and fun, depends on your dynamic together. I strongly suspect the above isn’t that, but it can be done.

If I can rant a bit…

I used to do my daily journal as plaintext in Vim. I wanted something that was a little more capable and in RedNotebook I almost got it. It stores plaintext markup (I think yaml?), the thing is it has an edit and a display mode, and you can’t edit it in display mode. Inserting a picture is pasting a file path to where that picture is stored. If I linked to where the pictures are stored in my ~/Pictures directory, if I ever migrated from Rednotebook or Linux or anything like that, the links to those pictures would break. So I store teh pictures I link in my journal in a subdirectory alongside the journal itself, so the pics should go with it and it should survive a transfer easier.

This is, of course, extremely user unfriendly to do, because it would mean copying pictures, reducing their resolution so they don’t take up the entire damn journal window, and then working through RedNotebook’s interface to navigate to where I just stored that picture to generate the link.

Or, I wrote a couple lines of Bash that did most of that for me and put the file path link in the primary buffer so I could open my file browser, right click, select Add To Journal, and then middle click in my journal. Felt kind of clever coming up with that one, and I kind of wish A) it was a bit easier and B) we lived more in a world where we did that kind of thing where things interoperated more than trying to silo things.

I’m pretty sure no one else has my shell script that takes a picture, uses imagemagick to copy a scaled down version of it to a special folder, and then build a string that allows me to just middle click paste the image into Rednotebook so it appears correctly.

Yes, The Onion is satire, but we’re talking about the idea The Onion was satirizing.

I saw a The Onion video where a white woman pledged to never say a word that began with the letter N. Not only the N word, all N words.

“I was shouted down for wearing black facepaint and white lipstick, so why does Tom get to wear a kimono?”

i already own my tools though.

I think the bowtie goes a bit better with the duck’s inherent ridiculousness.

That would be very on brand for an Aperture Science-like setting.

My favorite slur has to be “folding chable.” It was spoken by Rich Evans.

“Is the bed of your truck smooth side or step side?”

“Turned post.”

tilts head

plugs in USB optical drive

eject

pop

hehe

push tray back in

eject

pop

hehehe

Yeah I don’t think being naked factors into their decision making process as much as people think. He’s still running CatOS. He wants to get his snout around some of that delicious chicken.

Metalocalypse?