The character Berdly is an archetypal “annoying nerdy kid” character. He’s a gamer, he’s weird with girls, he thinks of himself as an intellectual.

The first person in the screenshot is presumably making a joke, but the message could have plausibly been made by Berdly (minus referencing sex).

The second person says that the first person’s profile picture (of Berdly) is affecting their behaviour in the same way that the mask from The Mask (1994) takes over the body of its wearer, suggesting that the first person’s behaviour is out of character for them.

This is funny because of the clashing tones between the two messages (the floweriness vs straightforwardness) and the (absurd) idea that a profile picture can possess you.

Trans woman who pays a bit more attention to mannerisms than most people, both in men and women.

1. Yes, it’s a real thing
2. It’s at least 90% men, and I’m being generous
3. It’s not most men that do it (especially in the sillier ways)
4. Size matters not

Picture a teenager in black sweatpants and a hoodie, on his own in a bus. That’s the most common I think. It’s generally men who try to project an image of strong masculinity or coolness. They don’t really do it with other people because it’s silly. It might be an unconscious thing, idk. It still looks stupid. It’s mostly men because it’s a masculinity thing.

It’s great if you don’t do it, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you didn’t. But there very much is a type of guy who does it. And there is no common type of woman for that specific behavior.

#F5A9B8 at (10,20)

For those curious, there is actually a reason. It compresses better in QR codes: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/02/why-are-qr-codes-with-capital-letters-smaller-than-qr-codes-with-lower-case-letters/

Having just read the problem, I’m curious how o3 solved it (and the human too tbh). My experience with LLMs says they’d be absolute complete crap at this, it’s a very hard and open-ended problem. Intuitively I’d say it would just end up doing random changes tryjng to improve its score.

I think I could write the “trivial” solution but anything beyond seems… difficult. Congrats to the winner!

Fair point. I was just thinking of landlines provided by ISPs with their phone packages. Still, surely we can do better?

They should really upgrade the audio quality, phone calls sound so bad still…

A lot of germany has deposits actually, so an extra 25-50 cents on top for cans and glass bottles

!! Congrats! Hope you get what you want soon

Proposal: have a shorter way to write “global time” (or you could have, say, 4 quarter-global times), the same way we have C, F and K for temperature, then make that a more common way of communicating time.

Yeah UTC kinda does that but nobody uses it like that. Shorten it to U and it’s much punchier. Also abolish daylight savings, too confusing.

If you don’t wanna bias to europeans too much, use the international date line.

It is really weird to suddenly have emotions and to be like, affected by the world around you suddenly X)

Lmfao samee, I getcha. I had nothing against my skin before, but it was never comfy. I didn’t even realize it because it was just normal, and when it felt worse it felt like it just needed a shower (where I incidentally rubbed my skin raw. Which I didn’t even process as probably-not-great).

The body is a hodge-podge of Rube Goldberg machines, and trans research is wayy underdeveloped. Method of delivery and absorbancy and a billion other things probably affect the effects.

Out of curiosity, the skin changes were a huge boon to me (one that I didn’t expect to be so nice), so there’s a world where it was partially psychological. Was body odor a big dysphoria source for you?

Yeah, in my little experience basically all of the effects of hormones are “in general” at best, both in timeline and actual effects.

Personally my libido went up a little but unlike OOP it was very much present before too.

Meanwhile the skin softening stuff took a week or so to be noticeable, when it definitely “should” take longer.

Well, in the first bit of the Hitchhiker’s guide, there’s:

“You’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“You ask a glass of water.”

Which does fit, even if it’s not necessarily a “well-known phrase”

Weird flirting would have been my guess

Or even just a bad attempt at small talk

They can, but it’s not trivial. The challenge uses a bunch of modern browser features that these scrapers don’t use, regarding metadata and compression and a few other things. Things that are annoying to implement and not worth the effort. Check the recent discussion on lobste.rs if you’re interested in the exact details.

I don’t think Dipper ever makes that face, Gumball looks nothing like the other shows (love Gumball’s style tho, amazing mix of style), I haven’t watched the other two much

Also the top covers like 80 years of animation and not 10

I’m gonna clean my room up and get a (feminine! Yay!) Haircut

I also wanna go out at some point during this week, socialize with people I don’t know yet

Yeah, the US prison system is absolutely abhorrent and counterethical to all the principles it’s supposed to hold.

First, the US is basically the only western country like that:tm:, second, more than one thing can be bad. “‘North Korea is a great country’ is a dumb position”, the only (implied) assertion I made about it in my original comment, is still true, even if they got dealt a shit hand (which, so did most of the east after WW2; South Korea was in a pretty similar state (it was actually worse than NK shortly after the Korean war), yet they’re doing… much better than NK at least).

Being “basically bombed to the stone age” doesn’t mean a dictatorship is inevitable, nor that their government is suddenly blameless; being victimized doesn’t mean you can victimize others.

Genuinely, if you take “the west” as a whole and compare it to North Korea… yeah, I do think they have a high ground. No, I’m not saying the west is perfect, far from it. No, I’m not saying communism is automatically bad, I’m totally cool with communists.

Basically my base position is “a functional democracy is the governance system that works the best”. Most western states are much closer to that than North Korea (yes, I know what the Electoral College is and why it’s bad), so I do think their political system is better.