In-laws took the family to a fancy resort. It’s beautiful but also autistic hell. Everyone turns and greets you when you walk past. I think it’s in their contract. There are never not people in your periphery trying to engage.

The only place to hide is the room, and even then they text your father-in-law worried about the situation and wonder when they could possibly come in to remake the bed. Nothing costs less than $25. I’m hyper-aware of the huge markup and it bothers me, even if the in-laws are picking up the tab for most of it. Actually, especially because they’re picking up the tab for it.

It all came to a head in the fancy restaurant last night. I was buttering some bread for my daughter and knocked a cocktail over on my lap. Was immediately surrounded by four people with napkins and all I wanted to do was crawl under the table. So I made it their problem.

“I’ll get you another cocktail immediately”

“Ya sure? You saw what I did with the last one.”

The head waiter offered to pour the gravy on my main course and I told him it was best for the safety and well-being of the table if he did just that. I asked him if any of the desserts were on fire and what kind of fire safety equipment they had. Stuff like that.

Internally I was mortified and just wanted to go back to the room but apparently my inner Marx brother took over and I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.

Anyway we’re going to be on a boat and I’ve already been informed that they’ll take my shoes. What a neat experience. Trying to just go with it and I’m aware of how awful I sound. I just want to hide for the rest of the week

Motherfuckers going around talking about mistakes like they spontaneously generate from old rags and bags of flour.

“Wow, you can really tell a machine made that. Fuck. I hope you’re not planning on sending that to anyone else. They might think you wrote it. Talk about your soulless garbage. I hope you didn’t spend money on generating those.”

Yeah, it’s so much cooler to learn how to type things into something that costs money and already does what you can do for free with slightly more effort.

The bulging male cheerleaders aren’t even remotely the strangest part of this slop.

But they are the most accurately-rendered part of it.

Say what you want, they got the diameter of his ankles right.

“According to the model, you set the mood with vintage polka music and then start leafing through a paint catalog.”

The more I look at the picture the more I don’t like it.

It’s flashy, does just enough to look impressive, and a lot of people throw money at it. Just like them.

I’m guessing it really flies over the neighbor’s tree, unrolling perfectly and leaving enough on the other side to throw it back across.

My first thought was, why didn’t she just paint a finger? Something small in case she was wrong. But then I remembered how I was in pretty much every lab at that age.

Not as cool as the original story, but I was working with a big carboy of dilute HCL in a CHEM 101 lab. The previous person that used the carboy had managed to spill dilute HCL all over the stopper. I was not aware of this.

The protocol was to grasp the stopper between middle and ring finger, pull it out, then pick the carboy up with both hands and pour into the beaker. That way, the only thing the business end of the stopper ever touches is the inside of the carboy.

I’d just started pouring when I felt the skin between the two fingers start to itch. It was obnoxious, but I had a heavy piece of glassware in my hands trying to measure out a precise amount. So I ignored it until it started to burn. By that point I almost had enough in my beaker so I topped it up. Then I lowered the carboy and replaced the stopper.

Then I ran over to the sink, turned it on full blast, and washed the acid off my hand. I had a red, tender patch there for days. After that, I always wiped the stopper off with a paper towel before I pulled it out.

I was unprepared for how red he gets by the end. Also, why do his eyes look like a smaller man looking out of a human-shaped periscope?

Word salad is your friend. The bigger the context of the prompt, the more it has to thrash. So if you ask it for a longform essay about elephants in the blue diamond-shaped trifold organza station wagon and the quality of fudge it can expectorate in the style of an old timey sea captain who just dropped his iPhone over the starboard bow, it has to pull in more data. And then tell it that whatever it did was awful and nonsensical and it should redo it.

Alternately, ask for a list of one thousand random numbers, with no repetition, between one and a million. Whatever it does, tell it it’s wrong and duplicated numbers and/or gave you too few. Repeat.

observemax

We’ve been here before, with *core. And we have learned none of its lessons.

Also, I want a Dot’s pretzels shirt.

Odo, centaurs, and the Grinch just standing in the middle trying to avoid eye contact with each other.

Protip: if you ask how they’re doing you have to talk less.

Dan Brown writing men: “He had steely grey eyes and was very smart. Scientists thought he was an idiot but that’s because he was smarter than them and didn’t spend as much time writing papers. He did four hundred pushups and took a shower. ‘Not bad for a fifty five year-old guy’, he thought, which was smarter than other thoughts even if those thoughts had won prizes.”

If the christian god exists and the reward for serving him is eternal life in his presence, I will gladly accept the alternative.

Introducing tech debt.