A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.

You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.

https://dev.djdupriest.org/name-combinator/index.html

Are those flying squirrels at the top of the first image?

Euler’s Disc, along with the most solid glass mirror you can find.

https://youtube.com/shorts/Q8M3Il0Zv68

Somebody call Randall Munroe.

Last Light, Dying Light, Dead by Daylight. Never played any of them.

I also confuse Amnesia, Penumbra and SOMA.

This view was one of the coolest things I ever saw through my first decent telescope. It instantly transported me back into time to the first moment a human saw the moons and everything clicked. If you’ve never seen this for yourself, I highly recommend visiting a local star party sometime. Most backyard astronomers are thrilled to show someone this for the first time. It should be on everyone’s bucket list!

Now I want a “what if?” on this. I would love to see all the g-forces and wind resistance and other details of how to survive with a big ramp.

A hot dog from a Japanese 7/11 for reference.

If you get the torrent from a site using HTTPS and get the data only from encrypted peers is it even possible to tell what people are downloading?

I think it’s neat that in a lot of these “penis stuck in thing” cases where bloodflow makes removal difficult a doctor can usually just show the patient the massive needle they will have to insert to remove excess blood and the sight alone usually “solves” the problem.

not insignificant portion of the population begins watching Fox News religiously

I was a new JET Programme participant located in rural Japan. The CIR variety, so I knew a good bit of Japanese and was there to teach and write about US culture, history, food, etc.

The local dialect was pretty difficult to understand however, and I was constantly asking what words meant. One day my coworker used an expression beginning with “o”, which is a common honorific prefix, and wanting to basically say “o - what?” I clearly proclaimed “onani?” in the middle of the board of education office. More than one person stifled a laugh and my coworker almost did a spit take.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned “onani” is masturbation in Japanese, based on the English term onanism, which I also didn’t know at the time. So I basically failed hard in both languages that day.

Flashbacks to reading the Guinness Book of World Records in elementary school.

The MIT page containing the report has disappeared and it isn’t archived on wayback. Anyone know where we can read it?

Poor VR support. I’d probably switch if it ever becomes stable.

A bay ba da bum bum waaay do

I think kaomoji have been a thing in Japan even before unicode was invented. The Japanese encodings and IME (input method esitors) allowed them to type a wide variety of characters, punctuation and symbols that aren’t available in most western encodings, so I feel like the Japanese folks had a head start on creative use of typography.

For example, if you want an eyeball you can just type “do” (degrees), and the IME will pull up °, and “omega” gives you ω, so it’s pretty easy to make (°ω°).

And a couple ball sacks.

I don’t know what technically constitutes the most troublesome username, but surely some of the kaomoji Japanese folks have come up with are up there. Good luck trying to type these.

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭ ੈ♡‧₊˚

I think the first person to use an obfuscated name like lIiḷ|ḷiIl was pretty clever.