Posted on 07/31/2015 11:49:41 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows
The time has come to take action against thread hijackers.
Let me begin with an example of thread hijacking:
Like most Freepers, I am pro-life. Abortion and and euthanasia appall me, and marketing the results even more so. I support candidates who oppose the culture of death, and cheer when it is thwarted.
I also do not find it necessary to mention these facts on EVERY. FREAKING. THREAD.
There is a certain type of Freeper, though, who has no such restraint. For these zealots, any thread that deviates from the pro-life cause, no matter how trivially, is a heresy that must be immediately suppressed.
You are shocked by cruelty to animals? I guess that means you couldn't care less about the cruelty of THE MILLIONS OF CHILDREN ABORTED EVERY YEAR!!!!!
You lost a beloved pet? Why can't you mourn THE THOUSANDS OF ABORTED BABIES WHO DIED THE SAME DAY?!!!!
Your car shredded its transmission and you're looking at thousands of dollars in repairs? Why aren't you thinking about THE BABIES WHO WILL NEVER GROW UP TO BE AUTO MECHANICS BECAUSE THEY WERE ABORTED?!!!!
(OK, maybe I made that last one up.)
Arguing with these people is pointless. It's the same principle as wrestling with a pig - you just get muddy and the pig enjoys it. Similarly, trying to convince them that they are being rude is a waste of time - THE CAUSE is far more important little things like courtesy and respect.
So, what can we do about it?
We can get drunk.
I hereby propose The Thread Hijack Drinking Game. The rules are simple: When a poster tries to hijack an unrelated thread to his or her pet cause, you 1) reply to the hijack attempt by quoting the text in question, followed by the word "DRINK!", and 2) Take a drink (or any volume) of your favorite beverage (alcoholic or non-alcoholic). Moderation is suggested on animal cruelty threads to avoid alcohol poisoning.
This game will not, I admit, solve the thread hijacking problem. But after a certain number of attempts we will no longer care.
And if anyone is offended by my little proposal, I can only say...
DRINK!
Just chatting about a house, which could be sold or not.
I’ve put up one of my Nativity sets, and I’ll put up a second one later. Now it’s time for choir practice. Tom the Son is mowing the lawn.
I haven’t even thought about Christmas decorations. I may not bother with it this year, because I don’t want to put them away again.
I suddenly realized I don’t even have the Christmas spirit. Last year, I did, and even sent Christmas cards, but I can’t do that this year.
And I got my yearly SSA benefit notice, with the whopping raise of 0%. Meanwhile the rent will be going up the first of January for an “interim adjustment” and then again in February for the COLA adjustment.
Yah. Like that. No Christmas spirit.
Yes..
Came back sometime after midnight. Had to get up and make the rounds turning off lights. Since power went out as I was working on music for this morning, it did make today's service a bit interesting..
The local arm of ConEdison (emphasis on the CON)insists they have absolutely no idea why the substation de-subed..
Except there does not seem to be a herd of Stoughtons anywhere.. ;-)
We’re too late.
I’m glad you didn’t have to suffer for too long, but I really HATE it when the power comes back on and so do all the lights/other things I forgot to turn off! ;o]
I seem to have been fairly fortunate in the places I’ve lived here in the Valley, as I can think of less than 10 hours in 35 years that I have had to find alternate methods of heating/cooling, while friends of mine have had to deal with ALL the drama.
We need cooler nights and windier days for the leaves to fall from the trees properly. Right now, the trees are half nekkid. And we’re having 40/60 degree ranges.
Yes, but the Vinyls with their ultrahigh fertility rate will continue to insure we will have Polyvinyls for a long time to come.
Right up until the entire country is protecting the environment by capping all the oil wells and relying solely (solarly?)on solar, wind, and other boondoggle methods of power production.
When that happens all the Vinyls will starve to death.
*snif-snif*
Oh how sad to die when one is so young and cute. (Pogo Possum)
It was five/six hours or so. Not like the five days we were out after Sandy. Usual outages here only last an hour, two tops so when the power first went down, I didn't shut anything down. I have three 'active' ups units and three more I keep charged but not connected to anything (well, one is connected to the laser printers on the non-battery side for use as a surge protector and thus stays charged but doesn't drain when power goes out - other than that annoying beep.. ;-)
I have a 1500va unit that only has the computer on it, a 1000va unit that has the monitor, the DSL modem/router, the second wireless router, the 8 port ethernet switch and my 13w fluorescent desk lamp on it, and a second 1500va unit that has all of my project computers and stuff on it (that would be my Linux box, the WinTenten unit, the 'new in the works' box, and the ethernet switch that feeds all the stuff on that project table.)
When the power went out I shut off everything on the 'project' table to keep that ups unit fully charged. When we reached the hour mark in the outage I shutdown the main computer and switched to my laptop. When the 1000va unit powering the networking stuff showed 40 minutes projected time left, I shut off the desk light (should have done that sooner..) Since I was keeping the networking stuff active eventually the 1000va unit shutdown so I shuffled a 650va unit over to power the networking. I did discover that I did not have any of the power packs for any of my laptops connected to the battery-supplied side of a ups so when the laptop suggested I might want to think about connecting the charger (about two hours into the event), I shut down rather than rummage around in the dark-tangle-of-wires-and-power-cords to find which ac plug went to which power supply for which laptop..
At that point I shut everything down and wandered outside for a look-see. With the glow of the nearby city suppressed due to lack of energy the sky was particularly spectacular. But it was also chilly out there..
Now that’s scandalous.
I understood more of that than I thought I would, so thanks! I’m happy you entrusted me with all that data. Igor always said I had a “mind like a steel trap: everything that goes in gets mangled,” so I felt fortunate I could picture it all.
I love going outside at night, here, as we are far enough away from Vegas to give us some pretty spectacular night lights, when looking anywhere but north.
Venus and Mars are especially beautiful, early in the AM, and if I had a place to sit with an unobstructed view of the sky, I would go out with my binoculars for an hour, once or twice a week. All the places with seating have roofs. :o[
Hey, Darks!
Do we have any potential Undead Threads?
And who do I have to sleep with to provide one?
Oh. Wait. That wasn’t what I meant to say...
GAH! My Ebil Twin is at work again!
About the vinyls dying..
To quote Billy Joel- only the good die young.
(I like that song)
And now add doing all that in the dark by braille (once I shut off the desk light to save battery..) ;-) I did learn that I need to have the charger for at least one on my laptops (I have three - two Win 7 and one Linux Mint) on a ups for those rare-except-for-hurricane outages that last for two or more hours. But that will require excavating my project table to accomplish. (Picture: all the wires, power cords, mousies, keyboard cables, and monitor cables have become buried under successive layers of parts, paperwork, install cd/dvd's, assorted toolthings, a basketfull or so of USB drives, assorted ram sticks - usually obsolete as they were yanked from a box-in-varying-stages-of-dismemberment, hard drives of questionable utility... So, when I get the gumption I'll shovel it all off, rearrange the wiring to the new specification, and then... bury it all again. ;-)
If it wasn't so chilly outside last night I would have stayed out longer, but I ventured outside with a thinner layer of insulating material than was required by the then extant climate that had changed since the glowing cause of global warmth sank into the Western sea..
I also learned that a lot of what I thought I remembered about what was what and which imaginary god/goddess/mythological critter/musical instrument/whatever was who in the heavens had leaked out of the fissures in my brain, so I need to reacquaint myself with some star-maps..
Beyond of course 'that's Orion, that blur over head is the Pleiades, Ursa the Dipper is that-a-way (or is that Dipper the Big), that's Polaris.. '
And now, I need to finish a printing project for someone. She publishes a monthly newsletter and had been using Staples to print it for her. Since about April she has had me print it for her and is paying me what it cost her at Staples. It's a just-a-bit-better than break even thing but I have found sources for more cost effective* supplies of laser toner and the 27# bright white paper she wants so I don't need to go to Staples for them. And she is willing to wait while supply replenishment is coming. The typical run is 100 or 150 copies of the six page (three sheet of paper) duplex printed and collated. I ran out of paper after 105 copies of this issue, and The Brown Truck People delivered my box of paper yesterday so I can now print up the remaining 45 copies..
For your storage area of trivial info, a ream of 27# paper is 300 sheets..
*Cost effective - the engineer's way to say "cheaper"..
Today's kitteh is invisible behind those two metal struts.
Oh lovely. I’m afraid I pretty much vegged out yesterday, slept, cried, and slept some more. Came here a bit but yesterday’s news just made me sad.
Happy Holidays to you too.
Mondays kitteh is adorable, and much needed today.
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