PhobosAnomaly

haven’t got opposable thumbs, have they?

I mean… that’s one definition of tourism I guess?

I’m very much a “leave only footprints” sort of guy - I know Brits have a bit of a shit reputation particularly when it comes to inexpensive package holidays, but I think tourism and learning about the rest of the world promotes a greater understanding of the only planet we live on. Whether it’s food; culture; history; or scenes of key historical events - it gives a window into people’s own gaps in knowledge or empathy.

I agree that an economy based entirely on tourism is a house of cards in itself, but I don’t think it’s a binary choice. Humanity have always had a nomadic element and there will always be those who want to travel, but it should be done sustainably.

Having experienced life in a city with a heavy tourism influence, it’s not the tourists that’s the problem, it’s counterintuitively a select few locals ripping the arse out of it.

• Housing shortages and sky high rents because homeowners and flat owners stick their places on AirBNB and other types of peer to peer services they provide access to;

• Ludicrous policies imposed on residents by locally-contracted private enterprises like event managers extending their road closures and parking suspensions a quarter mile away from their actual event areas, fucking over residents who actually live there for the other eleven months of the year;

• Zero hour contracts for those in gig economy or service workers, who get used and abused for a few weeks a year and fucked off when the good times dry up, while business owners have made bank;

• Increased pressure on public services for a few weeks a year, caused by influxes of folk putting heavy demands on the staff but leaving local residents to foot the tax bill;

• …and the usual creep towards city centre locations trending towards tat merchants selling utter shite.

It’s important to note that none of the above is anything wrong, it’s just assholery for the most part…

…and then those small numbers of “locals” have the gall to blame Mr and Mrs Miggins from halfway across the globe for ruining the city. Fuck all of the way off

Wireback sounds like an AI cover of a Justin Timberlake single.

It’s a bit of a wank article to be honest - it doesn’t even go on to say if the SIM was delivered. Why not wait the extra day and publish the article after it was due to be delivered?

If it didn’t get delivered then it’s easy meat for Trump-kicking, and if it did get delivered then you’d get some sort of review from some other poor fucker daft enough to sign up to it.

Bit of a waste of time really.

I don’t disagree, but throwing out the concept of prepared statements and parameterisation to someone who has asked for an explanation of the Bobby Tables jokes is a bit heavy going.

Spot on.

As for the sanitisation, it can take many forms. Either characters that don’t usually appear in the context for that field (in terms of names, you can usually scrub most parentheses, more than one hyphen in a row etc) can be removed; copy it to a known encoded field such as unicode to get rid of characters with unusual properties; and making sure bounds are enforced to avoid overflows.

It should mean that your data is exactly that - raw data, and not commands or operands for the interpreter to act upon.

🎵 KEN LEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEE-EE-EE-EE-EE-EEEEEEEE! 🎶

Perhaps it’s because I grew up with adventure puzzle games and point’n’click games, but GameFAQs was always the nuclear option for me.

I much preferred the Universal Hint System - an approach more suited to nudging you towards figuring out the answer for yourself.

There’s no denying that it was (and is) a fantastic resource though. Hell, I’ve even written a guide myself. One of the last bastions of the 90s and 2000s WWW experience.

I got into Poets of the Fall in a big way after Late Goodbye. Their work is fantastic and they’re brilliant live.

I’m glad Remedy have stuck with them over the years, the Herald of Darkness song from Alan Wake II was a banger.

The first major story where I thought “oh noes” was the Canary Wharf bombing in 1996ish. It was the first time I’d ever seen a “we interrupt this broadcast…” moment and it was so out of the ordinary that it sticks in my mind.

9/11 was a wild ride too. Getting home from school and my old man - who never watched the news - had Sky News on. At that point, the replays seemed… incredible, in the most literal sense of the word.

many

That line break is unfortunate.

I’ve had many an “ass apocalypse” in slow time after a dodgy kebab. They were anything but boring, however.

Mint.

On an unrelated note, my old girl used to take me to a local cafe for a slice of toast most mornings - there were two cabinets there.

My first memory of gaming as a three, maybe four year old was Pac Land, 10p a pop, absolute banger of a game - even if the controls were seriously dodgy.

Next to it was Street Fighter II - a premium cab at a whole 20p a credit.

A group of teenagers were playing it one morning, and I popped my 20p in, and I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. This older lad absolutely demolished me, like never even gave a poor kid a chance. Fair play, I learned a lot about going up against skilled opponents that day!

Outstanding. It’s like picking stuff like November Rain and Free Bird to make the most of your money.

In a similar vein, one of my old haunts had a jukey, but the button under the bar to skip tracks was fucked. So, we’d get towards the end of our drinks, put two quid in the jukey, pick two decent songs to give us six or seven minutes to finish our drinks, then queue up a load of Christmas songs… in June.

We’d drink up, fuck off, and sit smugly in the next pub knowing there was half hour of Mariah Carey & co. blaring out at the previous pub which couldn’t be skipped. Good times.

doesn’t matter bro, they’re your thoughts and that’s what makes them awesome 😊

have you tried getting someone else to do it?

Figma balls wheeeyyyy

Chuck it in the oven for ten minutes, no drama at all.

Then pre-book the following day off work with a dodgy stomach.