Oh, I fucking HOPE so! The thought of all those assholes dying horribly of radiation and/or starvation on the trip or on Mars proper just fills me with joy.

I don’t put short-term jobs on my CV. Problem solved.

I didn’t keep track of them. (I kept track of the programmers. They were nice and they landed on their feet.) But it would not surprise me, actually, if they landed in jail.

Oh, this predates cryptobros by decades. No, they were “consultants” who were making a “CASE tool”. Except their programmers sat me down and had a very long talk showing me their “product” and mentioned they already had other jobs lined up and were just waiting so they could give their 14-day and walk into the new job. So I handed my resignation in promptly.

For your issue, it is sane to wait until you get paid before resigning given the number of companies who routinely “forget” to pay the final paycheque and generally make it a pain in the ass to collect.

Started in the morning. Resigned by noon.

As far as I was concerned it wasn’t a business I was working for, but rather a criminal enterprise (the crime being fraud), only a really incompetent one.

They were a “tech firm” but their product changed literally daily, depending on who they were trying to sell to. They had no actual product. They had a couple of programmers who would be told every day what the product actually was today who would gnash their teeth and cry. Then they didn’t even have that much. Which didn’t stop them trying to sell it anyway.

• cerulean is a word that just has so much more class and gravitas than “sky blue”
• gravitas is a word that simply has no other word providing such … well, gravitas (dignity, solemnity, etc.)
• charlatan is a word we need to apply every time a politician or a CEO or such speaks
• the Holy Triad: whence, whither, wherefore
• nubivagant is a word that doesn’t mean anything like what it looks and sounds like
• niggardly is another word that doesn’t mean anything like what it looks and sounds like (and can get you fired if you have uneducated colleagues)
• frippery is just fun to say

I would also like to see some further German words imported into English like we imported “Schadenfreude”:

• Backpfeifengesicht as an alternative for ‘a punchable face’
• Fremdschämen to express being embarrassed for someone who’s done something cringe
• Weltschmerz is a word I’ll let you look up so you can see how it might be super-appropriate for this day and age

There’s also a Chinese word I’d like to bring into English and make common:

• 三观 (sānguān) which is pronounced kinda/sorta “san gwun”, means literally “three views”, and means idiomatically the alignment (or lack thereof) of worldviews, values, and ethics between individuals

Surely you mean Star Period 4?

The novelist’s meticulous attention to historical detail—from the cadence of 19th-century dialogue to the texture of hand-stitched corsets—lent her story an uncanny verisimilitude, making even the most outlandish plot twists feel hauntingly plausible.

Yeah, I pushed it HARD on figuring out that it fucked up on the crater and it never caught on until I flatly told it.

It hallucinated a LOT of information about it too!

How is it fixed? There is no “Marathon Crater” in Ontario, Canada. It just spewed out far more persuasive bullshit with even more confidence than the others.

The link should work without me (or you) being logged in. It’s a free tier conversation. (I’m not going to pay for degenerative AI!)

…

Huh. OK, more fool me. I shared the wrong link. I’ll fix that. Try again and tell me if it works now.

There’s a little trick you can do that will improve even crud like Tetley’s or Red Rose or their ilk into something approaching drinkability.

Wash the tea.

Put in the bag (the real crud’s ALWAYS in a bag!). Pour scalding hot water on top. Swish it around a few seconds. Throw it (the liquor) away. Then brew as normal. It won’t be great tea by any means, but it will be drinkable, if only just.

Here’s Perplexity at work:

Marathon Crater, located in Ontario, Canada, is estimated to be about 450 million years old, dating back to the Ordovician period. It is one of the larger impact craters in North America with a diameter of approximately 65 kilometers (40 miles). While the exact discovery date is not clearly documented, geological surveys and studies of such craters typically became more common in the early to mid-20th century. Based on this context, a rough estimate for when Marathon Crater was discovered would likely be in the early 1900s or possibly the mid-20th century, as systematic searches for impact craters began around the 1950s[4][6][9 inferred].

Note: Marathon Crater should not be confused with similarly named features on Mars, which were identified much later through rover missions.

Full conversation as I put its feet to the fire here: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/when-was-marathon-crater-disco-EY90YHp3SgakxVkrJcu0XA

I once told an embarrassing story on a public forum.

“Oriental Beauty” is an English name for a tea blend for English people. CHECKMATE! :D

What? Even for green, yellow, and white tea?

As the current Chief Executive shows!

Or you can go for Liubao which doesn’t get bitter no matter how strong you make it or how long you boil it. Or there’s Hunan’s Anhua Gold Flower Black Tea that’s like a pu’er with more umami in the aftertaste.

Coffee: Like I take my men: strong, black, and hot. (OK, OK, I know, old joke. Strong, hot, no milk, no sugar.) Tea: strong, hot, no milk, no sugar.

I also rarely, if ever, drink mass-market versions of either; essentially only if I’m forced to. I get my coffees and teas directly from estates and sometimes individual farms when I can wrangle it.

Isn’t that what I said? 🤣