On the one hand, one of the Doctor’s aliases is Merlin*.

On the other, there’s a surprising amount of technobabble for pure magic.

And then there’s Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

* I subscribe to the notion that this is the Doctor’s true name.

You’re still going to need a portal or some other kind of tech (or magic) in order for both characters in this comic to be sharing anything like that. Or there’s one heck of a perspective trick going on.

They both have the same one in. This is now a sci-fi plot because how is that even possible?

Or if there isn’t one, this is now a metaphysical question because we must ask: Does everyone who doesn’t have one in actually have the same one in?

That cat would be on a one way trip to as far away as possible for an hour.

oh alright, thirty-seven seconds.

… six

… no just six

… shut up

But my point is, that cat should be at least two rooms away and out of reach of causing damage during that time.

Boundaries, people.

Arithmetic / so-called pure maths up to pre-calculus and maybe a bit of early calculus. The rest just wouldn’t stick in my brain, so even if I could teach, I couldn’t teach that.

But seriously, I’m not sure I could teach anything. If I can’t herd the metaphorical cats in my brain, I’d stand no chance with a class full of students.

I happen to have first.middle.last@acertainfreehost that I use for government things. I wanted first.last, but there are a few of “me” out there and one of them beat me to it.

Which is partly to say that you might find that now you’ve posted your ideas here that someone has taken them all before you, so I hope you didn’t use your real name. And I still feel sorry for ol’ Dennis if you didn’t.

One alternative might be to get your own domain name. Plenty of hosting companies will do a domain and mail forwarding if not some tier of hosting for cheap. Many give a handful of accounts in the base price. (Though it should be noted that it’s a well-known money grab because it’s usually very simple to have <anything>@domain go to one mailbox for collection and sorting elsewhere. Storage management does not have to be at the mailbox level either.)

You’ve probably had your chilli by now, but no-one else seems to have mentioned that canned goods are often fine long past their printed expiry date.

Exceptions might include: rusty cans, because rust outside could also be inside; dented cans, because that might have created a weak point that could compromise the contents; and those cans with the ring-pull easy-open lids - ring-pull seals aren’t as good as the full seal of a can that needs a can-opener.

And finally there’s always the look and smell test. Tip them into a separate bowl before putting them in the chilli. If they look and smell fine, then dump em in the chilli, with or without any liquid they might have been stored in.

“You keep using that word laugh. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Other way around. “Moses” apparently came first. It’s basically the last two syllables of “Ramesses” but missing the initial particle saying who (or what) was the cause of the person’s birth. For Ramesses, it’s Ra, obviously. The Semitic peoples took it and applied it to their mostly mythologised forefather.

Since their culture took the meaning of a name seriously - something we’ve started to lose at least in Anglophone countries - you’d expect there’d be a record of that missing particle for Moses, and yet, there doesn’t seem to be one.

This could indicate there there were a lot of -messes all amalgamated into one.

Imagine, if you will, a compilation of stories about the heroic exploits of Celtic men all named Mac-something and eventually a mythos develops around a unified “Mack”, eventually with allegorical and fantastical stories being built up around him. This hasn’t actually happened in Celtic culture as far as I know, but it puts a context on the whole thing.

What’s your opinion of the word “neologologist” and are you proposing that these “most linguists” are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

Couple more facts for you: 1) It’s not just conceivable, it’s incredibly likely that *dyéws-ph₂tḗr is older than both the Greek and Roman pantheons. He’s in the ancient Vedic (Hindi / Indian) religion under a very similar name and even made it into the Norse pantheon as Tiwaz, though it’s harder to tell how and when he ended up amongst Odin et al. He might have been a borrowing because all these other folks kept talking about him and how great he was. (But he is why we have a day called “Tuesday”, so he was still fairly highly regarded, borrowed or not.)

2) Moses probably didn’t exist (his name having the Egyptian ending -ses is apparently a big clue) and stories about him are allegories and/or amalgams of real people whose names had been long forgotten.

I envy these linguists’ ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

I’m about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why.

Today I seem to have worded it in a way that’s rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some.

And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse.

Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

*whose

“who’s” is “who is”[1] or “who has”[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make “who” all or part of a name[3], but it’s the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased “which person’s”, which is mostly what “whose” means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I’m not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. “Who’s there?” [2]: e.g. “Who’s let the cat out again?” [3]: e.g. “This is you-know-who’s box of tricks.”

The bigger shock is that by 2155 they’re still using the smartphone form factor.

My 20th century brain is too limited to conceive of what might exist by then but that seems like an anachronism in waiting.

Brain implants might seem a likely avenue, but body modification and/or surgery isn’t going to be cheap.

And if it’s enforced by the state, well then, we’ll be Borg by 2155.

Yeah, yeah, Shen didn’t have time to invent and introduce new tech for the sake of a four panel comic. I get it. And yet…

Mostly no. Currently the only time I put it on is when I’m away from the computer for a length of time doing something quiet.

And I’d probably not even do so then if I had a tablet or smartphone to cue something up from the Internet instead.

(I’m basically stuck in the '90s here. Largely by choice, but money is a factor.)

Yes, you do still have to remember a handful of passwords, but remembering three or four is a much smaller burden than remembering upwards of 50 or 100. (This might seem excessive, but my password manager tells me I have at least that many.)

If that opens up brain space, make those three or four as long and complicated as possible.

String together things only you know and will always remember, but throw in a few random symbols to make the job harder if you accidentally let any of the regular facts and figures slip.

You might also be interested in something like https://www.passwordcard.org/.

Edit to be an unpaid shill for say I’m a happy user of Password Safe, too: https://www.pwsafe.org/

Too expensive. No government would use a cyborg when a bullet or even “re-education” will suffice.

I mean, I know the rich and powerful love AI, but not to that degree. They’d put the cyborgs in charge of firing the bullets and running the "school"s instead.

I’d like to believe that this means that these three pieces of software actually work and that someone in high office has decided that that is unacceptable.

Paranoid authoritarians really do not like ordinary people having access to secure communications and personal privacy. That might be an avenue they can use to organise and elect someone who isn’t a paranoid authoritarian, and that won’t do.

On the other hand, these pieces of software might already be compromised and this is all an elaborate double-bluff.

In which case it’s time for a few well placed communications over purportedly secure channels that would be guaranteed to generate an authoritarian response. Which they’ll then have to pretend they didn’t read until it’s too late.

I’m talking organising - horrors - peaceful protests. They really don’t like those. They have to use their brains, or someone else’s, in order to find a good excuse to stick the boot in.

I can’t imagine I’m the first to ever say this: Those who say they do not poop are full of it.