One of the plots in Dune was the idea that Baron Harkonnen initially put the Beast Raban in charge of Arrakis so that he could be a huge dick and make everybody hate him, then he would be replaced by Feyd-Rautha whom everybody would love because he was slightly less of a huge dick. Trump and Vance.

My favorite quote from A Bug’s Life is “first rule of leadership, princess: everything is your fault!”

And yet for all of eternity we have had different numbers of hot dogs and hot dog buns.

Nothing can possibly beat Road House in that department. Namely “pain don’t hurt” and “I used to fuck guys like you in prison”.

Just a reminder that ICE vans do have catalytic converters.

Q: What’s the capital of South Sudan?
A: Not a whole lot!

I remember some years ago when a version of MSDN came out that had clearly been developed entirely on enormously wide monitors. Despite word-wrapping being a problem that the programming world solved many decades ago, this version of MSDN had completely fucked it up and you could only read it on a normal laptop screen by scrolling left and right with the horizontal scroll bar for every line. I spent months copying every article I needed to read into Notepad.

Customizing the look, feel, interaction of elements, and general mechanics, seems like a toooon of effort. (It kinda seems like you’re not supposed to customize it.)

Sometimes all of this is there for a reason. I used to really hate standard Windows (and I still do) but it had one big advantage: everything was accessible, in the sense that it all worked very well for blind and vision-impaired people. Usually when people create their own custom look and feel etc. they never accommodate accessibility at all.

the omnipresent Qt

So weird. I spent more than two years of my career working on a Qt app (not by choice) but I’ve never met another human being who has ever even heard of Qt. Nothing else has ever made me so certain that I’m clinically insane.

My favorite thing about Qt was the use of C++ for the back end and Javascript for the UI layer. It lets companies take advantage of the, uh, four people in the world who are good with both languages.

Technically, their profession is “Saudi ball-cleaner”.

I started coding professionally using Visual Basic (3!). Everybody made fun of VB’s On Error Resume Next “solution” to error handling, which basically said if something goes wrong just move on to the next line of code. But apparently nobody knew about On Error Resume, which basically said if something goes wrong just execute the offending line again. This would of course manifest itself as a locked app and usually a rapidly-expanding memory footprint until the computer crashed. Basically the automated version of this meme.

BTW just to defend VB a little bit, you didn’t actually have to use On Error Resume Next, you could do On Error Goto errorHandler and then put the errorHandler label at the bottom of your routine (after an Exit Sub) and do actual structured error handling. Not that anybody in the VB world ever actually did this.

Now they are nickel and diming us until the bubble pops and they we have to pay.

She knows her endgame is being buried in an unmarked grave on a golf course.

Youngsters don’t realize that people became fucking bored with the Apollo missions after 11. Apollo 13 generated some buzz because the crew was probably going to die, but that’s it. Same thing happened with the space shuttle.

Lol out loud

You think I hate the Girl Scouts for no reason? No reason at all?

It couldn’t possibly be rich parents.

A rule of thumb is that a corporate employee costs their company roughly twice their salary. Probably not very many Oracle employees are making just $37,000 a year.

No, I meant the cackling muppet in the Jabba the Hutt scene.

I remember being utterly distraught after the first one came out and Lucas said it was the first of nine movies. The thought of having to wait that long to see them was a torment. And then I didn’t give a shit any more by the time Return of the Jedi came out; I only saw that one years later on VHS and I was like “why the fuck are muppets in this movie?” Have still never seen the prequels or the recent ones.