In 2013, I posted on Facebook, urging my Czech friends not to vote for the eventual winner of their Presidential election, Milos Zeman. I called him and inept drunkard, and compared to him to the then Slovak President, Ivan Gasparovic. The next day, the Slovak police paid a visit to my parents (I’ve been living abroad by then), and offered not to create problems for them if I deleted the post, because Mr. Gasparovic was offended by being compared to Mr. Zeman. As soon as my parents called me, I dropped everything and deleted the post.

This was in a presumably democratic member of the European Union, and I didn’t even think twice. I’d probably self-censor if I lived in a dictatorship. Sorry; I’m no hero type. I do have my opinions and express them when able, and don’t when it would cause problems for me or my family. I think I’m just an average person.

This is also the reason why Metamucil doesn’t sell in Europe. Seriously: just looking at the left picture gives me constipation.

(I understand that the pic is a joke, but anyone who has a coffee and a fag after breakfast can attest to their wonderful laxative powers.)

That’s a bad interpretation of the law. The law defines a max walking speed as 6 km/h. That’s a definition, not a speed limit. It will be used to clarify existing laws that already prescribe the movement of bicycles or scoters “at walking speed” on footpaths. Slovakia isn’t the first country to do that, either.

The ending of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. It pisses me off to this day.

One thing to recognise here is that neither governmental party was able to field a viable candidate against her. FF, the major government partner, had their candidate quit the race after the first debate. FG, the junior partner, nominated a candidate who clearly didn’t want to run, due to all the skeletons in her closet the media are now dragging out.

To be fair, however, the government always faces an uphill battle. Our President, despite being largery powerless, had been viewed in the past two decades or so as the moral counterweight to the immoral government. Nominating a former government minister was thus a very tone-deaf decision.

At first I thought I was on c/running and was about to agree.

One more week till Halloween. The next day the Christmas season starts, and I’ll gave the three TSO Christmas albums on loop.

I used to live in the US back then, and it was cheaper to leave voice messages than text. So, I did. One time I called my sister in Europe, and since she didn’t answer, I left a voice message. She called me back later, pissed off, because she had to call her provider to set up her voice mailbox, because “normal people just text when there’s no answer.” These days, she sends me long voice messages on Whatsapp, which I ignore for weeks at a time. Oh, how the tables have turned…

I don’t have light-up shoes, but I have lights for when I go for a run in the dark. They use a floating magnet that creates small electrical charges, strong enough to make a pair of LEDs flash, with every step. Installing those inside shoes would be a good idea.

This could satisfy environmental concerns, but I personally am not sold on the comfort angle of the solution.

Looks like they used CSS on that tree, instead of tables…

Last weekend I found that my original floppies for Eye of the Beholder II are still perfectly usable. Now get off my lawn, you young whippersnapper.

I’ll be probably downvoted to hell, but my hardware is so old it won’t even support Win10. So, I’m running 8.1. I use Bitdefender for firewall and antivirus. Obviously, everything is regularly backed up. So far, I haven’t had any security issue, so as long as the hardware holds (had to change a few pieces already), I’ll be using it. I imagine Win10 would be even more secure.

what if someone has friends but doesn’t value them or like them at all? They don’t dislike them, but they’re apathetic toward

Those are not friends, but acquaintances. Your friends are defined by you liking them, your enemies by you disliking them, and your acquaintances by you knowing but not caring about them. Having acquaintances is very normal. I always have many more of those than friends. Having no friends is abnormal, though. Without knowing your situation, I can’t even speculate of reasons, but in my case the failure in turning an acquaintance into a friend was most often due to a lack of mutual interests we’d both be passionate about.

At 10, I won’t have much money to invest, and I doubt I’d convince anyone to invest on my behalf. So, the butterfly effect on the markets will be at least 10 years away. I’d spend my first 5-6 years soaking up the knowledge that would be most relevant to me for the late 00’s, then from 16 or so I’d use that knowledge for well-paid gigs to earn money to invest, first into the stock market (short term), and later into startups I know will succeed. By 22, I’d start sponsoring the Cincinnati zoo, as a side project. By 24, I’ll use my influence at the zoo to beef up security in the gorilla enclosure. The kid will not fall in, Harambe will live, and today’s timeline will never materialize. Then I’ll retire. You’re welcome.

I sincerely hope that this is not to troll Trump, but that she genuinely deserves the prize. The world isn’t revolving around Trump. We should have our own lives, joys and worries, without caring what Trump would think of them.

I’m not a known artist. I like to paint and draw, but except a few paintings I did as presents, everything ends in my drawer. So, A.I. doesn’t threaten my livelihood. And until they make 3D printers that can emulate the brush strokes or oil pastels on canvas, nobody can accuse me of painting with A.I. Still, I often use A.I. to help me with my painting.

Whenever possible, I use my photographs as a model for a painting. However, I often want to paint something I don’t have a picture of. In those cases, I generate one using A.I. For example, right now I’m doing a series of Halloween paintings. A prompt of the likes of “Halloween pumpkin with flaming eyes, sitting of the ground, with twisted plants in Tim Burton style, and a red full moon illuminating the scene from top right” gives me the midel for my painting in minutes, rather than spending hours in Inkscape or Gimp.

I grew up in a country with a large Roma minority. Before WW2 they were travellers. They roamed the country in search of odd jobs. My grandma told me that they always paid them to cut their grass into hay bales, or to fix their pots and crockery.

Then communism came, and they were forced to settle dowwn and hold jobs. The vast majority never adjusted, and they treated their housing as temporary camp sites, devastating everything and then demanding new housing. This, naturally, created discontent that was aimed against the Roma, instead the authorities who forced them to change their way of life.

I now live in Ireland, which sees the same kind of “racism”, even though they are white: the Travellers. As the name suggests, they also come from the roaming background. They are also forced to settle, and they are treating their halting sites as temporary camp sites. I have one nearby. I pay some people from there to clean my driveway or gutters. They do a better and cheaper job than professional contractors. I know that it’s impossible to live a nomadic life in a civilised society, but sometimes I think how nice it would have been to let them roam again, and not care about them anymore.

It’s more about not buying services from companies that profit from providing services in the occupied territories, such as Airbnb and Booking.com. The Irish government is bending over backwards for the hospitality sector, so this is in line with their policies.

Today, my longest walk was 6.8 km. Took about 2 hours, but I had frequent stops as I was collecting kids from their schools and taking them to their respective sports clubs. When I have to go to the office, I run commute, 8 km each way. My watch says that my average step count for the past 7 days is 20,109 per day. I may be an extreme case, but walking 3.7 km to the library would be so routine I wouldn’t even think of taking a bus.

Can anyone actually think of a case where governments acted on what they promised Trump? To me it looks like everyone’s humoring him with “sure, whatever you say,” and then going on with their daily business. I would trust promises made to Trump about as much as I’d trust Trump himself.