tl;dr romance novelist trademarks the word "Cocky," and starts issuing trademark infringement takedowns for every single romance novel on Amazon with "Cocky" in the title. Including ones that predated her book. Shenanigans ensue.
Apparently L Ron Hubbard artificially inflated the sales numbers of his book Battlefield Earth by getting certain people to buy whole boxes of copies, return them unopened, then buy them again.
Vasovagal syncope can be triggered by things like not having eaten enough, being dehydrated, and sleep deprivation. Also, there is a massive difference between being intellectually aware that the human brain will fill in details if something concerning happens to the body and it doesn't have enough details to know wtf just happened and actually dealing with this happening to you. (I mean, I can piece together why my brain jumped to "we must have fallen asleep, lol, get up before anyone worries", but brain, no. We were fucking vertical two seconds ago as far as we can tell from system memory and then we were horizontal in the Walmart lobby. The only thing that came out of getting back on our feet was that we did what was probably a spectacularly concerning impression of a fainting goat in front of witnesses who were with it enough to get the store's medical team and call an ambulance.)
Things that make sense when you just passed out are a fun time. I once went down like a log in the middle of the floor in a doctor's office after getting blood drawn when I was severely anemic and hadn't eaten breakfast, and as they were carrying me to a bed to make me lie down and drink orange juice, all that registered was "I stood up and now people are TOUCHING me and I don't LIKE IT and this is DEMEANING," and I announced in tones of aggrieved sarcasm, "Is this REALLY necessary?"
Yyyup. I'm pretty sure my brain jumped to "oh lol, we just fell asleep" because I was chronically sleep-deprived during high-school and would routinely just sort of...pass out at my desk and wake up a few minutes later when the teacher noticed and came over to poke at me. So 'gap in memory during which time has passed' is something my brain knows One possible cause for, and apparently that one cause is now the answer for every time the problem happens.
Haru Urara is a racing horse that's famous for losing all of the races she has run she has been called "the shining star of losers everywhere" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haru_Urara
@unknownanonymous there's a really good episode of the dollop where they talk about the history of jaywalking!!! it's actuallg super weird and fascinating like, "jay" used to be an insult meaning something akin to "moron", the term "jaywalking" was coined by car companies
yeah, i checked out the wikipedia page on jaywalking 'cause something made me curious, and it is a lot weirder than i ever imagined it to be.
the FireBrick internet infrastructure company uses "GNU TerryPratchett" as the padding for their pings, rather than a bunch of zeroes. Makes it a lot easier to tell that it's intentional padding and memorializes Pterry at the same time! relatedly i want to read a fic about Pterry's ghost haunting the internet ETA: someone posted a screenshot of a packet dump from FireBrick pings https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-a31YTQ73.../s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-03-16+at+09.44.48.png
The jaywalking thing: right after automobiles became commonplace (around 1920), the number of pedestrian deaths spiked dramatically because people would just walk into traffic without looking because they were used to dealing with much slower, horse-based hazards. Crosswalks and walk signs didn't exist until much later. The thing that city governments did was to remind people to be cautious with really morbid parade floats and ridicule (you don't want to be one of those ignorent, careless jaywalkers, do you?).
learned a new word today! "Vexillology", the study of the history, symbolism, and usage of flags. a person who studies flags is a vexillologist, one who designs flags is a vexillographer, and the art of flag-designing is called vexillography. flag hobbyists/fans are vexillophiles. i love words so much! "vexillography" might be my new favorite word to say. good mouthfeel.
Fraternity, brother, and pal all come from the same proto-Indo-European root, *bʰréh2tēr. I knew about brother and fraternity already; apparently pal comes from Romani phral, which comes from Sanskrit. (source)
TIL the word "hamartia," which is essentially "fatal flaw" without as much of the inherent moral judgement of "fatal flaw." So basically, "this is the thing about this person that causes their story not to have a happy ending."
TIL that we have a TIL thread. A while ago, I made a handful of people aware of the term "White Elephant"
