rants prompted by <alt+printscreen> sugg.

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nikos
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Post by nikos »

hint: <alt+printscreen> copies only the active window so you don't have to crop from your whole desktop
Kilmatead
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Post by Kilmatead »

nikos wrote:hint: <alt+printscreen> copies only the active window so you don't have to crop from your whole desktop
Rant: All these time-saving conventions humans are so fond of will ruin the human race, I so swear.  Time was people actually had to work for their wares... now it's all "Save time here" and "Save money there" and all the rest of it.  With all this "Saving" going on you'd think we'd be better off as a species - but there seems to be no real sign of it.  They sell us on "Convenience" and "Luxury" and all the other catch-words the marketing machine can contrive - and we slobber all over it.  My kid needs new shoes, my wife needs a new car, I need a holiday.  Who are all these people?  Don't they watch disaster films?  Don't they know when they die in a plane crash the insurance company executive will be messing with their grieving wives?  When the volcano opens up under their house, do they really think they deserve compensation?  What does "Deserve" mean anyway?  Once upon a time it was derived from "to serve", with an implied absence of personal gain.  But now everybody thinks they "deserve" everything just on principle.  I should be able to deal drugs just because it's real capitalism.  I should get emotional comfort just because I'm "a nice guy".

Ah, fluff.  It's all fluff.

Have you got a keyboard shortcut for <Alt>-<Shift>-Remove-Ivy-from-my-backyard?  Now that would be useful.

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And Fred, just for good measure, I'll see your home renovations and raise you one mill-race waterwheel.  And this is supposed to be "spare time" work.  No wonder I get bored. :wink:

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Now, where were we?  Oh yeah, "<alt+printscreen>" - quite useful, cheers!  No, really, cheers!  Ah, you don't believe me now after my rant - I always was a contrary fellow - I can argue against anything just because it's there.  Oh well, story of my life.

:D
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Post by snakebyte »

Kilmatead, I love your posts  :lol:
Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's universe simulator.
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

i don't know if that's a real or imaginary back yard of yours, but this is what i've been battling with all last week, and <printScreen> with any modifier isn't any help, darn that rain :)
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Post by Kilmatead »

nikos wrote:i don't know if that's a real or imaginary back yard of yours...
Nice goggles. :shock:

Not imaginary: I rent a small cottage on a 20-acre estate (hence the name, "Kilmatead", for you nomenclaturists out there), so in these times of unemployment I can work off my rent by doing general upkeep.  And there's a hell of a lot of upkeep on an 18th-century estate, comprising some 8 living structures and 2 horticultural nurseries, horse stables, etc.  The ruins are an old gunpowder mill (circa 1750), for any architecture buffs.

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Picture from Virtual Earth.  Not all of Dublin looks like it's out of The Commitments.  (Just most of it.)

@Snakebyte:
Publius Terentius Afer (Terence) wrote:Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto

I am human; I consider nothing human to be foreign to me.
Or, to paraphrase, I am Off-Topic, I consider nothing Off-Topic to be foreign to me.

:D
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Post by Mr.Pleasant »

Nice!

The Ivy makes me think of poor Sheepman, who thought he'd just asked one simple question, and now gets his inbox invaded with 'Topic Reply Notification - Arrange Files by Name' emails. Life must be hard if you battle on two grounds. Considering that, I'm happy with my little terrace on the roof  :shifty:
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Post by fgagnon »

kilmatead wrote:And Fred, just for good measure, I'll see your home renovations and raise you one mill-race waterwheel.  And this is supposed to be "spare time" work.  No wonder I get bored.
No deal!  While your arena looks idyllic to visit, I wouldn't want to attempt upkeep on it.  What I have has enough to do to make it interesting, but is small enough to be manageable and give time off to go fishing. Which I did yesterday.  The 3-1/2 lb, 21 inch lake trout will be good eating tonight.  :)
Here it is ... after cleaning, ready for the grill. :yum:
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Post by Kilmatead »

As it would appear we now have our very own thread for Rants (and for our own psychological well-being, as Ranting is good for the soul), it might behove me to notice the sheer cruelty to nature we all engage in.

I'm guilty of cruelty to ivy.

Nikos is guilty of cruelty to grass (and bad-mouthing rain, which is ironic as the whole of the Greek nation was praying for rain last year when its landmass proved more combustible than its populous, for once).

And Fred is guilty of cruelty to fish.  And, it would appear, the deflowering of an innocent lemon.

And, more tellingly, of not cleaning his knives.

And all for what?  Aesthetics and the Victorian Ideal of man's dominance over Nature.  At first glance one would be inclined to excuse Fred's Piscean transgressions (no, not the astrological type) for aside from overpopulating the planet our only other human imperative from God is to eat.  But look closer at his photograph - which brings to mind an earlier one he had regarding doughnuts - does it not look a little "staged"?   Onions, Garlic, a long suffering Lemon, and what I can only think are Tomatoes made of wax - as they're "too perfect" to be real, just like America itself.  Has Normal Rockwell gone mad?  Or indeed, back to his roots in New York squalor?
Wikipedia wrote:Writer Vladimir Nabokov sneered that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to "banal" use, and wrote "That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood".
Which pretty much is how most men feel every day, if they were honest with themselves.  Not the supercilious art history reference, but the bit about being captured by gypsies at birth, and torn from the perfect life we were supposed to be living, yet somehow instead finding ourselves in a horrible twisted world of melting clocks which we ourselves did not design.

What does it mean?

Whilst I would love to spend time with Dalí and his pictorial approach to postmodern deconstruction, I've scammed enough cheap wine at gallery openings to take that world too seriously.  Like any good self-absorbed (yet blindly extroverted) student at university I too had a poster of his Christ of Saint John on my wall next to the beer bottles and obligatory panty-trophies, which seemed somehow fitting in a transpositionally juxtaposing collegiate manner.  (Hey, it's art man, I'm supposed to combine meaningless long words to make my shallow opinion sound important.)

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I'm also supposed to pepper my poor purple prose with paintings by the great masters to lend my <alt>-printscreen ranting some semblance of Gravitas and Authoritas.

But, as always, we're left with the quandary of Fred's unclean knife.  Why is it in the picture?  Is it to lend the image an overall impression of authenticity, backed up by the conveniently placed measuring tape (stolen, no doubt, from his wife's sewing basket)?  Or does it have a more foreboding mien of sinistrés, wherein he somehow prerendered my ranting with a more pragmatic cutting wit?  O would that the Pennsylvania Militia understood its true purpose under the shadow of Britannia's Union Jack!  Dalí knew more of war than this opinionated wastrel!  (Me, not Fred, that is.)  I followed Camus' pied-noire transgression to the drug dens of Amsterdam's circles of Hell, Judge-Penitent that I pretend!

This is the confession of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, for all men were stolen at birth and brainwashed to live lives of vain public service, unearned citizenship, and the sufferings of inexplicably unhappy women.  The gypsies so vilified, so long the victims of children's metaphors, so blamed for all our inclement woes - they seem to me to be but the thin vein of Necessity which drives men's counterfeit souls.

Yes, I claim the destructive hatred of nature on the Ivy I so despise to free the spiders from their homes.

Yes, Nikos clears his swathe with swagger and grace (or because his wife finally told him to do it).

Yes, Fred killed a living entity to preserve his place in the food chain.

This is, ultimately, what all we stolen children do: We long for the brothers lost in the war, We imagine a more perfect Rockwellian nightmare to dance within, We so scribe our scribblings with depth and hollow that none shall biblically fail.

* * *

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then those are mine in memory and abandon of Fred's Fresh Fish Dinner.  

:D

Yeah, I'm in one of those moods again. :wink:  That's what you get for giving us a thread to play with.  Just thought I'd prove a point no one knew needed to be proven.  Another story of my life.  C'est la bloody vie.
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Post by Kilmatead »

You know, à propos de rien, I really do curse Nikos for suggesting <Alt-PrintScreen>.  It really does take all the fun out of creating/editing those damned screenshots to help people.

Bring back hair-shirts.

And nail-beds.

And the Princess and the Pea.

How are rich men supposed to get through the eye of the needle into heaven anymore?

Oh the stunning potential of humanity lost to keyboard convenience.

Bah humbug.

Don't people earn their dinners anymore?

I need a cigarette.

Don't mind me.

Bah.

:twisted:
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Post by dunno »

I live on a tropical island, that has caught the estate development virus. There is a river adjacent to our property which has stood unmolested for years with beautiful ancient tall trees, flora and fauna gracing it's banks, until the owner of one side of the river, for development, decided to bring in caterpillar mounted jack hammers to rip up the banks of all vegetation, break the rocks and fill up the river bank and bed, now, why they would want to destroy and modify a riverbank and bed is beyond me. I stopped to pose some questions with the apparent local french supervisor, the conversation went something like this...

me, "what are you building here"
super, " we are err planting trees"
me, "really but why are you removing the old trees"
super, " because of the canopy"
me, " oh you mean the parasite plants'
super, "yes, yes, they are killing all the trees"
me, " that's very good, so you're removing the old trees to plant new ones because of the overgrowth".
Super, " yes we need to plant new trees
me, "I see"
super, "and it's for security as well"
me, "security" ?.
Super, "yes to prevent bad people from hiding there"
me, "what about the other side, bad people can still hide there"
super, "the other side doesn't belong to us, we cannot touch it"
me, "why did you divert the river"
super, "it's the dry season now, no rain"
me, "but the river always flows"
super, "no only during the wet season, January and February"
me, "why are you bringing in extra rocks and sand"?
super, "oh to make a road for the trucks"
me, "thanks and keep up the good work..."

me, *duly climbs into hammock with champagne*

And crawling on the planets face
Some insects called the human race
lost in time and space
and meaning

From that wonderful movie, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

oh shyte, almost forgot, yes yes alt print wonderful idea, never use it.
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Post by Kilmatead »

Goo goo g'joob, my good man, now we're getting somewhere, suckin' diesel, so we are on a once quiet tropical island.

The French have always had a questionable relationship with building things... I'd grant them two incongruous successes: 1: The architectural caravanserai that is Versailles (I had a gothic girlfriend once who dreamed of bleeding to death in the fountains - I put it down to youth and my apparent failure as a lover :wink:), and 2: The bridge at Le Viaduc de Millau, sweet mother of Jesus, and I thought the cliffs of Donegal sirened a call to leap into the Great Unknown - it's just all sky - above, below, give a man a good strong cable and he'll hang himself twice as high and thrice as hard. :D

When I was 10, my inane father thought it would be a fine thing to say I went swimming in the ocean on Christmas Day... but t'was my first (and last) experience with rip-tides that taught me a healthy fear for what moves beneath the waves.  My island isn't so small, nor so tropical, but developer's all the world over know nothing of creation (which oddly never stops them parading their past "accomplishments" in public for the blind to admire) - a humiliation in Pride, a Hubris paved of hardcore roadways.

When I was 20, I went out for cigarettes one day on one continent and never returned, only to find myself living on another continent the next day - for my sins.  There is a tremendous freedom (for the young) in foolhardy decisions which tread on the graves of artists everywhere.  I fell in love (she was, thankfully not a gothic, but the cathedral was) and thought I knew everything there was to know.  It ended badly, as it always must - did'st dream too much of islands in the tropics, and too little of impractical lust.  That rip-tide haunts me still: "Swim! Don't fight against it! Swim above it!"  Good advice from a father, but he was still inane.

When I was 30, I turned my back on the world - inevitably everyone must, whether they desire it or not - and locked myself in my cave with all the books of man (and much more wine than is healthy for a young pretender to parched scionesque intent).  I never did see the sun, I never did heed the rain, I never did what I never did - and I regretted not doing what I did.  Guilt is to a man's passion as thievery is to the soul: I may have turned out a social misfit, but I can sing the Brothers Karamozov a tale or two.  I so enjoyed my time in that dungeon under the floorboards.

When I was 40, there was the City.  Big and scary and blossoming a serious skein.  Blades of smoke separated the friends from the sublime, and we all danced some crazy hapless confusion.  What did I want to be when I grew up?  It was a serious question then, and only one that a man can even consider taking seriously at 40 (everything else suffers the illusion in preamble) - 10 little words which knew as little of me as I did of them.  There were no islands in the sun anymore, just a JCB and the most counter-intuitive control panel known to mankind.  Pull back on one lever to go down, pull up on the next to swing to the side, push the peddles to turn round and round.  It was, I fathomed, a metaphor in exquisite relief - why was every quaint French village so proud of their decaying Roman amphitheatre, and yet so demanding of "the glossy and the new" when it came to building a modern community beehive?  It was like Jean de Florette, someone else's imagination sewn dangerously into the hearts bloodied by industry and madmen developers.

Shoot them.

Shoot them all.

The wine shall be free until it's time to ask the question again and again and again.

I fear for 50.

Oh yeah, and <Alt-PrintScreen> is no doubt to blame for everything wrong with western society, it's an emblematic wraith of convenience and sloth.  It's the monster under the bed.  The fluff between the toes.  The end of all things apocryphal and true.

But I can't seem to stop using it.  It's just too easy.
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fgagnon
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Post by fgagnon »

JCB ?
Kilmatead
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Post by Kilmatead »

fgagnon wrote:JCB ?
That's her.  As opposed to CAT, you see.  Colloquialisms are peculiar - for instance though there are many types of "Vacuum Cleaners" in the world, here, colloquially, they are all called "Hoovers", regardless of who actually makes them.  Not sure if there's a grammatical term for creating verbs from proper nouns ("he hoovers, she hoovers, they all hoover together"); Ireland and the UK just love their verbifications.  Thus, all forms of diggers are JCB's - in fact, Mr. Joseph Cyril Bamford there would be highly amused to know that millions of people know his initials, but probably none could repeat his actual name from memory.  Such is the price of fame in the decadent capitalist wonderlands.  Either that, or all "Joe's" are genetically and culturally doomed to be generic, regardless of fame. :shrug: :D
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Post by dunno »

Kilmatead wrote: just a JCB and the most counter-intuitive control panel known to mankind.
ah yes the joy of "Made In England", cars made in England in those days required one to definitely R.T.F.M to determine what the toggle switches randomly placed on the dashboard were for, especially those located on the passengers side, the Mini, the Jaguar, etc. the advantage of this scintillating ergonomically designed dashboard was that the passenger could stress their point by toggling the wipers on and off, very clever to include the passenger in the driving process, load shedding, excellent concept, the only down side was when driving solo. Then there was made in France, who took being different with ergonomics to the extreme, sublime to the ridiculous, All early french cars had window winders that worked opposite to the rest of the world, the door locking mechanisms also opposite to the rest, they just HAD to be different, thank the stars for electronics. Now that I think of it their woman were also opposite, they didn't get turned off by smelly garlic, ashy, boozy breath, including armpits whose odour could raise the dead, that was a good thing, and yes I did go where many had been before.


alt-prt sc . On my keyboard, alt-fn-prt sc, the screen went "blink", and I'm darned if I know where that "blink" went, perhaps one of you has it as the screen was displaying X2's forum at the time.
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Post by Kilmatead »

As any failed Citroën enthusiast knows, driving a Jaguar is not about ergonomics, it's about knowing you were really Jackie Stewart in another lifetime when sailing through the air was as simple as imagining you could sing like Antony & the Johnsons.  Proper cars are like that: subtle extensions to the self - the Americans never really understood that part of design, their paradigm was one of brash augmentation and representation - how else would the only Irish sportscar ever made end up more famous as a film prop?  And when it comes to Minis... well, when your whole car (if you can call it that :wink:) is just over a meter wide, where else would you put the dashboard toggly-bits?  These things promote family togetherness (or boy/girl crammed-together togetherness that promotes families) - which switch plays the siren and the flashy-do lights?  Why do you think Citroën had so much fun developing hydropneumatic suspension?  Gotta keep a bouncy bouncy unjudgemental fille-de-rue comfy.

I always feel like I'm getting other people's PrtScn's as oddly dual-LCD's give you one combined screenshot of all monitors, so I get these entertainingly large 3200x1200 screenshots.

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I'll trade it back to you for your chanteuse française. :D
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