US patents expire after 20 years.

I recently read In the Company of Crows and Ravens and the authors mentioned that crows have come to specifically recognize the McDonald’s logo on a bag as a likelier source of food than a plain bag.

I recently read In the Company of Crows and Ravens and it suggested that crow language may be very specific to crow families and neighbors, kind of like a regional dialect but for many very small regions, so it might difficult to interpret a universal language that understands the more specific aspects of every individual crow cant. We might only get the most basic and common calls.

I’m guessing it would be more like, *Hey, Bob, watch this!"

Yeah, that is a pattern I’ve seen. I grew up having to troubleshoot stuff offline just to get a modem on PC to work on dialup to get to a BBS or CompuServe or editing mods for computer games, whereas my Mac friends were mostly playing with artistic programs on Mac. I also used artistic software on PC but that too required more skill. I don’t recall seeing them deal with a command line interface whereas most of my earliest games ran in DOS.

Weird. I was thinking the post was saying Mac kids were less digitally literate because of the whole “it just works” culture. When I ran a help desk, the Mac users were definitely less adept. The pattern seems to continue with iPhone and Android users I encounter today.

Humboldt is the neighborhood, but I rarely hear anyone use the term. It’s just a part of north Portland or NoPo when we talk about it.

I was looking through some old vinyl in a store yesterday and found an album from the 50s or 60s called Songs Everybody Knows and I didn’t recognize a single song on the list.

Knowing the localization and the interaction of everything with each other would have helped me a lot and certainly saved time.

I guess this is the disconnect. I’ve assembled one, but I don’t feel like assembling one necessarily conveys this. The instructions just tell you which part to attach to which other part. It doesn’t explain why much of it is important or how it functions.

The other difference is that I haven’t upgraded any. I have some MK3S+ printers that I are likely to remain that way since the upgrades are so expensive and the process so laborious.

For personal use, I’m waiting on the CORE One from Printed Solid but it’s only available for education, government, etc at the moment.

I’d actually recommend the opposite. Unless you’re a DIY hobbyist who loves taking everything apart and you don’t want to print immediately upon receiving it, it’s worth it to buy the prebuilt Prusa. There are so many many steps in assembling a MK4S that there are that many steps to get something wrong. Better pay a few hundred extra to get one that has been assembled by a more experienced person. And I say that as a makerspace coordinator who works with a lot of 3D printers.

Assembly teaches you how incredibly complicated the assembly is. I’ve adjusted pre-assembled printers with minor inconvenience. But the first one you put together can take more than the estimated 6-8 hours.

I tried, but I just can’t go back and play Oblivion after playing Skyrim with all the quality of life mods. I’m waiting on the Skyblivion release to revisit it.

My significant other and I still talk about how great the internet was in the 90s. You could be yourself without having to mask. You didn’t have to focus on the visual because uploading a picture either wasn’t feasible or just took too long and too much data. No selfies, just being yourself with people you’d probably never meet, discussing mutual interests, and not having your interactions commoditized or interrupted with ads.

I guess the upside to the vast commercialization and commoditization of every last aspect of the internet is that there’s a lot of greedy dystopian conventions to write about. I’ve got a few cyberpunk stories I’m going to include in an upcoming collection that utilize some examples of that issue.

I haven’t read through these, but it sounds like any number of a few patterns I’ve recognized in some older works might be occurring for you.

The “you had to be there” thing is definitely common. It might be more relevant if you got a lot of physical junk mail like decades past. It might be making clever references to things you’re not familiar with or mimicking a style you haven’t seen because its practitioners are gone.

It’s also possible that it wasn’t all that clever to begin with, but it was good filler at the time when there was far less of the subgenre available. They were fiction magazines rather than a thousand online sources and movies and graphic novels, so standards were lower for many people just wanting more.

For anything that was actually good for its time but didn’t age well, I’ve noticed that they often suffer from being surpassed by the later works that they inspired or broke down barriers for. The practical effects of Star Wars were a lot more impressive in 1977 when you saw cheesy rubbery aliens and blocky cardboard robots in earlier scifi works.

The beak is larger and curved, so more like a raven’s beak than a crow.

No matter how much he pointed to his white beard as proof, the witch didn’t believe Grumbles when he insisted he wasn’t a child and wouldn’t taste good in a nice meat pie.

How about:

I wasn’t creeped out while watching a true crime documentary on TV late one night about a brutal murder until they showed a picture of the crime scene and the victim. It was a picture of me in my living room and the TV was showing a true crime documentary.

I was referring to the 1994 version.

Have you read the Ghost Rider 2099 comics by Len Kaminski? The art is good too, but Kaminski’s writing and cyberpunk stylings is inspired and inspiring.

Check out Optimistic Nihilism.

It’s a great collection. There’s a good variety of topics and styles and if you don’t like one story, there’s always another. Some of my favorite authors are included like Gibson, Sterling, Cadigan, Doctorow, and Stephenson. It’s got a nice breadth to it such that lesser known authors could get included rather than only settling for the more well-known names and reprinted stories you might have already read elsewhere.