It always sucks to have to cut off or go no contact/ghost absurd family members… but after a long pattern of concerning, manipulative and/or abusive behavior… that’d you really only put up with because they’re family… after a while, that reason/excuse becomes worthless.

Reading the main post and other comments you’ve made giving more context, IMO you are correct, your aunt is a narcissistic sociopath.

No problem!

Wonderful username btw, haha.

In case people missed or are unaware of the context:

https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/2024/doj-google-must-divest-chrome-possibly-android-google-fires-back

https://www.howtogeek.com/united-states-doj-google-android-chrome-split/

The DoJ recently (before Trump got elected) won an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, and the lawsuit is currently in the stage of haggling over the extent of the penalty actions taken against Google as a result.

One of the things the DoJ is pushing for is breaking off not only Chrome but also Android from Google to just leave Google with its search stuff.

This is like splitting up Bell from decades ago.

What Google is doing right now is strategic positioning to be able to argue that Android can’t be split off from Google without causing them too much pain, and by making Android more and more dependent on, and nonfunctional without being under the same corporate ownership.

This is a powerplay to try to not be broken up so hard by the anti-trust lawsuit they already lost.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)

The actual penalty ruling is expected to come down by August 2025… unless the Trump admin fucks with it, somehow they… haven’t seemed to yet notice or care that this lawsuit is going on, despite Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, having a literal front row seat at Trump’s inauguration.

I would add to try regularly massaging the area and alternating between cold paks and hot paks … that might help a bit if its not a serious problem as outlined above.

If doing that for a few days yields little to no improvement… or is extremely painful… go to a doctor.

Also, probably just take your mattress off the frame, put it on the ground, roll up blankets or use pillows or something to extend the effective length of the matress, until you can get a larger mattress and different frame that doesn’t allow for this problem to occur.

Not a hacksaw, but I’ve dug fairly large glass shards and other sharp splinters out of my foot and sterilized and bandaged/stiched it up on my own, as opposed to going to doctor who would charge quite a lot… I’ve done that a good number of times.

None of them went deep enough to hit a major nerve or blood vessel, I’d probably have to go to an urgent care/hospital at that point.

=P

If you go back far enough, you’d be coding the ENIAC via punchcards.

… Or maybe today you could write code on paper and have an AI augmented OCR system try to run it?

I mean, the entirety of Steam’s code could maybe be described as an obfuscated version of

while(true){ print(money); }

Damnit.

Yeah, ok, that would work.

Congratulations, you have invented a new spice, made of mostly microplastics and a dash of metals, a few of which can bioaccumulate and cause organ / nervous system disruption.

… I …uh…

I dunno how you’d be able to actually accomplish that.

You could poo in multiple places over the course of a few days… but chances are the actual remnants of the sd card would come out in the same poo.

Smash it with a hammer for a minute or two, then microwave the chunks.

That’ll probably do the trick.

Alternatively, smash it, eat it, shit it out later at not where you live.

Kinda sorta.

The actual accent itself doesn’t sound the same, but I think you’re getting at how it came to be.

The PNW dialect/accent is basically a subset of the Californian dialect/accent, with a few differences.

It arose as being very close to ‘General American’ because it was the last, or latest part of the US to be settled by significant numbers of English speakers, and is an amalgamation of the accents of English speakers from many different pre-exsting American dialect regions.

People from the PNW often do not even realize that they have an accent, as it is so close to a sort of normalized middle ground of other US American English accents.

TransAtlantic accent/dialect specifically arose because of the technology, as you say… and also I think a bit from social circles of basicslly upper class NorthEasterners who had enough money to regulalry interact with actual UK English speakers themselves, whereas PNW accent/dialect seems to not have arisen intentionally, and isn’t as strongly tied to the upper social class of the region.

Seattle and Portland’s first major population booms were the result of the Alaska goldrush near the end of the 1800’s, with basically lower class people coming from all across American (and other parts of the world) either using them as a last port to stock up and buy supplies before heading north, or setting up a business to sell those supplies to those people… and a whole lot of them returned to Seattle or Portland after the Alaska gold rush.

https://pacificupperleft.com/does-the-pacific-northwest-have-an-accent/

Well, that does count as a dialect, but I literally would not be able to comprehend it in person.

I have the PNW dialect, aka, the accent that is trained into every newcaster and hollywood actor, because basically every English speaker can understand it without difficulty.

The type O blood of English dialects, if you would.

See?

The Internet really is basically a series of tubes.

Agreed, it does prove the rule.

…but that doesn’t change what I said.

If you’re interacting soley through text, you may get into a/an arguments with people who don’t know that different dialects pronounce the same words differently.

I didn’t say ‘this disproves the rule.’

How would you pronounce:

Al, as in Allen?

La, as in Law?

El, as in Elope?

Le, as in Level?

Ill, as in… Ill?

Li, as in Lick?

Ol, as in Oligarchy?

Lo, as in Logistics?

Ul, as in Ultimate?

Lu, as in Luminate?

Just because the letter ‘L’ is generally pronounced ‘el’ on its own does not mean the ‘e’ sound is not a vowel.

Its ‘an elephant’ because ‘e’ is a vowel, and that’s the first pronounced sound.

Its ‘a lever’, because ‘l’ is a consonant, and that’s the first pronounced sound.

… Is English not your first language, or have you not graduated middle school yet?

This is the general rule, but you’ll run into problems with words that are pronounced differently with different dialects.

Example:

A herb / An herb

I’d say ‘an herb’ because where I’m from, the h is silent.

But there are many places where it isn’t silent.

A bunch of other comments are using ‘history’ of an example of this… but I’ve not heard of a dialect where the h in history is silent.

Please tell me you are joking.

That’s quite a rosy outlook.

https://sofrep.com/news/how-global-internet-access-relies-on-a-few-hundred-vulnerable-undersea-cables/

If this is accurate, 97% of global internet data is carried through undersea cables.

Satellite systems for general, consumer (non military) internet purposes do exist, but their total bandwidth is essentially negligible in this scenario.

What would happen is:

First, everything on the internet would dramatically slow down and/or 404 due to built in auto timeout failures.

As BGP kicks in, this may lessen very slightly, but systems that mirror data across servers on different continents would basically be unable to synchronize.

Systems with servers in only one location would basically be unnaccessible to anyone more than … ballpark, a few hundred miles away.

International banking and transactions and would be forced to stop, otherwise they’d be getting massively out of date info, wrecking the legitimacy of their balance sheets.

International video calls stop working.

International voice only calls and email may work, but with great delay for emails, and a roulette wheel spin for your call going through and being intelligble and not dropping.

You’re basically looking at the Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, maybe not quite as bad in certain areas that effectively prioritize certain kinds of traffic and rapidly enact effective mitigation strategies…

But best case, for probably a very long time, you’re looking at an internet that is mostly fragmented and highly geographically localized.

… and thats assuming the world’s highly globalized and interdependent economy doesn’t just collapse and never really come back.

Almost all modern logistics is now impossible, and almost all modern logistics runs on the Just In Time paradigm… ot is very fragile, very reliant on things working on time, with very little margin of error and stored emergency reserves.

Remember when the Evergrande EDIT:(lol wrong name) Ever Given blocked the Suez, and this caused logistics nightmares around the world that persisted for years?

Imagine that multiplied by about 10,000 or 100,000.