Sound doesn't travel as far through warm humid air, so the world feels a little more muted and calm. (Contrast this with the dry, dense air of a frigid winter day, when the sound of cars carries for miles as a dull growl.) The light is almost entirely diffuse thanks to clouds, rather than the sharp glare of a sunny day; your skin isn't dried out and burned in the same way either. Public spaces aren't as crowded. Indoor rooms are often lighted more gently as well without sharp sunbeams drawing lines. Add the sound of rain itself and the faint smell of petrichor, and the improvement in the air quality as the rain washes particulate and pollen into the gutters, and you get a perfect day to curl up with a book, a cup of tea, and a cat on your lap.

"No, I am not going with you to a concert in the park! There's a zombie horde out there! We'll get bitten!"

"Hey, even the WHO says it's not an apocalypse anymore. The zombies are endemic now. You can't live your life in fear."

"Your mom was eaten by zombies literally last week."

"Yeah but she had diabetes. There's always gonna be people with preexisting conditions who are gonna be more vulnerable."

"At least wear your denim jacket to make it harder for them to bite you!"

"There was a study in the Lancet that said heavy clothes don't work."

"You know full well that what they found was that requiring heavy clothes didn't work because people just got bitten at the times when they weren't wearing them."

"The author himself said jackets don't work."

"He said that after he was bitten and just before demanding our brains!"

"Okay, sheeple. Oh, hey Mom. We're just heading out to the concert."

"Wait, your mom is here? I thought she was..."

"BRAAAAIINSSS..."

"You LET HER BACK IN after she died and came back as a zombie!?"

"Dude, she's not infectious anymore. She caught it like four days ago."

"That is NOT how this works! What... DON'T HUG HER!"

"Bye Mom, love you...ow!"

"She just bit you, didn't she."

"Nah, I'm fine. Let's go to the concert."

Maybe they should patent it, to protect their TCP IP.

Reminds me of a line from the Simpsons, when Nelson, the school bully, refers to "a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark."

Definite "Friday was the name of his horse!" energy here.

Wasn't the phrase supposed to be "Primus sucks"? I seem to remember that being a self-identification thing for fans back in the day.

Yeah, I've thought about this, but I think you need more than one degree of freedom for the chair to help with motion sickness. Like, if your character is in a car and accelerates, you need to tilt (pitch) backwards a bit, to emulate the way the acceleration pushes you back into your seat on the car (well, really it's the corresponding motion in the inner ear we need to worry about, but a tilt is the correct solution for both). When you go around a corner, it needs to tilt (roll) sideways a bit, to match the feeling of being pulled to the outside of the turn by centrifugal force. Etc. Those are the forces our inner ears are expecting, and without those, there's still a mismatch. And even with the hardware to do those movements, you need software to calculate the right motions ahead of time so you can reach the right positions in time to match the visuals, which is also quite difficult, and makes it pretty hard to picture doing this as a peripheral rather than as an integrated system. And the cost would be prohibitive.

Honestly I think we may not get this until we can fake it all with electrical signals to the brain, which is quite a long way off.

If I'm remembering correctly, this phrase was immortalized in a Primus track at one point. There's a weird, short track (or maybe an intro to a longer song?) on "Sailing the Seas of Cheese" that's just one guy singing along with running water, and as I remember them, the lyrics are: "As I stand here in the shower, singing opera and such/pondering the possibility that I pull the pud too much/there's a scent that fills the air; is it flatus? just a touch/and it makes me think of you."

Which apparently is still in my brain, even though I didn't think I've listened to that album since the 90's. My brain is weirdly prone to storing old audio, though.

I believe they were already required to use reflectors. Back in the 80's when I was sometimes in Ohio with my parents we used to pass Amish buggies sometimes, and they always had an orange triangle retroreflector thing on the back.

Honestly it just reminds me of the moral panic over "cock ring Ken."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earring_Magic_Ken

(also amusing in this context to note that his earring is in his left ear, so I'm not sure even the homophobes were consistent about this)

No, because the map is showing how many reports they got. So it's red where they got a lot of reports, and that correlates very tightly with where there are a lot of people, making the visualization kind of worthless.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/heatmap_2x.png

One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those "extensions" started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS's idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.

It's complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where "just a little tweak" can be quite a big problem for a standard.