Fun stuff -- word related or not, ramblings, junk, whatever.

[Spike1007]

Maybe once I get a Finnish wife...

[floppers]

So...has anyone else ever been to a Finnish Wife Carrying competition?

[bwt1213]

Ads they slip in before the start of other shows are called 'Promo's' & aren't considered the same as ads. Hallmark & Up are famous for that, they add them in right before a block of ads & then again @ the end. The annoying part for me is they show exactly the same promos & ads EVERY SINGLE TIME. There's no variety. If I must put up w/this (as I actually watch it on that old fashioned thing called a television) @ least mix them up. Ugh!

The latest commercial message thing is on Philo. I pay $20 a month and I get more than 60 channels, and I watch enough of them that it's a good deal. When commercials come up, on most shows you can just hit one button and skip them. But on a few shows, the commercial time block isn't marked and you have to manually page through them -- irritating, but at least you CAN skip them. But they're wise to that, so they'll have a block of commercials and go back to the show. For fifteen seconds. Then there's another block of commercials. What they hope to achieve by that is beyond my pay grade, apparently. Perhaps they just want to get their viewers angry at ALL commercial messages. I will note that on shows with just reasonable numbers and lengths of commercials (as things were when the FCC limited the number and length of commercial messages per show), an hour show usually takes about 43 minutes. So if you watch an hour-length show on Tubi or Pluto or even Paramount + or Disney + and watch it with their commercials, it will take about 43 minutes. An hour show completely without any commercials on Disney + takes something like 38 minutes. The last time I watched a network show with commercials, I noted that some of the commercial breaks were longer than five minutes. That would make a show unwatchable, for me.

[2cute]

I'm writing this while running WordTwist within the Vivaldi browser on Linux Mint. I really like the browser and recommend it; the learning curve is relatively shallow and it has some nice features. I'm wondering if anyone else has tried it and can warn me of any gotchas. The things I like -- I can watch Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock Premium, and every blasted thing I can find and with no errors at all -- except for Pluto. No sound on Pluto. If I try to watch Peacock on Firefox, I get an error message basically telling me "not for Linux, pal". But on Vivaldi, no problems even though I'm still running Linux. And Vivaldi has an ad-blocker built in. Had to turn it off to watch Paramount+, which is the ad-free version. Except they slip in an ad for their other shows at the start of yours, and Vivaldi blocked it, which Paramount+ didn't like. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and it's freeware.

Ads they slip in before the start of other shows are called 'Promo's' & aren't considered the same as ads. Hallmark & Up are famous for that, they add them in right before a block of ads & then again @ the end. The annoying part for me is they show exactly the same promos & ads EVERY SINGLE TIME. There's no variety. If I must put up w/this (as I actually watch it on that old fashioned thing called a television) @ least mix them up. Ugh!

[bwt1213]

They are much better at that than they used to be. Vivaldi is a Norwegian company, too, and the name ought to have wide appeal simply because almost everyone can remember The Four Seasons.

[floppers]

They choose lovely names for these things, huh?

[bwt1213]

I'm writing this while running WordTwist within the Vivaldi browser on Linux Mint. I really like the browser and recommend it; the learning curve is relatively shallow and it has some nice features. I'm wondering if anyone else has tried it and can warn me of any gotchas. The things I like -- I can watch Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock Premium, and every blasted thing I can find and with no errors at all -- except for Pluto. No sound on Pluto. If I try to watch Peacock on Firefox, I get an error message basically telling me "not for Linux, pal". But on Vivaldi, no problems even though I'm still running Linux. And Vivaldi has an ad-blocker built in. Had to turn it off to watch Paramount+, which is the ad-free version. Except they slip in an ad for their other shows at the start of yours, and Vivaldi blocked it, which Paramount+ didn't like. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and it's freeware.

[Naboka]

Anyone else ever completely misread words?

I saw rebit and rebite so thought de-bit, completely not realizing debit was certainly not some form of having taken away a bite.

Damned, playing this game is sometimes hilarious.

Screen Shot 2023-03-26 at 10.23.09 AM.png


Screen Shot 2023-03-26 at 10.23.50 AM.png

[2cute]

Tried to send a private message but got this

Screen Shot 2023-02-08 at 10.18.35 PM.png


haven't figured out how to fix this. Tried checking the box for private messages, but still got this message.

Yep, I've gotten that too. I just ignored it as when I contacted admin it didn't change. I just chatted via this section instead.


For while now periodically I get this strange message ...

WT weirdness p4 Notifications I can't view 05.21.22.png
When I click a link from my notifications. Hello, If I'm not allowed to view it why are you sending me the link? Duh.


and this goodie ...

WT weirdness pt1 05.22.png
You & minus one others (-1 others) posted to my subscription. Hmm ... Minus one, does that mean someone (or a few people) deleted their post(s)?

[Naboka]

Tried to send a private message but got this

Screen Shot 2023-02-08 at 10.18.35 PM.png


haven't figured out how to fix this. Tried checking the box for private messages, but still got this message.

[crazykate]

Genealogy is fun, particularly now that so many records are available online. My grandparents started doing genealogy when they retired, and they actually had to go to the towns where their ancestors were from and look through the records there, which was less convenient, particularly if people didn't just marry people from the same parish for several generations in a row. Now that most records are available online, I can just click through without driving from one place to the next within office hours. I'm also lucky that in Austria continuous records started being kept in all parishes after the 30 years war, and although not everything is legible, I have managed to trace some of my ancestry lines back to the mid-1600s.

[JedMedGrey]

Check to see if you can use Ancestry and other databases and services through your library. We used to be able to access Ancestry from home, but now can only do so in the library. There are other services available from home, such as Consumer Reports.

[Nylimb]

My grandmother & father both used the term "he's the son of the second cousin twice removed". For the longest time I didn't understand what that meant. Now I do. Twice removed means from the person you are related or 2 generations. Now second cousin also means 2 generations. So this cousin is actually 4 generations 'removed' from your related relative. So he's your fourth cousin. I too have fourth, fifth & even sixth cousins that I know. Each generation is a number. I too always hated those terms. Why not just say he's your fourth cousin?

That's not how I understand these terms. I think the standard usage is that someone is your first cousin if you share a grandparent, your second cousin if you share a great-grandparent, your third cousin if you share a great-great-grandparent, and so on. A child of your n-th cousin is called your "n-th cousin once removed". A grandchild of your n-th cousin is your "n-th cousin twice removed", and so on. And that works in reverse too: an n-th cousin of your parent is also called your "n-th cousin once removed", etc.

So saying that someone is the son of your second cousin twice removed is non-standard. That person is either the son of a grandchild of your second cousin, in which case he's your second cousin thrice removed, or he's the son of a second cousin of your grandparent, in which case he's your third cousin once removed.

There's a "cousin calculator" chart at https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/cousin-chart that explains how this works.

[2cute]

I am from a small town, and my mother often said that we were related to everyone. I doubted that, and she proved it to me once. The thing was, only she knew all the relationships. She still knows them, too -- even though she sometimes says her son is her (deceased) brother when she's at the nursing home and can't recognize herself in pictures, she can rattle off stuff like "he's the son of the second cousin twice removed", and I have utterly no idea what any of that means. My mother is, to be kind, "addled". She's 96 years old, and by chance lives across the hall from her daughter-in-law's mother who is 93 and simply old. Neither of them know the relationship and no one's going to tell them. My mother wouldn't remember anyway. Her short-term memory is almost gone entirely. And yet she retains this incredible store of relationships. Everything else is scrambled but the family history remains. She thinks I did things her father did or my father did, and my younger brother is tied somehow to her younger brother, but that genealogy stuff remains. I'm leaving out the stuff about the dinosaurs she saw (in detail, it's almost convincing). It's oddly fascinating to see how a mind disintegrates, but I don't want to observe it very closely.

My grandmother & father both used the term "he's the son of the second cousin twice removed". For the longest time I didn't understand what that meant. Now I do. Twice removed means from the person you are related or 2 generations. Now second cousin also means 2 generations. So this cousin is actually 4 generations 'removed' from your related relative. So he's your fourth cousin. I too have fourth, fifth & even sixth cousins that I know. Each generation is a number. I too always hated those terms. Why not just say he's your fourth cousin?

One thing I wish I had done when these relatives were alive, was have them draw the family tree. Yes yes, I know you can join Ancestry & do the work yourself (& suck up all your free time in the process), yet since they know the lineage, why not get their version of it. Its so much easier to understand when its written down in branches or tree form rather than using terms like twice removed.

[bwt1213]

I am from a small town, and my mother often said that we were related to everyone. I doubted that, and she proved it to me once. The thing was, only she knew all the relationships. She still knows them, too -- even though she sometimes says her son is her (deceased) brother when she's at the nursing home and can't recognize herself in pictures, she can rattle off stuff like "he's the son of the second cousin twice removed", and I have utterly no idea what any of that means. My mother is, to be kind, "addled". She's 96 years old, and by chance lives across the hall from her daughter-in-law's mother who is 93 and simply old. Neither of them know the relationship and no one's going to tell them. My mother wouldn't remember anyway. Her short-term memory is almost gone entirely. And yet she retains this incredible store of relationships. Everything else is scrambled but the family history remains. She thinks I did things her father did or my father did, and my younger brother is tied somehow to her younger brother, but that genealogy stuff remains. I'm leaving out the stuff about the dinosaurs she saw (in detail, it's almost convincing). It's oddly fascinating to see how a mind disintegrates, but I don't want to observe it very closely.