I’m no conspiracist, but… If I were a malicious—perhaps foreign—power and I saw how well that kind of fake news spread and how much staying power it had, despite it being totally far-fetched, and yet easily-verifiable, I’d be absolutely fucking giddy.

It would be the surest sign that I could now spread any bit of disinformation, particularly anything not easily-verifiable, and absolutely tear the country apart.

My first temptation was to say that it might be an age thing, but then I know many people my age who still don’t care about plants.

For me, it’s like a switch flipped one day. When I was younger, I just didn’t really care, and the few times I was given a plant, it did not end well. Figured that I just had a brown thumb.

But, maybe 10-some-odd years ago, I got a peace lily, and, by then, something had changed. I wanted to see this plant thrive, and it brought me just a little bit of satisfaction to see it doing well. It doesn’t hurt that peace lilies will tell you when they need watered, and, as such are pretty easy to keep.

I’m still not the best plant dad, but I’d since gone on to buy about a dozen more and appreciate the bit of greenery around the house.

I’ll pick the Stegosaurus… but only because the Triceratops is conspicuously absent from this chart.

(Secret fighter menu?)

I think you’ve already gotten some good answers here regarding the function itself:

It sits and waits for the user to input something and hit Enter, and returns the value the user entered, which is then assigned to your nam variable. (See the documentation for the function.

I might also offer the advice of confirming your understanding of the flow of a program. That is, understand that, in the general sense, the computer must resolve the right-hand side of the equals sign to a value before it can assign it to the left.

For example, if the right-hand side is a literal value, it’s already resolved. For example, a line like name = “Joe” is easy—assign the string literal “Joe” to the variable name, when the line is run.

If the right hand side is a mathematical equation, it must be resolved to a value when the line is run. For example, for a line like value = 2+2, the 2+2 must be resolved to 4 before it can be assigned to the variable.

Then, for something like name = input(“Who are you?”), in order to resolve the right-hand side, the computer must first run the function before it can assign a value to the variable name.

It can, of course, get more complicated, where you can call multiple functions on a line, and the results of one feed into the next, and so on. But, that can be an exercise for the near future.

Unflavored soju is my defense against drinking too much soju. I’ll have one bottle of that and be like “yep, I’m good”.

Meanwhile, everyone else is near the bottom of their second bottle of flavored soju and eyeing a third…

I’ll have to buy the White Album again…

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I’m 25 years into my career and I’ve only just started to put this into practice. (I say “slightly” because, hey, I’ve been doing this without any advice or mentorship, and, maybe, one can be forgiven for not finding this stuff self-obvious…)

Took a new position and got tired of people scheduling my lunch four out of five days a week. In addition to the meetings before and after, it often meant most of my day in meetings without a break.

So, I threw a tentative meeting for that time slot and the number of lunchtime meetings cratered. Somehow, folks were able to figure out another time or solve it without a meeting. Only twice in four months have I been asked if that “meeting” could be moved.

Needless to say, I’m a convert and would wholeheartedly recommend the practice—of scheduling a self-meeting, for any purpose, be it lunch or even just productive time—to folks well before they hit 25 years.

Hard agree. I played through the opening twice in my first sitting. Died both times. Put it down for a year and a half.

Finally decided to try again and picked it back up. Passed the opening sequence and got into the game proper. And, I can say that I had a pretty good time—excepting a key, bullshit timed mission that I barely passed.

They really did not need to gatekeep the game behind the poor design of the opening.

“Mr. Sansweet didn’t ask to be saved. Mr. Sansweet didn’t want to be saved. And the injury he received from Mr. Incredible’s ‘actions,’ so-called, causes him daily pain…”

It’s this scene—dark as the implications may be—that really drives the point home.

That these people think they are “in Christ” is a massive act of self-delusion. There is nothing Christ-like, or even godly, about their speech or behavior, even judging by the books they hold sacred.

The layered shot craze is getting out of hand…

With how well the “every accusation is a confession” adage seems to hold up, I’m pretty darned sure that lizard people are real at this point.

I chuckled at “MAC ADDRESS-MARK OF THE BEAST ENABLED”. I had to set that same setting on my router for IPSec to work properly…

Definitely “Gulp Shitto” vibes, yes.

I was put in mind of my favorite episode: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happiness_Patrol.

Maybe not a direct match for the camera bit, but probably the kind of culture they’re trying to create.

Those NextDoor posts are something else.

In my area, they tend to take on racist undertones. But, there are also posts of equal-opportunity fearmongering, wherein strange cars, teenagers with clipboards, or nicely-dressed middle-aged ladies taking pictures of houses are suspected of casing the joint for later break-in, accompanied by the usual question: Should I call the police?

Folks really are that fearful, and it’s a sad state of affairs.

“My, I bet you monsters lead interesting lives. I said to my girlfriend just the other day - Gee, I’ll bet monsters are interesting, I said. And I’ll bet you meet a lot of interesting people, too. I’m always interested in meeting interesting people. Now let’s dip our patties in the water!”

Substitute “walking down a road” with: “having dinner at a conference”, “chatting over lattes at the local coffee shop”, or “at a neighborhood cookout” as makes sense.

…so far.

That’s a great way of putting it. I enjoyed it. I liked it for what it was. I’m not sure I need to see it again.