@liamvhogan You and my father would get along great (I said, as I receive yet another email to him that he tried to send as an MMS, Telstra helpfully forwarding it to me.)

End-to-end messaging services like Tutanota and Protonmail, which use neither IMAP nor SMTP, are not, strictly speaking, email.

PSA: Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day. I will not be engaging.

@clacke International Englishes are awesome in their diversity.

Our company accountant—he’s a migrant from Sri Lanka—just asked me in an email to “do the needful”, and I don’t know if he really uses this expression or if he’s just taking the piss on the stereotype of South Asian English. It doesn’t matter either way, of course, but I’m grateful that he could give me a chuckle this morning.

(“Do the needful” is still common in Indian English; it is more commonly phrased in other Englishes as “Do what needs to be done”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_English#Vocabulary)

Wikipedia having fun with the “Demographics” section of abandoned town Centralia, Pennsylvania.

<has a thought about direct .au domains>

<searches for "words ending in au">

Nope, every single one of them has already been claimed.

@traabot As an armchair astrophysicist, I believe that this take is very metal.

Ideally, one of them at UTC+2 and the other at UTC+1:30, each with different daylight saving transition dates. Imagine the cacophony of the town hall clocks! (Though of course you’d only hear your one, don’t want to invite Breach do we?)

I’ve said this before, but I think China Miéville missed a beat when he wrote _The City and the City_ and didn’t have Besźel and Ul Qoma observing different time zones.

@duncanhart Well not it’s not but NTP happens only in UTC so unless I want to import tzdata and keep it updated to reflect the whims of $jurisdiction then it doesn’t prevent the need for pitchforks.

With my sysadmin hat on: I don't care what people end up calling a time zone, but I will lend my pitchfork to any group that advocates abolishing changing the clocks twice a year.

With Alan Parsons there’s a tradition of the wistful end-of-album ballad, and “Oh, Life (There Must Be More)” [big big CW for suicide] does not disappoint. It even has a Truck Driver’s Key Change, starting in Am and ending in B♭m, subtle enough that I didn’t even notice it.

Bluesy “Wine from the Water” in F♯m alternates F♯m7 and B like a good blues song but ends the eighth bar on a delicious dangling C♯7(♯9). Also features chords like A/B where the bass note belongs to an entirely different chord that won’t be played till the next bar (I like to call this the “Baker Street” chord, play it and you’ll hear what I mean).

Aptly-named instrumental “Dreamscape” manages to modulate from B major to A major and I _still_ can’t figure out how it does it. It ends on an ambiguous A/G or maybe G/A and I find this upsetting because it doesn’t _sound_ ambiguous. Curse you, Dreamscape!

Peaceful “Siren song” in E has plenty of suspended 2nds, and lots of ambiguous harmonies. Is that a GM7/E or is it an Em9? You’ll never know! Later it modulates to G, throws in a F/G, and then then _really_ throws in a F7/G (wtf? or is it Cm6/G? I can’t decide, it’s one of those duckrabbit illusions). Then it chucks in a straight F6, as if we haven’t had enough weird F chords by now.

Having just listened to the Alan Parsons album _Try Anything Once_ I reckoned I’d heard some very funky chords, and today upon transcribing some of the songs, my (one good) ear was not disappointed. (Thread)

@drwho Time to post yourself some glitter.

Landscapers, like house guests and fish, smell bad after three days.
— Chinese proverb