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."

The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3

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

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.

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

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.

Oh, cool! I didn't know about that. I might actually check it out once that's released.