is it just us?

We’re having all kinds of weird and random problems with YouTube and Google-hosted stuff. This mostly isn’t a big deal, just really annoying – I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine, so.

But it is a thing. and it’s not just lagginess – if I go to YouTube and try to switch accounts, it says I don’t have multiple accounts, then it lets me try to log into my other one, then that fails with a bad password or no response at all (often the latter), then suddenly I’m logged in to both accounts, except one isn’t available, except when it is, and then I can check analytics… unless it just decides not to load. Then I may and may not be logged into both accounts anymore.

Videos sometimes load perfectly and sometimes just never load at all. It’s across browsers and machines, and I’ve rebooted the hardware router. We can’t detect a pattern yet, other than it’s only on Googleplex sites. Everybody else is fine.

To wit: whut?

eta: oh ho, maybe it’s not just us:

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Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!

pinky fingers sounds like a pickpocket pianist from the jazz age

Apparently whether you can be a great violinist resides in large part in your left pinky finger. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that makes more sense once you read it, but who knew? I wonder how many serious violinists and fiddlers can’t do that. I’ve always had a large amount of “yeah? go fuck yourself” to “you can’t do that,” so I wonder whether this is one of those brick walls I’d throw myself against.

Tho’ not literally, because I have that left pinky finger property. Which clearly in and of itself does not make you a great violinist, because “Doctor, will I be able to play fiddle once the cast comes off?/Yes, yes, you’ll be fine!/That’s weird, I couldn’t play the fiddle before!” I guess you have to study and practice and stuff. But I do have the viLOLin – the $36 violin I picked up at a pawn – and I do want to learn to play sometime.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Too many pieces, too many parts, too many things to learn in not enough time. For me, it’s a bunch of music things, and languages. Now there’s a brick wall I throw myself against – I’m great at grammars, my accents are too good (in that people assume I’m fluent or even native-speaker and firehose at me), but I can’t learn vocabulary to save my life. As in, I’m so bad at it, my secondary school let me out of the language requirement, as long as I just kept trying.

Really, that’s what I need the brain enhancement for: memorisation. Particularly of language vocabulary, but not just that. If I could stick a chip in my brain and fix that? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.

Should that be a poll? “What enhancement would get you to try it?” That might be fun. Suggestions in comments, if you got ‘em.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil. Come listen to our music!