AnyOldName3

Thunderbird is basically an Outlook-from-fifteen-years-ago clone, and I’ve always disliked Outlook, even before the recent push to make it even worse. Everything I disliked about old Outlook is exactly the same in Thunderbird, except the licence.

I don’t want much from a mail client, just:

• basic stuff works
• I can see an unread email count for each of my accounts at the same time, and also have the list of messages for the account I’m looking at and a reading/writing pane at the same time, too.

Thunderbird and Outlook will only show the unread count once you’ve expanded the list of directories in an account, so once you’ve got more than two accounts with a reasonable number of folders, any further accounts end up pushed off the bottom of the screen. This isn’t something that a theme for Thunderbird can change. It’d be a small change to include a total unread count next to the list item for each account when it wasn’t expanded and a total unread count next to the combined inbox button, but I’m not maintaining a fork of a mail client myself when it’d still be too Outlook-like to avoid being annoying.

In the end, I settled on Mailspring, but it doesn’t score brilliantly on the basic stuff works bullet point.

The basic Mail app in Windows 10 is still the baseline I compare every other email client to, and I’ve yet to find anything I like as much. Unfortunately, for obvious reasons, it only ever ran under Windows, and for stupid reasons, it was deprecated and now if you try to launch it, it exits and launches Outlook (New), which is a horrible email client.

Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It’s a massive improvement, but it’s not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.

The meme doesn’t really work. The working-class people who played football the most always called it football. Upper-class people at public schools (don’t confuse this with state schools - in the UK, public schools are even posher and more expensive than private schools, and the name comes from letting anyone who could afford the fees in, not from any intention to educate the general public) needed to distinguish it from Rugby Football so they could make a rule against playing it, and invented the name Association Football. There’s a tradition at public schools to shorten names in a particular way (Rugby football to rugger, buggery to bugger etc.) and when applying that to association football, it becomes soccer. Soccer has always been a term used to mock poor people who play football instead of rugby, so of course it’s badly-received when people say it.

I’ve seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).

How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it’s promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?

To go one better, there’s http://isthereanydeal.com/, which tracks prices across a bunch of vetted key retailers (i.e. companies that buy wholesale keys from publishers and sell them to users, but not grey-market or dodgy sites) so you can see where’s cheapest and get notified of discounts etc.

Why check GreenManGaming and Steam (and potentially a bunch of their competitors, too) when you could check one site and know who’s best?

I’ve accidentally made this read like an ad, but they’ve not paid me to say this, I just always check the site before buying games, and have either saved loads of money by doing so over the years, or have ended up buying a bunch of things I’d have ignored on the grounds they were too expensive otherwise. I don’t know in which direction, but it’s definitely changed the amount I’ve spent on games over the last ten years.

Being mean is willfully making people around you feel worse. Being cringe is negligently making people around you feel worse. Once you’re aware you’re cringe, if you do nothing to mitigate it, you’re being willfully negligent, which is just as bad as doing something intentionally.

Edit: I’ve posted the same joke as a response each time I’ve seen this meme, and this is the first time it hasn’t been well-received. Just in case that’s down to people thinking I’m being mean instead of making a joke, I’ll clarify that I am in favour of letting people enjoy things.