Mastodawn

@cstross There are worse things.
All it gives you is a Youtube video (which they call "user's manual" or maybe "quick start guide") which shows how to open the packaging.
Once you extracted the contents from the box, you are on your own, no manual.

Charlie Stross Jun 6

@Uilebheist Also, I LOVE cheap Chinese electronics where the manual is a 10cm by 10cm booklet printed in light grey 6pt type on white paper (bonus points for lemon yellow on white!), which turns out to be machine-translated from Chinese and simply tells you how to charge the device for the first time (using an unfamiliar foreign charger that didn't come with the device).

Then tells you to go to the manufacturer's TikTok account and follow them.

¹ https://polyglot.city/@Uilebheist/114637056813661565

@cstross I once bought a flame thrower¹ and the instructions explained in excruciating details how to:

1. unpack the thing
2. fit a gas cylinder (amazingly, a standard fitting which anybody who has seen one can guess).
3. follow them on twitter and become their friends on facebook,
4. err, that's it. There wasn't space in the booklet for minor things like how to use it safely.

They could have omitted 1, 2 & 3 to make space for safety instructions, but of course not.

Uilebheist (@Uilebheist@polyglot.city)

@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @cstross@wandering.shop It's really not the type one can attack a crowd with. I think, I never tried. It's sold as a gardening tool to very precisely burn plants one doesn't want while not touching nearby plants one does want. It produces a very small flame (although bigger than a lighter). It's more dangerous against the person who uses it (if used wrongly) than against a crowd. [Somebody who follows me here has seen me using it to light a BBQ a few years ago; that's how dangerous it is]

Polyglot City

@Uilebheist @cstross
> ¹ no, not telling why

Ordinarily I would understand that and not comment, but since a flamethrower was in the news in a really horrific way just a few days ago, you might actually want to tell *something*.

Uilebheist

@dougmerritt @cstross "something"

@Uilebheist @cstross
Hey, it's up to you, but I am going to assume that you missed my point, which was to alert you to something that may not have occurred to you: some readers may understandably assume that you mean that you're going to attack a crowd of people with it -- again, because of events of a few days ago.

@dougmerritt @cstross It's really not the type one can attack a crowd with. I think, I never tried.
It's sold as a gardening tool to very precisely burn plants one doesn't want while not touching nearby plants one does want. It produces a very small flame (although bigger than a lighter).
It's more dangerous against the person who uses it (if used wrongly) than against a crowd.
[Somebody who follows me here has seen me using it to light a BBQ a few years ago; that's how dangerous it is]

@Uilebheist @cstross
There we go. That actually sounds awesome.

@dougmerritt @cstross [And yes, I didn't see that news item; with all the news of presidents having a kindergarten fight with billionaires, well, some things don't quite reach here]

@Uilebheist @cstross
Ah. Yeah, there's too much news for any of us to see it all.

Charlie Stross Jun 6

@dougmerritt Also, unless you're not actually in Silly Valley, @Uilebheist is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from you.

@cstross @dougmerritt My location is East of Greenwich. That's precise enough, right?

@cstross @Uilebheist
Yes, but I thought that someone using a flamethrower on a crowd of Jewish people advocating Jewish thing, which included a holocaust survivor, was the kind of thing that news services worldwide would pick up on, so I didn't think I was being provincial.

Although I am sometimes provincial in my worldview, to my embarrassment.

@dougmerritt @cstross Oh it appeared on news sites here. But the title made it sound like "oh, an American has opened fire on a crowd again". With "fire" automatically interpreted as "gunfire".
Quite why they haven't made things more obvious in the title, I have no idea, but they did make it easy to skip without reading.

@dougmerritt @cstross Anyway, off to use my flamethrower - the recent weather here has made it necessary.
The nearest person is about half a mile away, so that'll be safe enough.

@Uilebheist @cstross
Here's wishing that the Fire Safety Gods smile upon you and bestow their safe-use blessings.

@dougmerritt @cstross
Thanks.
There's heavy rain on the way. That's why I'm doing it now.
And I have a pipe connected to the rainwater reservoir ready if necessary.
(So far in 9 years I've had the thing it has never been necessary - but better safe than sorry).

@dougmerritt @cstross OK, since I perverted the thread from talking about product instructions to peaceful uses of flamethrowers...

Here's some other instructions. It's a bicycle horn (I have a bell to use to gently alert of my presence: I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient).

The instructions say: "Keep this information for future reference". That's the whole of the instructions (repeated in several languages).

@Uilebheist @cstross
> I bought the horn for when "gently" turns out to be insufficient

😆
Which is no doubt all-too-frequent. 🙄

> "Keep this information for future reference"

That would be funny if it weren't so ridiculous and sad.

@cstross @Uilebheist
Tangentially I wondered if I should keep using the word "provincial" in such contexts, so I looked at some synonyms:

I should try to avoid being a bumpkin, a hayseed, a rustic, a hick, a yokel. Someone who thinks in terms of their surrounds, not of the wider world.