Dear UK Gen X people: the chancellor of my stepson’s university is Milky Milky.
I will fucking PAY him to say “lovely” when he gets his degree.
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Breathless press: Fusion energy breakthrough!
Me: reading article “blah blah blah Lawrence Livermore blah
Me: This is nuclear bomb research. Nothing to see here. Also solar panels literally exist. Move along.
I swear, “fusion power stations” are the global death industrial complex’s fig leaf for bomb research just as “hydrogen cars” are the global death industrial complex’s fig leaf for digging oil out of the ground.
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“Look at me pretending to develop fusion power for A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS PER KILOWATT HOUR! Muhahahaha! Nobody suspects me of getting round non-proliferation treaties, which I literally admit to doing on my website!”
Solar panels: “Am I a literal fucking joke to you?”
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KatLS reshared this.
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The right: Liberal democracy has become all the things Orwell warned us about in “1984”
Also the right: We are working to abolish the orgasm
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@fool Fucked if I know. Maybe the sub mods can pass it up the chain, and one of them is some kind of arsehole or something?
Surprised my appeal did anything tbh. Stranger things have happened.
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Britain’s ‘deep state’ thwarted my plans, Liz Truss tells US far-right summit
Former Conservative PM, whose tenure lasted 50 days, tells CPAC she fell victim to UK’s ‘establishment … its bureaucrats and lawyers’David Smith (The Guardian)
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Sarah Brown likes this.
Watched The Marvels tonight.
Legitimately lost it when “Memory” started playing. What an excellent fun film!
"Stop running! Let the [redacted]! You will be fine!"
We howled, from beginning to end.
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Then there's this 🤦♂️
arstechnica.com/science/2024/0…
Unvaccinated Florida kids exposed to measles can skip quarantine, officials say
On Tuesday, nearly 20 percent of the school's 1,067 students were reportedly absent.Ars Technica
“So you’ve found this website because your ADHD is flaring up to the point where deciding to boil an egg because it’s nearly midnight and you have known for the last six hours that you need to eat, might as well be designing the logistics for a manned mission to fucking Pluto. Here’s a simple 87 point plan for getting yourself out of this funk. Point 1: have you tried not having ADHD?”
Who writes this bullshit?
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Hey, instance admins, if you want to deal with the current spam problem, check this out: mastodon.de/@ErikUden/11194030…
And consider sending some money to @Erik Uden 🦣🍑:coffefied: because he's doing us all a huge favour.
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Honestly, I think this is a wakeup call for the fediverse. This time it was mostly harmless spam images.
Eventually though, someone is gonna use the same trick to send seriously nasty stuff to our servers, and our timelines. The sort of stuff that you need therapy to try and unsee.
We, collectively, need to try and stop that before it happens.
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Muppet be like, “look at what trans people made us do!”
dailykos.com/stories/2024/2/18…
A 'Christian' family moved to Russia to escape 'LGBTQ, trans,' but now they're 'ready' to 'get out'
The patriarch of a right-wing Canadian family of 11 had had just about enough of gay people in his country. “We didn't feel safe for our children there in the future anymore,” father Arend Feenstra told Russian media. “There's a lot of left-wing...Daily Kos
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Sounds like the LGBTQ+ agenda is a good one. I can get on board with that.
Also I hope they don’t let them back.
TIL; there’s a bit of Sahara on the Egypt/Sudan border that no nation state recognises as part of its territory.
So if you’re looking for somewhere to do crimes…
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Mark Asser reshared this.
The Carry-On-Baggage Bubble Is About to Pop
Airplanes aren’t made for this much luggageIan Bogost (The Atlantic)
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Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Just had a moment of panic as my little fediverse instance started throwing out error messages and refusing to load images.
Turns out, while uploading a CSV file of instances to block for posting spam, I’d managed to create a defederation rule for a server with no name.
It didn’t like that, and the federation stuff started going a bit wrong.
Managed to remove the offending entry and all is well. Phew!
PSA for small server admins. Spam bots are searching you out and creating accounts for spamming the fediverse.
Other admins are dealing with this by mass defederation of contaminated instances.
If you admin a small server, ensure that you have open registration turned OFF. If not, you may find yourself getting widely blocked.
I get that vetting registrations is work, but if you allow other people on your server, then this is part of what you need to do to be a good citizen.
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There are a few weird differences between opposite-sex marriage, same-sex marriage, and civil partnerships. In particular, in the grounds on which the partnerships can be annulled on the application of one partner.
The first is that same-sex marriages aren't voidable for reasons of non-consummation; basically it used to mean "PIV sex" and Parliament didn't fancy trying to define consummation for same-sex couples in legislation.
The stranger one is that only marriage is voidable for reasons of venereal disease.
@argv minus one Their bombs are old as fuck.
And they aren’t allowed to set them off by treaty.
So they do this instead. Even if they don’t know why, it keeps the talent trained, I guess.
All sorts of people have tried to palm off doing real work on ChatGPT and friends. Has any legislature yet considered or passed legislation suspected of being autogenerated?
Bonus marks for working out how the rules of statutory interpretation apply to robotically created legislation
Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books
'Unfortunately or fortunately, this is going to be a trend'Katyanna Quach (The Register)
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
Thinking about UK Labour and the US Democrats, and their ideological clones across Europe.
Progressive parties seem have decided they don’t need to provide HOPE any more.
Literally the only people offering hope and the possibility for change for the better in the future are fascists.
And they’re liars, but if the only other option on the menu is “we will keep things exactly the same and stuff will slowly get worse. Fuck you, and be grey”, then I can understand the temptation to vote for ANYONE offering something different.
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It’s notable that none of the various articles on the far-right co-opting farmers seem to notice this - if the fascists are the only people offering hope to <any group>, while regular pols don’t give a toss, don’t be surprised at the outcome.
Nothing stopping Rutte or VdL saying “farmers need to be paid to apply their skills as the spearhead of better environmental management, forestry, river and flood management, etc etc ”, for example.
@BashStKid Exactly, but they seem to have a profound mental block about saying ANYTHING that offers ay chance of improvement in anything.
What has made them like this? They didn't used to be this way.
@Alexandra Lanes @BashStKid They literally had "things can only get better" as their campaign song.
And now the attitude is like, "we must not make any improvements to anything ever. All the shit that the Tories did, that you're voting them out for? Not gonna change any of it. Tough titty."
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it's just so *craven*
Like the facist press will savage them no matter what so fuck them and be bold and honest
Racist Uncle will vote Nazi^wReform no matter what so fuck him with a .303 and be bold and honest
And I understand that putting hard numbers on things is daft but for the love of god you can sell net zero as "yes, it's a bit up front, but you get *free* 'leccy for 6 months of the year and it fucks the Saudis and Putin with a wirebrush dipped in battery acid"
Sarah Brown likes this.
A recent interaction on the fediverse:
"This term makes no sense to me. Does anyone know the history and why it is used? Don't explain why you think it makes sense"
Me: "This is the history. Its common and established usage across many fields. Why don't you think it makes sense?"
"I mean it when I said don't explain why you think it makes sense"
So I told them that I answered their question, but had no time for miserable cunts, and blocked and eradicated all trace of them from my own server's database, because I can do that.
Fucksake though. Some of the stereotypes here are true.
Do fucking better.
The thing about the reputation that the Fediverse has for being full of "people like that" is that if you comment on it, they turn up.
Even when it's brutally obvious you're going to server block them for it. They can't seem to help themselves.
This is one of the nicest features here: with minimal effort, the tedious takes itself out.
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Here's a good one:
"There are legitimate ways to conceptualise power dynamics which do not centre whatever US-specific racial category Americans have decided you belong to"
As Tom Lehrer said, they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide...
Reminds me of an old explanation of the term “trolling” as in “trolling for fish” but “trolling for newbies”.
I hope you get a bountiful catch and a full blocklist!
Alexandra Lanes likes this.
@BashStKid mp3s, pdfs, sheet music all here for you!
tomlehrersongs.com/poisoning-p…
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park
Lyrics: view or download PDF Sheet music: view or download PDF -- An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer, track 1 Album: stream playlist Audio File: download MP3 The Remains of Tom Lehrer (disc 1), track 13 Album: stream playlis…Tom Lehrer Songs
Martin Vermeer FCD reshared this.
glasgow2024.org/chairs-stateme…
Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement - 15th February 2024 | Glasgow 2024
Statement from Chair, Esther MacCallum-StewartPaul Taylor (Glasgow 2024, a Worldcon for Our Futures)
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Alexandra Lanes likes this.
I've defederated from most of the worst of the "Mastodon HOA", and most of what's left gives me a pleasant and constructive social media space mostly without the massive knee-jerk navel gazing.
But sometimes a bit of it breaks through and ... yeah. Let's just say that the reputation that the fediverse has amongst those who mock and caricature us isn't entirely undeserved.
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‘This is where I apologise’: Polish state TV presenter says sorry to LGBT+ viewers
Activist Bart Staszewski hails ‘meaningful and necessary’ apology as opening new chapter for state broadcasterAshifa Kassam (The Guardian)
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Nick Barlow
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •... There's context to this, but I'm scared for the context.
They're actually talking about skull fucking and not "skull fucking"?
Sarah Brown
in reply to kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈 • •kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈 • •Simon Waldman
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •@kianryan
Sarah Brown
in reply to Simon Waldman • •kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •@swaldman
That's going to chafe.
Sarah Brown likes this.
Nile
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •