Been vaguely aware of the latest Fedi drama. Been trying to ignore it, but it seems to have ended up at “trans people need to stop being so sensitive to people randomly assuming they’re disgusting perverts who the rest of society needs shielding from, it was a MISTAKE you guys”.
And that just makes me sad.
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@cy
Respectability politics, innit.
I'd rather have solidarity with my fellow deviants (read: sex workers, drug addicts, unhoused people). We all deserve liberation, safety and respect.
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Hopefully I’ve shared this right. Anyway, I did this at the weekend. It broke me. 34 kilometres. 30° C, 800 metres of ascent.
So I have stupidly decided to do it again next year.
While I can still barely stand up because of the DOMS.
I must be loopy.
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This is a bit concerning.
Basically, every few hundred years the earth is hit by a solar flare powerful enough to pretty much destroy all modern tech, and probably give anyone flying in a plane at the time cancer.
These are much bigger than the Carrington Event, which was the last really big solar flare recorded.
One day, without warning, the sun will just wipe out tech slate clean.
And there is apparently nothing we can do about it.
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Did the Dale Mountain Rescue 9 edges challenge yesterday.
Uploaded my results to Strava.
Apparently the climb from the A57 to High Neb has me on the leaderboard as the 4th fastest middle aged woman.
I imagine this will annoy a "certain group".
In 30 degree heat too!
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Also I ws eating a sandwich while doing it.
Tl;dr: I am fucking quick up hills.
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@Alisdair Calder McGregor Cambridge destroyed my hill fitness.
But Lagos; Lagos is hilly, and hot.
Going up hills in heat I can do.
Usually I block internet transphobes.
But sometimes, like today, they irritate me sufficiently that I go and donate to a trans charity in their name, and then show them the receipt.
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A thing I was recently wondering. For most of the world's population, what is the largest island they can get to, other than the one they are currently on, using only fixed links (ie bridges, tunnels etc. No boats or aircraft).
And I think the answer is very straightforwardly, "Great Britain".
But if you start on Great Britain, then what is it? (I am not counting the land mass of Asia/Africa/Europe as an "island")
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yeh if I'd noticed a causeway on the map (& known it was bigger) I I would've gone with it instead of PEI!
Please enjoy this excellent footage of a nazi being good and properly punched:
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Watched a video about that fateful Air France Concorde flight. It took 121 seconds from the point they lit the afterburners to start rolling to the point everyone died. For most of that it was probably profoundly obvious to the flight crew that they were going to die: the plane had two engines out, their wing was on fire, they were on the verge of a stall, their landing gear was fucked, they could not gain speed or height, and the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable.
They HAD to know they were going to die, and yet right to the point their short flight ended impacting a hotel at 200 knots, inverted, with the plane yelling, “pull up, pull up, pull up”, they acted utterly professionally.
So impressive. So tragic.
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@alastair Apollo 12 was also struck by lightning, which wiped out the guidance and the telemetry. A single flight controller was able to figure out what had happened, and instructed the crew to flip a single switch that saved the mission.
If they hadn’t have fixed it, they would’ve had to abort.
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I am in the showers at the marina (yes, TERFs, the women’s showers. Go fuck yourselves). They have the radio on. They are talking to a “psychotherapist” who explains how, because of the iron in your blood, you can get rid of “negative energy” by touching a radiator to “ground yourself” for 20 minutes a day.
Did the Enlightenment actually happen, or did I imagine it?
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Dear Vodafone. That you managed to make registration for your site not work with the built in password manager for iPhones, one of the most popular mobile phones, is deeply unfortunate. It’s also an impressive achievement, because iCloud Keychain works nearly everywhere. You actually have to go out of your way to bugger it up.
But you, a mobile phone company, have managed to make your mobile site not work with this most common of mobile phones. I am impressed with the amount of effort it must have taken to be this incompetent.
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Techbros: self driving cars are inevitable!
Also techbros: prove you are human by performing a task that computers can’t do, like identifying traffic lights.
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US Republican senator praises UK Labour’s ‘Reaganesque’ policy
Conservative lawmaker Chuck Grassley likes the look of Rachel Reeves’ tax proposals.Jones Hayden (POLITICO)
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You can tell your covid requirements are pseudoscience tickybox woo when they emphasise “hand gel”, which is completely fucking useless against covid, over “face masks”, which are not.
And also when your activity is outdoors in the countryside.
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@Adam With the caveat that a lot of the orthodoxy around those viruses also originates from the same utterly wrong assumptions that made the WHO state that covid couldn’t possibly be airborne until they evidence that it was became overwhelming.
I’m not saying personal hygiene with regard to hand cleanliness isn’t important: it is. It’s much more an issue for gastrointestinal stuff though, and is unhelpful to focus on with diseases (including the ones you mention), that the vast majority of people catch through inhalation.
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Things are pretty good for me. Lots of people care about me and it seems to me that when I spend time with them I like myself a little more. I even had a moment of actually appreciating how I look. Some of my fears about the future have started to seem more manageable and navigable, and I've had a pretty good day today, organising for a day's walking in the Peak District next weekend and lounging around before watching what was a pretty exciting Italian Grand Prix.
And so why do I find myself suddenly feeling slightly low and on the verge of tears? There's nothing to sadden me, I'm sitting in the summerhouse with the laptop and the new bureau I rescued from Ravensworth Gardens. It's a lovely afternoon. And yet there are tears welling up and something catching at the back of my throat.
I've taken antidepressants as usual, per schedule, and similarly hormones. Whyyyyyyy.
@ceb Could well be though I rather expected most of that to be over and done with by now! Bloody hell I’ve been on hormones for three years now. How did that happen?
Walking on Saturday 9th.
Ah yes, the Four Quartets! (Roses in Four Quartets; hyacinths in The Waste Land).
At the start of 4Q I always think of someone a bit like Eliot himself, a bit like someone like Bertrand Russell or Whtehead, wandering through an autumn garden of a dilapidated stately home maybe after some great sadness and shattering, perhaps the great war (1), kicking up leaves, kicking up dust, running your hand along the sheets covering the furniture in the west wing remembering the great Edwardian dances, etc.
(1)via a linking image of my own: the way people can and have dry-drowned in disused fountains filled with leaves, from the CO2 of the decay, like the trenches in the war).
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Apparently I have a controversial belief about the modern software industry. I don’t think it should be controversial.
The belief is this: writing new code in C in 2023 is like installing plumbing in a new house using lead pipes.
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Just genocidal fucks openly planning a genocide. Nothing to see here.
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*goes to add to kindle*
*finds it's already in the pile*
Somewhere around the coal layers...
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Britain and France are sibling countries: We spend a thousand years fighting like cat and dog because MUM SAID I COULD HAVE CALAIS, YOU COW!
And then Germany comes along and messes with one, and the other is like, "HITTING MY SISTER IS MY JOB! DIE!"
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@Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫ @John Macintosh UUUUUUUULA!
And presently they came to Tillingham, where, if Wells had done his research properly, he would have known it is basically a mudflat and far too shallow to float a torpedo ram, which had a draft of 6 metres.


Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Some of the blocks called out by this poster do seem to be appropriate. It's not enough that they "seem nice". Like, I recall specific problems. Note also that problematic DMs won't show up by looking at their public timeline and that a lot of instances don't bother to enforce their CoCs.
A huge percentage of fedi is trans, so seeing a high percentage of trans sites is not in and of itself a red flag. Alas, there are fashy trans people.
That said, many of the small instances are not blocked by babka, which is a server with proactive moderation, so, at least in some cases, the person doing the critiquing appears to be right.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party • •@Charles ☭ H I think we're way past the benefit of the doubt here. I mean, it's standard transphobe playbook 101: portray the removal of trans women as a necessary step to "protect" some other minority. We've seen it happen with feminism, we've seen it happen with the LGB community, and now this.
If it keeps quacking like a duck, you eventually have to stop thinking it's probably a sheep.
Spencer likes this.
Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •witches.live, for example, has been into some well-dodgy stuff, the details of which I can't recall, but it was major drama at the time.
I don't know what's going on with tech.lgbt, but they're blocked by the server I'm on now, which is also a trans server.
I tend to argue against blocking mastodon.social, but it actually is very poorly moderated. In my own experience, antisemitic reply guys face no action. Apparently, racism is also tolerated. Just because they're big doesn't mean they're entitled to federation.
imo, federating with actual Nazi instances, like shitposter.club is a valid reason to block.
In general, I'm suspicious of shared block lists and it appears the algorithm used here is not one I consider appropriate. That said, I don't think that the lead devs or the proponents of the project set out to fuck up trans people. I think transphobia can be an emergent property of respectability politics and the algorithm/oversight needs to be reworked to mitigate this. And I'd like to see a manual review of the entire existiung list, especially of the ve
... show morewitches.live, for example, has been into some well-dodgy stuff, the details of which I can't recall, but it was major drama at the time.
I don't know what's going on with tech.lgbt, but they're blocked by the server I'm on now, which is also a trans server.
I tend to argue against blocking mastodon.social, but it actually is very poorly moderated. In my own experience, antisemitic reply guys face no action. Apparently, racism is also tolerated. Just because they're big doesn't mean they're entitled to federation.
imo, federating with actual Nazi instances, like shitposter.club is a valid reason to block.
In general, I'm suspicious of shared block lists and it appears the algorithm used here is not one I consider appropriate. That said, I don't think that the lead devs or the proponents of the project set out to fuck up trans people. I think transphobia can be an emergent property of respectability politics and the algorithm/oversight needs to be reworked to mitigate this. And I'd like to see a manual review of the entire existiung list, especially of the very small instances.
There's a lot of accusations flying around about transphobia and racism that I don't think are helpful. But I also don't think the person who you've linked is arguing fully in good faith.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party • •@Charles ☭ H Honestly, I have seen members of marginalised communities before being suckered into being useful idiots for organised transphobes, and they end up just as dangerous to us as the true believers.
So honestly, when the end result is equally hostile and dangerous, I find their motivations irrelevant.
People spent months arguing over whether Rowling was motivated by a misdirected urge to protect women, or whether she was just an uncomplicated hater of trans people, before she removed any doubt, to what end?
You and I are both old enough and jaded enough to have seen this exact same bullshit play out time and time again. We both know that trying to convert them, one misguided soul at a time, is entirely a waste of effort.
In this instance I have begun the process of firewalling myself off from the whole thing. If, some months or years hence, someone wants to delve into it and work out exactly who was motivated by what, then I hope they find some joy and utility in that.
I'm just going to protect myself from it.
Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I totally get where you're coming from. But I think there are some important differences here.
This is basically pre-alpha software. The lead developer has recognised that a problem exists. IMO, he has not yet found the right solution, but he is taking criticism and not making excuses.
The hypervisibility of the fuckups is on purpose, in that the devs want everything to be transparent so that they can find and fix things before it gets widely deployed. They are also actively soliciting feedback. nivenly.org/docs/papers/fsep/
Rowling never owned a "mistake" as she got radicalised.
You and I both have experience of two shared twitter blocklists. One you helped run and the other was the Wil Wheaton one, which I was on. Both of them were responding to real problems - which also exist on ActivityPub. One of these was run transparently and the other was really not. I feel this difference was at the root of why one was good and the other was horrible. This new project, wh
... show moreI totally get where you're coming from. But I think there are some important differences here.
This is basically pre-alpha software. The lead developer has recognised that a problem exists. IMO, he has not yet found the right solution, but he is taking criticism and not making excuses.
The hypervisibility of the fuckups is on purpose, in that the devs want everything to be transparent so that they can find and fix things before it gets widely deployed. They are also actively soliciting feedback. nivenly.org/docs/papers/fsep/
Rowling never owned a "mistake" as she got radicalised.
You and I both have experience of two shared twitter blocklists. One you helped run and the other was the Wil Wheaton one, which I was on. Both of them were responding to real problems - which also exist on ActivityPub. One of these was run transparently and the other was really not. I feel this difference was at the root of why one was good and the other was horrible. This new project, which is still early days, is going for transparency.
I've seen the people behind it on fedi for years and they don't just seem nice, but have a good track record.
(I've also seen a *lot* of fashy trans people on here and I wish it weren't so, but a good block list is actually going to have a ton of trans people on it. IDK wtf is going on with some young trans women, but they're very into being Nazi-adjacent edgelords.)
Federation Safety Enhancement Project (FSEP)
nivenly.orgSarah Brown
in reply to Charles ☭ is now tooting from queer.party • •