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So glad I got my nervous breakdown response to this shit out of the way after the Brexit referendum.

My deepest, most profound sympathies for anyone going through anything similar today. It’s fucking horrible.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Thanks Sarah. Let's sit with this. Madison said this morning she didn't want to talk.

Unknown parent



Bridge carrying the N125 road over the Rio Arade near Portimão, Algarve. iPhone 16 pro, pro raw, 10 second exposure. Seeing it like this always puts me in mind of the massive atmosphere processor in Aliens.

Walter Nissen reshared this.



Rising feeling of dread about Trump winning tomorrow.
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Sarah Brown Same. It feels like any kind of hope is me trying to con myself. And there's really really nothing I can do about it (unlike UK elections where there's merely mostly nothing I can do about it)


Flight back from NTE to FAO used an honest to god jetway at the FAO end, like it’s fucking Emirates or some shit.


Big fan of Bernie Collins on Sky F1. Whereas usually a lot of the presenting team is drawn from former drivers, she used to be a strategy engineer for several teams in the paddock, so she brings a lot of insight from the "behind the scenes" part of the sport. Also unlike some of her counterparts she doesn't feel the need to chip in when she has nothing useful to contribute!
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Leena Gade is similarly good in the Le Mans commentary (which we're about four hours into watching).


Advantage of intelligence: being able to catch up an OU unit and a Portuguese language unit in an evening

Disadvantages of procrastination: having to



Today's law study amusement. "Even taking into account that the bird had travelled from Leicester in a box on British Rail its condition was rough"

(Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204)



So I know it’s all very funny, ha ha, but here’s why the orcas don’t go after the boats of the ultra rich.

Two photos. One a multi million euro luxury yacht. Notice it has two props. They steer by vectoring the thrust. There is no rudder.

The other, my boat. It costs what a new car costs (like if you were buying a low end Tesla. Expensive, but not stupid money). It has a rudder because it’s a sailboat. It can’t rely on thrust being present.

No rudder - no orca attack. People who can afford sailboats, which the orcas are attacking, cannot afford luxury motor yachts, which they aren’t.

A sailboat is like a mouldy caravan, but floating, and slower.

in reply to Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻

@Mike J👹🐀 🤘🏻 same. I run the gauntlet next summer. Somewhat worried. I have a life raft and a phone that can do satellite distress, and I don’t taste like tuna.


New theory: the orcas are trying to get high. This shit is neurotoxic. Got quite a headache from spending 2 hours painting the hull with it.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@IncHulk and yet the barnacles prevail. (Got to do the same job on a friend's boat in a few weeks)




Something happen to make you offer this generous discount, did it?

How about you fuck off 500 miles, and then fuck off 500 more, WaPo?



Day 2 in Oxford for medical trial fun and games. Today was the infusion, 50% chance of ketamine vs placebo. After doing a variety of questionnaires and having blood and urine samples taken it was time to be infused. It was fairly relaxing. Maybe a bit boring. I idly let my mind wander. I think I either didn’t get ketamine or I did and it had nearly no effect on me. I felt maybe slightly lightheaded at one point, and now feel a bit weird, but nothing especially noteworthy.

After that there were more questionnaires and computer tasks. Rather cruelly one of these asked me to remember things from another task, which they hadn’t warned me about. Testing memory when you’ve not been asked to remember stuff is a valuable thing to do.

Tomorrow afternoon is an MRI session where I remember various things while in the machine and they look at what bits of my head light up.


in reply to Sarah Brown

@transworld There’s evidence on Twitter that they actually added more ketchup to their shirt for the photo they put online.

Also, if they actually had any guts they would have tried that stunt in the Rutland Arms, and not the Benjamin Huntsman ‘Spoons.

in reply to Katie Fenn

@transworld Hmm, the article says it was a London pub, but I’m fairly sure they were in Sheffield.


Just cleaning the orca chew toy

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I’m always a bit apprehensive about doing this, but it’s also kinda cool
in reply to Sarah Brown

Presumably, checking out the antifouling, sacrificial anode, prop and rudder?


Anyway, while I’m in France, in a marina, stuck for the next week, have a photo. iPhone 16 pro, pro raw.
in reply to Sarah Brown

they are remarkable. I couldn’t see that comet the other day but I took a photo just in case and there it was.


Go to sleep. Wake up with clocks having gone back. Get on plane to France. Clocks go forward again.

So basically my return from daylight saving is delayed a week.

in reply to Sarah Brown

In England now, clocks went back last night. Return home to Washington State on Wednesday, clocks go back next weekend. So I get 2 hours more this year!


I am begging heterosexual men to stop watching stupid YouTube videos that are convincing you that women give a shit about your height.

I assure you that plenty, if not most, of us do not.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I hope you are right. However, I have been interested for a long time in this question, and on searching the Internet I am always directed to several academic studies that claim that most women have a preference for men taller than themselves, but I have not (yet) found sufficient time to read through the details of this alleged heightism.
in reply to coyets

@coyets Honestly, were I attracted towards men, I would be much more interested in whether they clean their arse properly and don’t piss on the floor.

Low bar there, boys. Wanna wow the girls? Actually quite easy.



This from Wikipedia made me giggle. "[New Zealand] Inland Revenue continues to spell its Māori name Te Tari Taake instead of Te Tari Tāke, mainly to reduce the resemblance of tāke to the English word 'take'"


Clocks go back tonight in case anyone still has clocks to go back.

(In Europe, at least. No idea what other bits of the northern hemisphere do.)



I understand Michael O’Leary “dog foods”. When he wants to travel, he buys a ticket using the RyanAir app on his phone and experiences it as a normal passenger. As a result, the app is bloody excellent.

It is profoundly obvious that the CEO of Volotea does not do this. Dear god, it’s terrible!




Curious about just how good the quad bayer "48 megapixel" pro raw camera in the iPhone 16 Pro is, I put it head to head against my 26 megapixel Fuji XE4 with a 16mm lens (stopped down to f/5.6) to closely match field of view. I photographed the same scene on both. Here are 100% crops from both, scaled to the same size.

Notably, the phone, despite having more pixels, simply does not capture the amount of fine detail that the Fuji captures with only half as many pixels.

As good as camera phones have got, you simply cannot compete against large photosensors fed by a nice expensive quality piece of glass.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Here’s the full image (from the Fuji), by the way. It’s gonna be butchered by making it a low quality JPEG for sharing here, but this is the image.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Sensitive content

in reply to Nile

...Camera recommended by Sarah Thompson, who gives useful advice on photography, among other things.


How odd. This Portuguese listening comprehension exercise has a person in who's invented a folk etymology for the English word "vintage". They've decided that rather than being < French vendage and ultimately Latin vinum + demo, it is related to the word for twenty (vinte in Portuguese, vingt in French, viginti in Latin) and thus vintage clothes are ones which are 20 years old.



Just getting started on the OU Contract Law module. It's talked about some software terms and conditions being contractual. I wonder how EULAs work as contracts for software you bought in a box from a shop. How is there consideration? Is it "reused" from the purchase contract with the retailer somehow?


If you see this post... Quote post a bridge.
(If you can be bothered emulating a quote post). This is the Bridge of Sighs in Oxford, presumably so called in despair at how much less good it is than Cambridge’s queer.party/@sparrowsion/11335…


If you see this post... Quote post a bridge.
(If you can be bothered emulating a quote post)

Had to go back to 2019 to find a picture of a bridge in my collection, but it's a very fine bridge (Penmaenpool)

Re: mastodon.social/@womump/113358… from @womump (although I saw @xanna 's first but wasn't in a position to get at my photos then)




I prefer to take advice my on child rearing from people whose kids still speak to them.

businessinsider.com/elon-musk-…

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in reply to MeaTLoTioN

@meatlotion
On the contrary, one does not amass such wealth without also becoming a total asswipe. Financial success requires killing one's own humanity

@KenSwe @goatsarah

in reply to MeaTLoTioN

@meatlotion
On the contrary, one does not amass such wealth without also becoming a total asswipe. Financial success requires killing one's own humanity

@KenSwe @goatsarah




If you have a choice between littering an open tin of train gin or carrying it in contravention of TfL byelaws, which should you do?

Where is the boundary at Paddington between the applicability of TfL’s railway byelaws and anyone else’s?

Unknown parent

@Adam @Ben Evans It didn’t actually occur to me at the time that drinking the contents would change the nature of the container.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@kittylyst I am not a lawyer, but I'd assume that the defining feature of a container of alcohol is that it's got alcohol in it. If it was the printing on the label then it would be legal to drink your gin so long as you put it in a milk bottle or whatever first.


I can’t take all my belongings with me when leaving the train! Most of them are at home!

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Reminds me of those signs at Moto services which tell me that alcohol may not be consumed inside or outside the premises.
in reply to Adam

@pseudomonas That's a good point, I suspect they do! I'm no expert, but there must be something you put into a car that's alcohol based.
@Adam
in reply to kæt

@chiffchaff @pseudomonas Petrol is (normally) 10% ethanol these days -- that's what the E replacing octane is about (IIRC)
in reply to kæt

@chiffchaff @pseudomonas As well as the ethanol in petrol, screenwash is usually diluted propan-2-ol (IPA) with a bit of detergent.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Careless. I hope you at least brought along a dog to be carried.


Me: I think I’ll make a post to this Reddit community. What are their submission rules?

The community blurb: Please consult our rules wiki before posting.

Reddit mods need an intervention.



Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from Miradouro da Cordoama near Cape st Vincent, iPhone 16 pro, fusion camera, ProRaw, processed in Adobe Lightroom. 10 second exposure.

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Had to book an AirBNB with a microwave in France because searching for a restaurant that can cater to coeliacs in Brittany resulted in “these guys can do salad without toast.”

I expect coeliacs in France just … die?

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@ajlanes @zoe Cinderford (near the forest of dean) has a GF chip shop! 40 mins drive from home but we make occasional pilgrimages, or stop there if we are in the area anyway!



Thing is, Keith, literally nobody voted for you to do David Cameron cosplay for five years.

So maybe what you need to cut is not imaginary “red tape”, but “the crap”, and start doing your job?

markus reshared this.



Neurodivergent people can read and listen to podcasts too, you know. This sort of thing makes us profoundly angry.

My father was not a “super hero”. He was my first bully.

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Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Zoe
@melivia In my experience that's just how people with neuro-typically personality dysorder cope. If they need to call them self supper heroes to actually treat their child as human, I am happy to support them.
@Seph