From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upsh
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From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upshot conversation took away some matters to note. Mainly that the RCDs work (I already know this from accidentally grounding neutral while wiring a socket. That’s so annoying), and an action going forward: if Sarah does something that trips an RCD in future, she will immediately swear loudly.
Federal and state governments acknowledge the widespread presence of lead pipes throughout the country—NRDC’s new map reveals where they are. The EPA, states, and cities must act now to solve this problem.
@KayEllen_OTS I mean, fair, but I was born in the early 70s and as was recently revealed, that’s peak lead exposure time, and I’m not yelling “OMG ALIENS!” at random Boeings.
Bluesky T&S have shat the bed and basically told all trans people on the site to go fuck themselves.
I've turned off my fediverse-bluesky bridge. Still have the capability to crosspost there, but I'm not planning to now. Am getting better engagement here anyway.
@AllysonShaw @Natasha_Jay you’re spot on, that’s usually the venture capital tactic: get something to grow fast no matter what the cost (financial, ethical or otherwise) and then cash out by either selling it or an IPO (making it a public company traded at a stock exchange)
@Allyson Shaw @Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @marlies They basically have no business model beyond “create a pool of content which someone will pay for”.
And generating harassment drives engagement, so it’s not in their interest to clamp down too hard on it. Their ideal strategy is “slightly less harassment than Twitter”
@Rachel Lawson @Roche Limit @krims Because they want to hurt you, and are responsible for lots of the things that have likely already made your life harder than it needed to be, and knowing who wants you hurt or dead is kinda necessary, if unpleasant.
It’s a bit like a mouse not knowing what a cat is.
@marlies @Natasha_Jay I just wondered why no one on Bluesky is talking about this-there seems to be a single minded focus on replicating ‘the old Twitter’ rather than considering the future of that platform.
@Natasha_Jay @marlies right- there’s obviously a lot of engagement just going on about this ‘dilemma’- I just peeked in there because I have friends who now only use that platform. It’s so messed up. Thanks for helping clarify this.
The same guy followed up with a news article about how the Russians are going to beat the Americans at stealth fighters (comparing it to an F117, a slow ass bomber that’s been obsolete for decades), by building one out of fibreglass (plastic).
Credulous cheerleading tankies are the worst kind. Believe any stupid shit as long as it’s out of Russia or China.
@Matt Hodgkinson The only weapon Russia has that actually works properly is the ability to throw expendable human flesh at a target until it gets exhausted. It’s low tech as hell, but very effective.
The rest of their shit is junk. Sadly they have so many nukes that at least some of them probably work.
amazon.co.uk/Na%C3%A7%C3%A3o-C… I've been reading this in Portuguese, because I enjoyed another of the author's books and because I find the level of Portuguese very easy to follow. The best thing about it has been some of the idioms I've met along the way.
“Pôr a carroça à frentes dos bois” - to put the cart in front of the oxen.
“Tremer como varas verdes” - to shake like green twigs
"tirar nabos da púcara” - to pull turnips from the clay pot. Metaphorically to tease something out or to go on a fishing expedition in the journalistic sense.
"Engolir o sapo" - to swallow the toad. Kind of "bite the bullet"
"sair pela culatra" - to exit through the breech, i.e. to backfire
Been watching the HBO Max Dune prequel thing and I’m thinking, Paul Atreides is like, “I am the product of a 10000 year breeding programme to produce turbo Hitler. I have enough morality left to avoid being tubro Hitler. Phew!”
Why is it that whenever there's an Israeli drama about Mossad or Shabak, the Israeli intelligence services are portrayed as completely incompetent buffoons? Even by the standards of thriller TV, agents are so absurdly unable to follow orders that you do wonder if they'd do better ordering them to do the opposite.
Or maybe this is just the Israeli dramas that are selected to be exported to the rest of the world via Netflix and Apple TV. Perhaps Israel is less threatening if you associate it with 007 in clown shoes.
You can tell I'm getting to the nitpicking and rewording stage of writing an assignment for the OU when I go on flights of sfnal legal fantasy instead.
A bunch of senior members of the judiciary have a time machine. When a miscarriage of justice is discovered, they use the time machine to wind the unverse back to before the miscarriage. Obviously this looks splendid, and nobody in the rewound universe (handwave handwave) suffers the consequences of long prison times.
Unfortunately, a convicted criminal learns of the existence of this machine and on his release uses it to rewind so he committed the perfect crime...
Philosophy question: a randomly selected UK journalist or medic is told that a 40 megatonne hydrogen bomb will go off in London unless they write 5 sentences about trans people without deliberately lying.
Imagine being someone like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel and suddenly realising that your main legacy is for your obituary to get mostly laugh reacts on Facebook.
If you are a cis woman athlete, and trans women have been banned from competing in the women's category in your sport, a good way to show solidarity would be to refuse to compete in the women's category too.
It would be nice to see people doing this to help an entirely unjustified attack on us, but I feel it's unlikely to happen 😞
Interesting to watch American oligarchy join the “Charles Stuart, Louis Bourbon, and Nicholas Romanov club of having learned nothing and now wishing to explore the consequences of that”.
Only with a proletariat that’s armed to the teeth.
Well well well well. Turns out that the carnivorous housefly that’s been driving us nuts for 2 days is utterly pervious to my acetamiprid fruit tree insecticide spray.
@kincaid I call him a fucking quisling and I'm cis (but bi).
He is a fucking quisling and his memoir makes it very clear he is a power monger who says what he thinks will keep him in power, hence being nice in 2017 and a transphobic shit now. I will enjoy watching him regret it, but know many are suffering who will never get recompense.
We need to kick transphobes out of the queer communities. Not welcome, not queer, ahistorical hypocrites who can get in a big bin.
I don't understand how anyone rehabilitated Bindel, she's appalling.
I got monstered at 2013 Feminism in London con (just before it showed its TERF face) where I'd been asked to speak on being a bi and disabled woman (like you do). I named Bindel as a hateful bi/transphobe whose type made me avoid women's space for yrs. The organisers sat there and let a minority abuse me. But 30+ people thanked me 1 by 1 for speaking out against disablism and terfery.
@NatalyaD I was invited to that conference. They set me up to be ambushed by Bindel. I only found out when students protested against her inclusion. I said I wasn’t comfortable but was happy to be on a panel without her (she had already pulled out by then). The organisers said no. The rumour was then spread that I had organised the protests (I hadn’t even known they’d existed) and got Bindel removed (I had not), and this kicked off an internet stalking/harassment campaign against me which resulted in a nervous breakdown and a 6 month gap in my memory.
The organisers of the 2013 feminism in London conference are not my favourite people.
I don't think Bindel was at 2013 cos I'd have kicked off if she had been - I hate her.
I wonder if you mean 2014 which was the year of protests and lot of the same organising people for sure. I know a nonbinary black person who pulled out when they found out Bindel was involved. I no longer speak to my former friends who were organisers cos TERFery.
I'm sorry you got the blame for the protests, that's just barking, but standard for TERFs who really are horrible obsessive evil ppl.
@NatalyaD The harassment campaign happened in 2014 because that was the year I was standing for reelection and it happened as a result of the FiL conference.
Was it really early in the year, or really late? I had a feeling its as December, but if it was January then it was indeed 2014.
Memory doesn't work too well during that time period. There were psychiatric drugs. Quite a few of them.
Looks like FiL 2013 and 2014 were both in October of those years.
The 2014 organising kickoffs that I remember were in the several months running up to it as I knew people who pulled out after discovering Bindel and TERFery & the organisers trying to stealthily set them up for shit.
Anyway, best left in the past and protect yourself at all costs. I'll keep calling Bindel and friends out as the grifting bigots that they are.
Now I have a dilemma what toast is the most appropriate.
Considering the spirit, the Hebrew l'chaim! - to life! - fits the purpose. So also does Polish na zdrowie - to health.
But we also have very Slavic na pohybel skurwysynom - let the motherfuckers die.
Anyway, let your goal be fulfilled!
PS. If that matters, the glass is a keepsake from UK. I've bough a set of them in a thrift shop in Shipley (Yorkshire), where I was living for 3.5 years.
When he's done travelling the Clapham Omnibus the reasonable man turns out to be handy for my mental health. I am very harsh on myself and very strict when I'm interpreting instructions and deadlines others give me in words, so it's useful to have the reasonable man point out that it isn't quite so cut and dried.
There's this thing that seems to be happening in western democracies recently where leftish liberal politicians look at their right-wing-going-on-fascist opposition and say "they're right, but don't vote for them". The result is that people shrug and think they may as well vote for the real fascist rather than the guy doing fascist cosplay.
But does this ever happen the other way around? You never get Trump saying "The socialists are right, don't vote for them". Possibly I'm asking why the Overton window only ever goes rightwards.
It occurs to me that on a small scale politicians know it’s not a good idea to agree with your opponent too much. Remember “I agree with Nick” from the first leaders’ debate in 2010? IIRC Clegg got a bounce in the polls and public estimation after that debate. “I agree with Nick” was not uttered again.
The real problem to me is the left/liberal pretending the populist far right is just another player in the democracy game, when it obviously isn’t. They’re treating equally something that is not equal. They’re debating something that can’t be debated, with people who go to debates do everything but debating. It’s like history taught them nothing and they don’t understand this is something that needs to be eliminated while we can, before we need to do it with guns and bombs again.
American companies on Facebook advertising clever carry on luggage and not publishing dimensions, or making it not fit in a 55*40*20cm cuboid, and wondering why nobody in Europe buys it.
@Nicovel0 Yesterday I was watching a couple of YouTubes about why US car makers failed to sell their bloated gas guzzling cars in Europe and its a similar story of making products that just don’t fit anywhere else unless they have the wit and wisdom to set up locally and make products specifically for that market.
@Miguel Arroz Ryanair basically sets the standard here. They want to turn a plane round in 20 minutes which means the standard US “everyone spends five minutes playing luggage Tetris in the cabin” thing is right out.
@Nicovel0 @christineburns there's a video I can't find of a hill climb. It's up a streambed, ankle deep liquid mud. Rocks. REAL 4x4's sliding back down the hill
And some french farmer just boings one of them up, one handed, fag out the window* and roars off
I have an amazing "Carry On" training backpack that allows me to carry a laptop, regular clothes, training clothes, trainers and swim kit. Individual compartments, barriers, the works.
Designed specifically for the needs of travelling athletes.
Designed specifically for the needs of travelling American athletes.
Worked that out a bit late. Great domestic travel bag.
@Nicovel0 @christineburns They are, and they benefit from their lightness compared to suvs. However, they also have their brother on speeddial with a tractor if they do get stuck in the winter.
May just be the fact that I have Covid, but I just see the future getting darker and darker as a self fulfilling prophecy of our idiot politicians who think they have no choice but to drive society into the abyss.
Just unblocked a load of people I had server blocks on because they had animated GIF avatars and they were bricking my server’s job queue.
Have upgraded server software and it fixes the issue so I’ve removed the blocks.
If you were one of these people, sorry! It was nothing personal. I couldn’t even tell you because any attempt to interact with you in any way poisoned my job queue.
Somewhere in my past there is an officious bystander trying to point out that I obviously didn't intend to be doing a law module, a Portuguese course, and a work project all at the same time.
it works surprisingly well if you add “on Spotify” to the end of your query. Which is _wild_ given the fact it doesn’t with their own music service! (I have both for errm reasons)
Well done! I am pondering whether to pay privately for a 2nd Covid jab 6 months after the one the NHS randomly decided I was entitled to this yr. Esp if I can get a Novavax which I am hearing is the best one for modernish Covid.
Still being super cautious, disability health stuff is already barely manageable, I just can't risk anything getting Worse on top of my usual age related deteriorations....
Kincaid
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sensitive content