New British House of Lords appointments announced. UK politics is just a contest to see who can run the most transparently nihilistic grift and still get cushy life tenure in Westminster.
There needs to be a way to restrict the number of political peers who can sit in the Lords at a time. Either they can elect some number of their own body similar to the hereditary peers or have a first-come-first-served each day to allow them in.
The subject matter experts are useful, they help beat legislation into some sort of usable shape. That's the Lords serving a useful function.
What Lego have done with their PoweredUp stuff is very cool. You can control it from a remote control or from your phone using Bluetooth. But this means that when you’ve not played with this stuff for a while and just want to make the train go forward you have all this technological baggage. I miss the joy of being able to press a button to make it go.
Is it silly to feel a bit nervous around people on the train wearing Harry Potter gowns (not just ordinary academic gowns, but obviously embroidered with Griffindor etc.)? It feels silly, and yet…
I dunno. I get twitchy when I wind up using the chemist in town that sells HP merch, rather than my regular.
(Why a town this size has two chemists, I don't know, but it means I can go to the one I don't like for OTC meds which are contra-indicated by my prescription meds. Because the thing about a town this size is that your pharmacist knows who you are, if you're a regular)
@sparrowsion Ha, I've found mine in the village is hard to buy cough medicine in - because they didn't have the sugar free pholcodine in stock and knew I was diabetic!
I've not got the impression that the people being poisoned by JKR's transphobia are actual Harry Potter fans, primarily. It's not people with HP avatars who tweet out the bigotry, it's single-issue shouty types, different demographic. So many HP fans are sound people, they support Daniel Radcliffe in his vocal support for trans rights, even the ones who keep wearing the shirts etc. This is what I choose to believe, anyway.
One begins to fully appreciate why "May you live in interesting times" is a curse. I think the hope this time is that things will crash and burn so badly in the next couple of years that the whole thing is definitively resolved. Or that all the campaign promises are kept and we really do get lower egg prices.
Interesting conversation the other day. In relation to the ban on GnRH agonists I said that the requirement for puberty blockers before hormones at 18 was a sop to the cis. A friend pointed out that my experience was very gender binary and that blockers might have a role for those whose gender identity is more complicated or in flux. Food for thought.
Useful questions that in-universe characters could ask:
What kills the people sent out to clean?
Why, despite us clearly having been down here a very long time, does it seem that everyone sent out to clean dies after about the same amount of time? Why is the threat not diminishing over time?
Why were these very well stocked silos ready and waiting and apparently very well matched to the threat outside? (In the books, Lukas does ask this question and gets an answer, and the answer is correct but incomplete).
This is not mentioned in the books, but I’m assuming the secret library of the before times that IT has does not mention climate change. The vault library probably does, but if IT knew about climate change, they could learn something interesting by monitoring external CO2 levels.
Curious thing I’ve just noticed about my progesterone prescription. It’s for 28x100mg capsules, fine, but the capsules come in packs of 30. So every month the pharmacist cuts two capsules from the blister pack before sending the rest to me.
What happens to these little pairs of progesterone capsules? Is there someone who finds themselves with a box containing 14 little two-capsule blister packs? Is any of this worth anyone’s time and effort rather than letting me have an extra two?
I have a medication that comes in 28s, which I am prescribed in an odd multiple of 14. I can receive that as all sorts of random offcuts, presumably from others with more fiddly quantities. (It's a lifelong, cheap, uncontroversial medication, so indeed it seems like unnecessary faff for everyone to dole it out a month at a time -- even increasing the interval to 2 months would mean no-one would have to faff around cutting up anything.)
@womump While I have one that comes in boxes of 84 as 3x21s and am prescribed 28 at a time, so I *usually* get one full strip and a 1x7 cut off another. But not always.
I am on some things which are one-month-at-a-time only, and this isn't one of them.
(Also, the chemist has an auto-repeat system which works on a calendar month, which is 🙄 )
It’s quite astonishing to watch the Bluesky people keep digging that hole.
Now apparently they auto remove any post that has the house number and street of Jesse Singal in. As a result, literally everyone on the site now knows what they are, thanks to the Streisand Effect.
@A Spectre, Haunting @Kincaid @kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈 I'm really wondering how they're going to handle the backstory parts of Shift though. The whole, "WHY were umpty-billion people murdered?" thing is kinda important to the storyline.
I'm confused as to why the wound on her arm is getting worse.
Atlanta was nuked, some of the surrounding area was nuked. The rest of it is all fiction.
There's no evidence at all in the books that the W.O.O.L. conspiracy succeeded in nuking the earth and cleansing everything. The only are the nanobots are active is in the area around the silos, because they're being replenished by the cleanings.
Thurman wanted all knowledge of nanotech erased and the entire conspiracy was to do a Bene Gesserit for 500 years to raise a society that would never again create the tech. Thurman saw it as an existential threat to humanity.
He specifically makes sure that Donald is at the convention because everyone else is going to die.
It's never mentioned in the books, but I strongly got the impression that the Atlanta incident was a FAE. They look like nukes (see Beirut), and would convince everyone inside that WWIII had happened. Using an actual nuke would have been counterproductive because it would have irradiated your breeding stock.
Thurman was convinced that a nano war was coming, and on entry day probably deployed enough into the upper atmosphere to kill every human on earth. If there's anyone left alive elsewhere at all, then his entire project is utterly pointless.
Note that the vault exists, precisely to restart civilisation, because there's nobody else out there.
It would be like sealing off Barnsley for 500 years to create a society that didn’t know about, say, plastic, and leaving a vault outside the sealed off area with loads of stuff in that nobody else touched because of the reason, and also you were so scared of your future civilisation knowing about plastic that you were willing to kill your self and your coworkers because you know about plastic, and by the way, the rest of the world is out there knowing about plastic and could rescue you at any time by just walking up and knocking and just decides not to, and by the way you literally have radios which you could use to call for help and they could hear you and you would hear them, and planes, which you would see in the night sky flying past, etc etc etc.
Humanity being dead is a central plot point. The entire premise makes zero sense if it’s not.
Local DIY barn is full of Christmas tat, except most of it looks like it’s been designed by generative AI. Upright boxer dogs wearing 19th century military uniform while looking vaguely cutesy and shit like that.
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.
I've resisted dipping my toe into bluesky so far. There are one or two over there I would like to follow, but I'll keep resisting, as I did while they were on twitter.
Bruce Alderson 🇨🇦
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •