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mention of suicide

Your regular reminder that John Money lied about the results of what he did to the Reimer twins, covered up the fact that David appeared to express an innate gender identity of male, and that both twins died by suicide, likely as a result of what Money did to them.

Furthermore, through his covering up the damage his wholly unethical experiment did, he gave legitimacy to subsequent decades of mistreatment of trans and intersex people by quacks.

It’s a shame hell isn’t a real thing, because by god, he deserves to rot there.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.



Running your own #Fediverse server? Want to give your users the authentic #Twitter experience? It’s quick and easy! Just pull the Ethernet cable out!


US Pol, police, racism, murder
Even before clicking through to this, it was obvious to me what the victim’s skin colour is. American police murder a man for … crossing the road while black.
in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
If the US were reported on like a lot of countries are, their police would be referred to as “state sponsored death squads”.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
right?? So much power- the ability to use state sanction lethal violence but with no accountability, transparency, reporting, or standards is just so mind blowing and appalling.
in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
I saw a tiktok from someone that kept getting kicked out of police academy for asking too many questions and having the sense that the training went against "the ethics of policing" (which, uh... that's a whole thing they need to unpack). They said they were told to should things like "drop the weapon" and "stop resisting" after firing their gun because people's memory will rearrange the events to make them make sense. It's so horribly fucked.


My dockerised homebridge was logging using the American date format, and I found this incredibly annoying. Worked out how to fix it: you add this to the docker-compose file...

    environment:
      LANG: en_GB.UTF-8

Took me long enough to work that out though.

in reply to Sarah Brown

building a fancy tool using MS's cloud services a few hours

Getting it to write and read out in non-fucked dates on the other hand...



Shoutout to Nginx Proxy Manager, which if you host some websites on your home internet connection, is a really nice bit of software that installs in Docker in about 30 seconds, has a nice GUI, handles SSL for you, and requires no Nginx knowledge. Even @Zoe O'Connell was impressed and that takes some doing!


What the cock is this shit? Someone had to go and integrate the stupid crypto scam bollocks into the fediverse. Oh dear.

Rui Malheiro reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

oh, joy! Looks like something I will block on principle.

"Likecoin is a digital currency that the authors of content are rewarded for each YouTube like.

Likecoin is based on Blockchain technology using the mechanism called “Proof of Popularity”: the higher the popularity of the video and the more likes it gets, the bigger is the amount of cryptocurrency rewarded to the author.

This technology makes it possible to monetize video content easily and to get a decent reward without adding any advertising or attracting advertising agencies."




I am, unusually, awake for the sunrise. This means I just got to see a bird fly straight into my window with a loud THUMP!, turn round, and fly away again.

I guess this is the bird equivalent of me randomly walking into things. Hope it’s ok.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Zoe cleaned the windows yesterday. Save the wildlife, leave them a bit mucky.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Normally they lie down stunned for a few minutes. You obviously have thicker skulled birds down there.


The mission architecture for the ESA/NASA Mars sample return mission is becoming clear. As the spacecraft approaches Mars, it will break into an entry vehicle and an orbiter (from ESA). The entry vehicle will land and the samples will be loaded onto it by rover or helicopter.

It will then launch into Mars orbit to rendezvous with the ESA orbiter and deliver the samples. The ESA orbiter will then burn for Trans Earth Injection and coast to Earth.

Once it hits the atmosphere, it will decelerate rapidly in a blaze of fire before slowing to subsonic speed and deploying its parachutes.

At this point, the United States Air Force will scramble an elite F22 Raptor squadron and shoot it down for being a Martian Spy Capsule.

jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia25338-n…



I now understand why you can’t share photos from a Mastodon client when using it with #Friendica:

In Friendica, photos have permissions. Mastodon doesn’t understand this, so when it uploads the photo it doesn’t set any. The Friendica server seems to see this and decide it needs to default to the most restrictive set, i.e. private.

So the created post does not contain a shareable photo.

If you then go into your gallery and edit the photo permissions to be public, then make a bullshit edit to the post, so that it refederates, it’ll suddenly appear.

HïMY SYeD🟩 reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

I have the exact opposite problem (and have already pulled all my hairs out trying to solve it), the Friendica instance I incompetently installed sees pictures but not text from the non-Friendica parts of the Fediverse.

github.com/friendica/friendica…

This entry was edited (2 years ago)


You guys! I think this fediverse thing might have legs! These are the stats from my micro instance, and I guess there are loads more corners that it doesn't know about!

Rui Malheiro reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Sarah Brown
@Evil Bee Permissions issue. Try again?



What is the deal with this balloon thing the yanks have got? Is it still there? Is it doing anything strange? Why not a satellite?
in reply to Sarah Brown

It's still hovering somewhere, and the more excitable right-wing congresscritters are trying to convince folks to take random pot-shots at them.

Because that'll totally work...



@Elk works with Friendica! This is very relevant to my interests! It presents it as a microblogging experience, but work it does.
@Elk
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Elk Interestingly, I can use Mastodon features with it that I can’t use on the friendica native UI, such as changing audience mid thread.

It can’t upload pictures though.

@Elk
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Elk It’s also limiting me to 500 characters, or at least displaying a countdown to 500.

This is actually very nice. Currently I’m maintaining two fediverse accounts: one Friendica, one Mastodon, because Friendica is great as an aggregator, but it makes a very poor Twitter replacement. Mastodon is much better at that.

But elk gives me the mastodon experience on my friendica account.

And I’m now wondering if I really need to maintain both.

@Elk


Formerly the richest man in the world, now selling MLM schemes. Whatever.

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An interesting fediverse quirk. On Mastodon, you can change visibility midway through a comment thread.

This makes sense because Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform and each response is a post in its own right.

But this is a federal system and your toots may be going to something that isn’t Mastodon.

This, that you are reading now, is not a Mastodon post. It’s a Friendica post. Friendica is not Twitter-like; it’s Facebook-like. That means that a post includes all responses as comments on that post and not first class posts in their own right.

Which means you can’t, e.g., change the audience midway through a comment thread, even if the people you’re replying to are on Mastodon, because the idea of changing the visibility midway through a comment thread is absurd in Facebook-like parlance.

As different fediverse protocols become increasingly popular, we’re gonna have to het used to these quirks.

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Sent an email to our conveyancing solicitor. Got an automated reply back:

Thank you for your email, which has been safely received


It’s SMTP, guys, not a consignment of dynamite sent through bandit country.

Sarah reshared this.

Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Sarah Brown
They’re an admin assistant. I don’t think they’re legally trained. They just either think, or have been told, that being endlessly verbose makes them look “professional” instead of like a space alien that taught itself English from garbled police radio transmissions.
in reply to Sarah Brown

me, an American, searching for a definition of "conveyancing solicitor" that doesn't just say "a solicitor well specializes in conveyancing". I finally found one, but I was facepalming hard for a minute. I already knew that solicitors are what we call attorneys or lawyers, so I was really trying to determine what conveyance meant here. I never would have guessed residential property/real estate law.
in reply to Tim

funnily enough, if you see a sign on someone's property in the US that says "No Soliciting" it does not mean you can't practice law. We call door to door salespersons solicitors, because they "solicit" goods. Which to be honest, feels like an old timey word.
in reply to Tim

Some might be so unkind to suggest that conveyancing solicitors are those who couldn't hack the legal profession and barely scraped a pass.

But that would be a very unkind stereotype.

Might explain their apparent inability to fucking read, though.



#Friendica server now migrated from a 2 gig RPi 4 to an 8 gig early 2015 retina MacBook Pro running Ubuntu.

The MBP was headed to the skip, but it turns out it makes a pretty kick-arse #ActivityPub server.

Reuse is better than recycle.

Here it is, in my server cupboard! If you're reading this post, that dilapidated Mac in the corner served it!

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

No. The wire is underneath the Mac. That's a trick of the perspective. The Mac is configured not to sleep. The lid is not closed because I think the hinge is slightly warped.


Dateline: a petrol station outside Tavira on the main road between Tavira and Faro last night. Action: I park there and, a few minutes later, an older gentleman in a jeep pulls up and I hand him a brown paper bag through my car window.

We then both drive off.

I’m sure this all looked perfectly innocent to anyone observing.

(I was selling the old autopilot unit from my boat)

Sarah reshared this.



Ordering a McRoyale Cheese meal from McDonalds’ coeliac menu, because I can. So ner.

Sarah reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Weirdest thing about Portuguese malls is their addiction to playing 70s, 80s and 90s Britpop


Discovered why my Friendica server has an occasional massive load spike for several minutes: it’s running out of physical RAM and thrashing the swap.

Machine it’s on only has 2 gigs. I have an old 2015 MacBook Pro that is in a very dilapidated state, but it works perfectly as an Ubuntu server.

Will migrate to that. It has 8 gigs of RAM. That should be plenty.

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The longer I live, the more I come to the inescapable conclusion that most "successful" captains of industry, managers, and politicians are literal psychopaths.

We are ruled by psychopaths working for psychopaths. The only way you can succeed in their hierarchy is to be a psychopath.

This is the Bad Place.

in reply to Sarah Brown

because 'success' means exploration. A normal human doesn't seek to exploit humans as mere objects. Psychopaths however, do
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Charlie 🏳️‍🌈♿💖
My girlfriend and I are currently writing a book called A Better Algorithm; A Manifesto For Democratic Communism, which we think has some pretty good ideas. We're just starting the pitching to agents / publishers stage (with the first draft written) so hopefully we'll be able to share our ideas soon 🤞🏻



UK Pol

Oh, Britain needs me, and other early retirees, does it? Maybe it should have thought of that before Brexit, before all the transphobia, before I got so pissed off I said “fuck it” and buggered off to Portugal with its, *checks notes* 300+ days of sunshine and subtropical beaches.

Well, Jer, old buddy, Britain may indeed need us. We, however, do not need it.

Off you fuck, now. Toodles. Mwah.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

UK Pol
this makes me joyous and sad in equal measures. You shouldn’t have had to leave, but I love seeing people thriving.
But yes, off they all fuck. GTTO


I challenge anyone to read this without thinking either of the words, "phlogiston" or "epicycles".

Sarah reshared this.



UKPol

Hey, Liberal Democrats! People are keen to try and fix Brexit, they want standards on clean air indoors for public health, and we really, really need proper and urgent action on Climate change. What can you offer?

"We'll try and make sure that if you need a doctor, one will phone you within a week"

It's utterly, utterly tragic how far my former party has fallen. What an utter, utter lack of ambition. It's just, "The future is going to be shit and there is nothing we propose to do about it".

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Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Sarah Brown
UKPol
Probably some from column A, some from column B. There is definitely a dominant ethos of "don't scare the horses" in the Lib Dems now that the properly progressive wing of the party has tried for years (and, sadly, failed) to replace with actual radical politics.
Unknown parent

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Sarah Brown
UKPol

They have got into a situation where the MPs care first, and foremost, about defending their own seats. This means never doing anything that might cause strong feelings in the people who are currently electing them, on the basis that if they don't spook the horses, they will vote for the name they did last time.

That tactic, however, goes to only one place: eventual total extinction.



in reply to Sarah Brown

@Mabande it’s interesting; I hear many people say they’ve been hounded by moderation etc but I’ve used every major social media platform, some of them extensively, and never experienced it myself. Maybe they don’t speak Swedish?
in reply to Amanda

Before I left twitter, I learned that the way to tell people to "get in the fucking sea" safely was to do it in Portuguese.


UK Pol, GRA reform

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I sorry to hear that, that is so frustrating. I hope you can find a way to proceed and not need to use those words! 😢

The US only requires a "declaration of intent" and a pronouncement from an officiant (a license easily obtained and needn't be religiously associated). The wording of the declaration is very flexible.



in reply to Sarah Brown

"would you have watched this series we could have commissioned? We're testing out if we can get people annoyed without even making things."
in reply to Nick Barlow

“Hi. We realised Ripley still has to go get Newt from the atmosphere processor, but we just cancelled this film. You’ll have to put up with ‘we’re not leaving’ being Ripley’s final words.”


Love the guy in the article: “why don’t customers understand the value us spying on them via their dishwasher has? The problem must be that we haven’t explained why being spied on is good for them well enough”

Like, fuck off?

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in reply to Susan

I have a SUP too, but I’m still getting the hang of it 😊
in reply to Sarah Brown

only got mine last year and managed about 4 outings. That will definitely change this year.