"Platty joobs", "genny lec", "menty b" & co.: I wrote about this British slang fad
stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/0…
#slang #language #words #phrases #hun #linguistics #wordplay
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Type of enby who responds to "Are you a boy or a girl?" with a "418 I'm a teapot".
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openwall.com/lists/oss-securit… OH MY FUCKING GOD complete auth bypass in inetutils telnetd for over a decade and obviously nobody inside that decade should have been running a telnet daemon but wow
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@cjwatson @shelldozer @wolf480pl Worse, it turns a variable into the empty string if it has bad characters, rather than failing.
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We need to buy a replacement DVD player from Argos (cos we like owning our media) and looking through the Q&As this tickled me.
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Oh, excellent.
"Moose dropped on a parabola" 🫎
youtube.com/watch?v=pjnFsk5b8X…
Moose dropped on a parabola
3000 randomly distributed point masses initialized to be confined to the interior of a moose-shaped contour are released under gravity to scatter off the fun...YouTube
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@psychicparrot42 Gotta admire that one rogue particle that de-moosifies. 🫎
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Have you always wrestled with questions about the things that turn you on? Are you worried that your desires are messing with your relationships, your self-image, even your body? I'm ready to help you stop feeling "broken" and become the wholehearted kinkster you were born to be.
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Kinky is Beautiful is open, and you can join us from anywhere in the world for only $25: blake-becoming.mykajabi.com/of…
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NEW
Trying to make sense of the nonsensical decision to drop the Chinese spying prosecutions
How the positions of neither the CPS nor the government stand up to scrutiny
By me
Substack
emptycity.substack.com/p/tryin…
Personal blog davidallengreen.com/2025/10/tr…
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The entire Western Pacific has been verified free of measles and rubella. The WHO has verified the elimination of both diseases in all Pacific Island countries, alongside rubella elimination in Japan. The achievement follows two decades of coordinated immunisation campaigns, regional surveillance, and high routine vaccine coverage, making the Western Pacific the first WHO region to eliminate rubella entirely. who.int/westernpacific/news/it…
#ShareGoodNewsToo
#ShareGoodNewsToo
item
The World Health Organization (WHO) today announced that the 21 Pacific island countries and areas that are part of the WHO Western Pacific Region have collectively been verified as having eliminated measles and rubella.www.who.int
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that sadly wont last long with US and german visitors (i am from germany and anti-vaxers are on the rise here too)
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BBC Model Linear B
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@hpcchris it's all Geek to me.... (sorry)
Good job it's not the Linear Model A, I've never been able to understand the manual for that one.
Stop convincing yourself that you need to all of the thing to make it worth doing any of it.
Put on 1 song, tidy, clean, draw, or whatever for the length of that song. When it's done, you can be done.
Doing something is better than nothing
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If you've heard of Tor lately but
aren't sure how it works and how it can help you to stay safe,
I wrote this article explaining how Tor works, who it is for, and how it can help you in a very accessible way.
No technical knowledge needed.
I hope this helps you to stay safe 💜 
privacyguides.org/articles/202…
In Praise of Tor: Why You Should Support and Use Tor
You might have heard of Tor in the news a few times, yet never dared to try it yourself. Despite being around for decades, Tor is still a tool too few people know about. Today, Tor is easy to use for anyone.Privacy Guides
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And now for something light and fun:
A friend sent me this--and I cannot stress this enough--*PEER-REVIEWED* article on transfeminine puppygirl culture because it includes comics (one NSFW).
And yall
This thing is a wild ride. But it's also kinda great.
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Honestly, this seems like work that either winks toward or outright engages a lot of the frankly-odd shit that (especially white, but overwhelmingly well-educated) trans folks get into: things that yearn for ways to sever our humanity, personhood, intellect, or all three at once, in the fantasy of Getting Out of that awful double-bind, where we're helpless front-row spectators to, well, *gestures vaguely at the structures of the white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy* all that crap.
Anyway, this is neat, and got my noodle cooking. Thought some of y'all might enjoy it too.
wow I did not expect to be this called out by an academic paper on a subculture I'm not even in. I wish I had the emotional capacity to dig into the lit beyond a paper here or there...
"most trans women know that their perception of themselves, that their own ideas of their self, are not always trustworthy. In a society built on foundational trans-antagonism (Stanley 2021), and suffused with narratives of trans femininity as inherently fraudulent (Bettcher 2025) and unloveable (Guadelupe-Diaz 2019) it simply hard for a trans woman to feel secure enough to be the source of her own affirmation." 🫣
"the enticing anxiety surrounding desires that we may fear as much as we want them, which, once again, is a deeply trans feeling (Lavery 2023)" 😯
(Ok and it's slightly distracting the number of times "is" is missing from the phrase "it is" in the paper, but oh well)
Oh my this paper is DELIGHTFUL.
Bookmark, cackle, send to therapist For Science.
fun feature of HRT:
- you start to look like a woman
less fun feature of HRT
- that woman is your mum
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Hilbert/Russell Inn
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schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp schlorp
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Frogs apparently represent peak masculinity in english children books and I don't know what to do with this information.
This entry was edited (7 months ago)
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well.. considering amphibians can change their sex from male to female this speaks volumes especially regarding transphobia
So if Stella wants to concentrate on farming what does that mean for Pip? Ploughing? #thearchers
While I’m much better these days at shedding the idea that summoning takeaway is a vice, cooking properly for myself still feels virtuous
(originally by twitmericks in 2014, but bears repeating:)
As traffic control out of Swanwick
Is now by and large electranwick
A technical glitch
Is more than a hitch -
The chaos ensuing is chranwick
Source (
): twitter.com/twitmericks/status…
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I think it’s at least mildly surprising that three of these can be combined into a cube. skfb.ly/pzByn
A third of a cube - 3D model by robinhouston
Three of these pieces may be combined to form a cube. This dissection is based on Hashimoto’s bucolic cube, which is a cool puzzle. - A third of a cube - 3D model by robinhoustonSketchfab
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content cruelly disappointing given the URL
bouncysigns.co.uk/products/inf…
bouncysigns.co.uk/products/inf…
Inflatable slide rules
Inflatable slide rules safety notice Printed and Laminated Size - A3 (297mm by 420mm) Other sizes available A4 & A2. 3mm Foamex board, Strong & durableBouncy Signs
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The current breakaway leader in the Tour de Nap 🚴
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When the problem involves more than 2 hat colors it does not appear to me to resemble a hypercube graph and when it involves more than 2 people it does not appear to have the simple isomorphism with edge orienting that you have described.
Have I misunderstood?
@mjd it's true that with k>2 hat colours the problem stops resembling a graph. Instead you have to generalise to a k-uniform hypergraph, i.e. graph edges are replaced by sets of k vertices instead of sets of 2. But you still keep the rest of the properties: every hyper-edge is a set of exactly k vertices, all agreeing in the same n−1 places but covering every possibility for the remaining place, representing a situation in which one player sees one particular layout of hats on the other n−1 players but could have any choice for their own hat.
And an 'orientation' of a hyper-edge involves nominating exactly one of its endpoints, which probably isn't the right generalisation of orienting a graph in all situations, but it's the one that works for this problem.
But with k=2 but >2 players it still seems like a graph orientation problem to me.
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The Mustelid of the Month is a pine marten!
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Why #Ao3 was down yesterday:
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@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer
So there is no "fix it once and for all" solution to timekeeping, and the best and most robust strategy will always be store timestamps the way the user provided them, and interpret them as best you can, given the knowledge available to you, when you do.
So there is no "fix it once and for all" solution to timekeeping, and the best and most robust strategy will always be store timestamps the way the user provided them, and interpret them as best you can, given the knowledge available to you, when you do.
@simon_brooke @catgirlQueer
And as for nanosecond resolution: Now you also need to think about which relativistic reference frame to use.
And as for nanosecond resolution: Now you also need to think about which relativistic reference frame to use.
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#AcceptTheCompliment and #GetCherishedNerd.
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
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The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
[...]
Client implementations SHOULD NOT be a place of honor. Client implementations MUST NOT commemorate highly esteemed deeds.
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Minesweeper on my DXY-885 plotter. A project that took longer than expected!
Uploading partly to test video-embed from mastondon.social.
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I've done this now. The current version of Puzzles on my website – both the live web version and the downloadable binaries – mark the original first click location with a cross if you undo past the move that opened it. For example, I loaded the save file you sent me into the Linux version, and now it looks like this. Same if I use "Upload save file" at chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtath….
This entry was edited (5 months ago)
yoooo! thank you! 
i didn't expect you to go out of your way for a mistake on my part, but i really appreciate it either way!
Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.
> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?
There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.
> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?
None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.
> But are you / they in the cloud?
No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.
> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.
*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
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The hard part in many parts of the world these days is obtaining any sort of affordable static IP address
*Me, laughing, as my 5kB of mostly handwritten carefully crafted CSS instantly loads in the browser and does not, in fact, take five seconds for the rendering engine to catch up.*
Labour have proposed a transphobe, Mary Ann Stephenson for next chair of the EHRC. The Women and Equalities Committee of the House of Commons will want to scrutinise this appointment. Help them understand why she’s a bad pick by signing this letter! #UKpol
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So I tried out the nonogram dude's android app and the controls are baffling and I gave up when it tried to be clever with zoom, so back to the good old fashioned Simon Tatham puzzle collection for me.
Tapping a second time gives you blank, dragging only works in the line you started. Intuitive.
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It is time, once again, for me to tap the sign.
"Ant-ee-far" is a profoundly un-British pronouncation of "Anti-Fah", and is used by plastic "patriots" for precisely one reason - to obscure the fairly obvious question: "Who are the Fah that these people are opposed to?"
Likewise, the UK does not have "DEI" and never has.
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#england - and #wales - did however pass a law against 'diversity of opinions' in the latter part of the reign of #henrytheeighth . It was repealed in the next reign.
Make them define it.... every time some one uses DEI or Antifa or Woke in any kind of pejorative manner... Ask them to define it... make them state categorically that they A: Don't understand what it means (ignorant moron) or B: Understand but are against equality, equity, compassion, consideration and basic human rights (utter piece of human bigoted garbage).
Male friends (I have male friends here right?) - have you heard of Ask for Angela?
(A man in The Archers didn’t know of it and I was wondering how likely it is for men to be aware of it.)
Yes, although I wasn't completely confident I remembered what exactly it was for (I did) nor that I'd remember the name on demand.
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lol omg i accidentally a massive rant
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Microsoft also never implemented decent quoting in email, which makes extended communication very hard if one of the parties is an outlook victim.
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I feel like there ought to be a discipline of something like "perceptual geometry", and I need to be better at it.
We all know that finding the "optical centre" of a glyph is not straightforward (but there are algorithms). Even something as apparently simple as "stroke contrast" requires thought. Stroke contrast is just the thickness of the thickest part divided by the thinness of the thinnest part, right? Not so. The thickest part of the O on the right is not relevant to contrast.
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oh lots of fun stuff 😄 measuring contrast and italic angles isn’t even 5% of it—too much to fit in under 500 characters
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Black-chinned hummingbird at purple sage. They are noticeably smaller than the local Anna’s and Allen’s, and their hovering is much less stable so this is a situation where I focus on a cluster of flowers and hope it eventually goes to it.
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Today is a GREAT day for the ocean. Not only is the new Attenborough Ocean film out today, but I got a sneak peak at the new Great Map being installed at the National Maritime Musuem in Greenwich, and it's just astonishing. It's the Spilhaus projection - a way of unwrapping the globe that keeps the ocean intact - and it's got beautifully detailed topography and plenty of other fun bits and pieces. The whole redecorated hall will be renamed Ocean Court and will reopen to the public on June 7th, World Ocean Day. Do go as soon after that as you can - it really is stunning.
#Ocean
32 s
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The commands 'cd $PWD' and 'cd .' in bash both look like useless no-ops which change into the same directory you're already in. But they're not, and both can be useful.
$PWD is a string variable which caches the pathname that your current directory had at the time you changed into it. It's not automatically updated in between cd commands.
So 'cd $PWD' (or 'cd "$PWD"' if you're being properly careful) changes to whatever directory _now_ lives at the pathname that your actual cwd _was_ when you changed to it.
'cd .' really _does_ just change directory to the same physical directory you're already in, but it's still not useless, because it causes bash to recalculate the value of $PWD.
For example, if one shell is in ~/test, and in another shell you rename ~/test to ~/newname and make a new directory ~/test, then in the first shell 'cd $PWD' will move to the new ~/test, whereas 'cd .' will stay in the original directory but update $PWD to reflect the fact that it now lives at ~/newname.
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That's remind me something i found amusing some times ago:
~/tmp/tmp$ rmdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # where am i now?
~/tmp/tmp$ pwd
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ echo $PWD
/mnt/vg00/diego/tmp/tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # everything is fine, right?
~/tmp/tmp$ ls
~/tmp/tmp$ ls .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ # ah!
~/tmp/tmp$ mkdir ../tmp
~/tmp/tmp$ # so does it works now?
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
bash: x: No such file or directory
~/tmp/tmp$ #still no luck
~/tmp/tmp$ cd .
~/tmp/tmp$ cat /dev/null > x
~/tmp/tmp$ # now it works!
While the error in creating the file looks legit, why can I list a directory that doesn't exist? And I think that a new directory with the same name, it's still a new directory, but looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell.
Just for reference tests were made on linux on a ext4 filesystem (but does it matters?).
@diegor 'why can I list a directory that doesn't exist?' – it does exist, it just isn't linked from anywhere. On Unix, directories as well as files have the property that the inode (containing the actual contents) persists even after there's no path to it from the filesystem root, if a process has it open. So your cwd can still be in a directory that's been deleted.
'looks like "cd ." somehow fix the cwd of the shell' – assuming the shell is bash, yes, by default "cd ." will do that. It _doesn't_ do what I claimed in the head of the thread, unless you have the non-default 'set -P' option, which I set long ago for myself and had forgotten was relevant. If _I_ had done "cd ." in that situation, I'd have stayed in the deleted directory.
Stan Carey
in reply to Stan Carey • • •A comment on my post describes users of this slang as lazy simpletons with a limited vocabulary. (I was having none of it.)
I see linguistic shortcuts – abbreviations and the like – more as efficiencies. They're the verbal equivalent of desire paths, which no one sees as "lazy".
But the characterization shows the social baggage that language has accumulated. It's a scapegoat for broader anxieties and prejudices.
#language #slang #abbreviations #sociolinguistics #blogging