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patreon.com/posts/98498779 has leaks about the Hugo censorship thing. I’m not convinced self-censorship is the whole story and there’s almost certainly more to come out. However if it is accurate about Kat Jones’ involvement she probably ought not to be involved in Glasgow’s Hugo admin.


My chin is an angry red from yesterday’s electrolysis session. But what can you do? Those hairs have to die!
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I guess I will be grateful that I never get any of that kind of reaction. Didn't get much with laser either. Getting a bit tired of having to be fuzzy enough for them to be accessible though.
in reply to Sion [main]

@Sion [main] The 2-3 days of growth before a zapping are horrid. I just hate that bristly feeling. (It doesn’t look so bad as so many of my chin hairs are white)
Unknown parent

@Sesquipedality It’s true. All I’ve tried is violence. Blades, laser beams, and electricity.

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Apparently one of Willy Wonka's secret ingredients was flattened lentils.

He was a big fan of rolled dhal.

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in reply to marnanel

I want to Like this, but then it means Liking something about
Roald Dahl. 🙁

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The Ukrainian navy is just trolling now: the original Major Kunikov died on February 14th, 1943. They literally waited until the anniversary of his death to sink his nautical namesake. kyivindependent.com/media-russ…
in reply to Graydon

@graydon @rabidchaos

There are, I think, 4 Virginia-class SSNs under construction.

hii.com/news/hii-arkansas-ssn-…

... although they do have six vertical tubes for cruise missile launch.

Note for potential use by Charlie:

"The third ship of the [Seawolf] class, USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23), has a 100-foot hull extension called the multi-mission platform. This hull section provides for additional payloads to accommodate advanced technology used to carry out classified research and development and for enhanced warfighting capabilities."

That's nicely vague.


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I can only hope that one day the UK does similar to trans people. theguardian.com/world/2024/feb…

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Does the “check” in “check your privilege” mean “assess, analyse”, or “stop, restrain”, or is it like hold baggage?

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in reply to Alexandra Lanes

the phrase started slightly after privilege checklists became a thing, so I think it's the first one.

amptoons.com/blog/?p=2731


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Sometimes I love negative reviews: "While the inclusion of non-binary and lesbian characters was great to see, the sheer volume was disproportionate" 😂

If you want disproportionate queerness go buy A Fire Born of Exile
geni.us/AFireBorn
books2read.com/u/b5WeP7

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in reply to Aliette de Bodard

I felt this way about Mercedes Lackey books when I was like, eleven.

So here's hoping it's a pretween babyqueer just working some feelings out.



Weird mixture of “yay life’s good” foreground reactions to the day with a background of “life’s crap” feels.

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My doctor told me I needed orthopedic supports in my shoes. I didn’t believe it, but now I stand corrected.

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WHAT—

github.com/djanderson/aho

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in reply to Charlie Stross

but mawk is faster (although lacks multidimensional arrays)
This entry was edited (9 months ago)

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I piloted a starship, and I can’t figure this out either.

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Even Elon Musk is laughing at this shit. At home, Russian propaganda can spin anything into a win for Putin, but it seems any hopes the Kremlin might have had of influencing American perceptions with the Carlson interview were misplaced.

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in reply to Kevin Rothrock

This interview shows a visible mental decline of putin.
This entry was edited (9 months ago)
in reply to Kevin Rothrock

Holy 💩🐔🤭

He. Got. The. Interview.ru/Tucker🐔

🦖🐦📢❄️Buttttttt..... How does this play out in 🎎⛩️🎌👺🇯🇵

😽😏

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in reply to 𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not nonbiological"

Waterfowl are totally queer-friendly!

I had a transgender duck years ago. Our male duck died, and over the course of the next few weeks, one of the afab* ducks molted, grew male feathers, and started quacking like a male duck. The other ducks totally accepted that he was a male duck as he transitioned. It was very cool to watch.

*(I'm not sure if this is the right term to use for something that hatches... but it was absolutely a gender transition so I'll use that language!)

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Unknown parent

Prof. Sam Lawler

@joesabin He lived at least a year after transitioning (I think he was about 2 years old when he transitioned). He got killed by a mink ☹️

He had a great post-transition life before his untimely end, though! Coastal BC is a great place to be a duck.



To UK ears “the IRA is the most successful decarbonisation policy we have” sounds very strange.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Whaaa... ?Gobsmacked, followed by a few minutes thought and search. Ah.
(NB: Sometimes when faced with abbreviations and #TLAs which clearly don't mean What I Think They Mean, I can't be bothered.)

Imagination on overdrive for a few moments there, though. Bombs may have been involved.

#ThinkAndSearch


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Permit me to suggest the claim on Wikipedia that His Majesty's Airship Number One "provided valuable technical experience for British airship designers" is an overly sunny assessment of the featured predicament.

#FailureFriday

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in reply to ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘

@anne_twain No, it didn't. Initially it was three tons overweight, so a programme of removing essential bits and pieces started. One piece lost was the keel, which almost certainly contributed to the airship essentially snapping in half when caught by a crosswind as they took it out of the shed.


My varifocal glasses are great but I still get distracted by a worryingly bendy wall out of the corner of my eye.
in reply to kæt

@chiffchaff @sesquipedality Mine mentioned office trifocals, where the main portion is screen distance (like the pair I'm wearing right now) and the top is true distance (or at least, other side of the room).
Unknown parent

Colette
@sesquipedality @chiffchaff A few years ago my optician (who kept telling me that my monitor should be placed low so that I had to look down at it) persuaded me to try varifocals. After a couple of weeks I took them back as I didn't get on with them at all, and had them replaced with monofocals. And I ignored his dreadful 'advice' about monitor placement.

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Harassing botnets with zipbombs.

The idea is this: instead of just blocking IP addresses that hit honeypot URLs, feed them a compressed document that massively expands on their end, making them run out of memory and crash.

This is extremely...
jwz.org/b/ykMS

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in reply to jwz

The mind behind this reminds me very much of my old college It professor, brilliant man who loved to deconstruct things just to see if & how they could be broken.
The only thing he loved more than tech and teaching, was chain smoking & food. That ultimately was his downfall about 10-12 years after I last took his courses.

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UK media: wow, British politicians have got really transphobic!

Me: Sure have, UK media. Who do you think they learned it from?

UK media: we will never know



in reply to Nanoraptor

On the one hand at least it’s polite.

On the other hand, what are you doing that makes Photoshop beg for mercy?

Unknown parent

.:/ DiSCATTe \:.

we gotta get speech recognition going so we can photoshop like we're in blade runner.

"computer. scale. blur. noise. export jay-peg quality fifty-five"


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Are you rewatching #Babylon5 or watching it for the first time? Feel free to use my episode bingo sheet. I created it with my friends while we were watching B5 for the first time. Most of the squares should be self-explanatory.

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Today in Assassination Coordinates:

You should follow @TaylorSwiftsJets as Taylor Swift goes Full Musk:

Taylor Swift's attorneys have threatened legal action against a Florida college student who runs social media accounts tracking the flights of her...
jwz.org/b/ykMQ

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Unknown parent

jwz
@ComradeGibbon Uh huh. Go fuck yourself. *plonk*
in reply to jwz

Hm... why can't Sweeny just report the flights' lengths? I mean without locations... Or maybe categorized into 'above 500km', '400-500km', '300-400km' and so on. Swift's amount of flying is critical, but I doubt the necessity of the geolocations. Those are - as mentioned by @ComradeGibbon - only helpful for incels, stalkers, haters, groupies and so on.

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The real fantasy element of Dungeons & Dragons is pretending that you have a group of friends who all get along with each other and can manage to meet regularly for four hours at a time.

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in reply to evacide

My group meets about once a month, 100 miles away from where most of the players live, and we spend ~12 hours that day eating, drinking and playing D&D. Been doing this for ten years now. Maybe the dedication of a full day to the event is what makes the difference?


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I hate that TERFs have taken phrases like, "women and girls", "suffrage", and "equity" and made them into the feminist equivalent of countries with "democratic republic" in their names.



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Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko is the new record-holder for the human with the most time in space. He passed colleague Gennady Padalka who had the previous record of 878 days. Kononenko is expected to crack 1,000 during his current ISS mission. svoboda.org/a/rossiyskiy-kosmo…
This entry was edited (9 months ago)

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I believe no greater truth has ever been told.

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Here's a fifth painting of @major_clanger 's cat Taura, focusing on dark and light.

Taura looks as elegant as ever 😆

N.B. You can find my prior paintings here: hgpenningtonart.com

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In my hands is my first iPod. Steve Jobs is smiling at me. Everybody at the Apple Store is smiling.

I take off my Apple Vision. I am back in the retirement home. Nobody has visited me for 12 years. I put it back on.

I hold my iPod. Everybody in the Apple Store is smiling.

in reply to SwiftOnSecurity

that device should be renamed to the Delusion Vision Pro extreme 😀


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Fuck yeah clearance to prototype one of my more hilarious hacks also it is *astonishing* what you can do with the SSH agent protocol

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in reply to Matthew Garrett

Heh, last time I was tempted to abuse ssh-agent for something, I ended up discovering dpipe instead (reverse-sshfs to access... something, I don't remember what, maybe a kerberos credential cache? Or auth cookies?)

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At this point, the British court system is actively transphobic, acting as the judicial arm of a state that seeks to eradicate trans people, especially women.

When the law is unjust, it must be ignored. Resist transphobia.

It is disappointing to see the Open University back down in the face of obvious justice denied.

ounews.co/around-ou/ou-speaks-…

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in reply to NatalyaD

@NatalyaD @ajlanes
Well yeah it was obviously exactly that. What research was expected to come out of it?

Intellectual enquiry can be into new understandings of things, or the psychology of why people hold to their views, but it can't simply seek to re-affirm a mainstream view. That's not research in any meaningful sense.

Only imagine my surprise that someone who doesn't understand that turned out not to handle robust criticism well and became unpopular with her colleagues.

in reply to Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫

@petealexharris @ajlanes Phoenix is whining that in criminology there's ~300 academics in the field (seems an under count) and she's been ostracised by them.

That's cos most criminologists follow the Actual Evidence not some "I get to wave my trauma to be a bigot" like Phoenix did. Also there are already prison policies (not always followed) which Phoenix-and-friends (there's a disturbing children's TV prog title) never talk about either.

Shouting about being cancelled=attention.




My Fediverse app of choice, @Mona app is gradually decaying so it copes less and less well with Friendica. I’ve coped with it being unable to parse notifications on my phone for a while but it’s stopped being able to do it on the desktop either. I asked them about this problem a while back and they said it was Friendica emitting notifications in the wrong form. I lack the cutlery to investigate further so… anyone suggest a good Fediverse client for iOS and MacOS that works nicely with Friendica?

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GDPR is what Europe has instead of God

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in reply to SwiftOnSecurity

GDPR is good but "right to be forgotten" for public persons is very bad. In my opinion, every member of national or European parlament, other government institution doesn't have such right.