epeus.blogspot.com/2002/04/i-c… I can read people's thoughts. Using an ancient technology, handed down over millennia, improved and refined along the way, I am able to read people's thoughts. And not just people nearby, or people I know. I can even read dead people's thoughts. This gives me a great deal of power and knowledge - I can learn from their lives, their experiences, their dreams and fears, their insights and imaginings.
you know what else is magic? Getting in your climate controlled coach, driving to somewhere 40 miles away and arriving about a half hour later, and all the while you listened to a symphony played by a 100 piece orchestra.
I admit it's not as magical as being moved by words written someone 1000s of miles away or centuries in the past, but it is pretty damn good nonetheless.
After all these years I’m rarely surprised by medical misogyny, but finding out that the research from the first ever tests on period products using blood instead of water were published LAST WEEK is one of those surprises.
all the pads suck. So do all the tampons. I switched to a cup finally, and my life has changed. Fewer cramps, zero leaking, so much less waste, easy to travel with. I am never going back.
I feel somehow vindicated. Before starting a bc that stops the periods entirely, I tried to use the cup because it was more environmentally sustainable and supposedly holds more than a pad, but it did not work (learned later it's an anatomy anomaly that means it will never work!), so I ended up making my own reusable cloth pads because I knew what materials were in them and why. Cloth was the only option that didn't have a severe risk of leaking.
For those interested in cloth pads but don't want to make them, Party In My Pants was my go to purchased version.
and even then, this research didn’t use period blood, which can vary wildly in consistency. Cups or discs can contain the thicker material that pads and tampons can’t absorb.
as a trans woman who, thankfully, doesn't need to deal with menstrual products, but who patiently listens whenever my cis woman friends vent about their periods and therefore knows the general sentiment on that topic, I was shocked by this fact, and now I get why people hate menstrual products so much.
hey! That's brilliant 😀 may it continue. (I wouldn't be surprised if it's at least a bit of a Thing that telling people how bad it is does sometimes make it a bit better)
@Sion [main] External events are a factor but my reaction to them is way over the top or even exists at all because of the depression. I think the feeling is that I was somehow exaggerating how bad it felt (I wasn’t) to get attention, and now one of guilt for having alarmed or alerted friends now that 48 hours later I’m a bit ok again. And also a sort of fear that everyone will go away again.
Similar feeling regarding my therapist. She’s offered an emergency appointment rather than waiting until September but it doesn’t feel like an emergency today. Saturday evening it definitely did.
I think the potential for emergencies almost certainly counts as an emergency. It's a bit like standing on a plank and it wobbles, I think. If you try again and it doesn't wobble the next time it doesn't mean that it's okay to put all your weight on it, or that it's not worth investigating it as a priority, or that it was silly to alert people to it!
Remember that free software licenses are irrevocable - even if a vendor changes a project to a non-free license, the older versions continue to exist as free software. So while we should absolutely criticise vendors who take the work of others and make it non-free, we should also bear in mind that they gifted us the earlier versions in the first place, and cannot take that away again.
FLOSS is the product of the thousands of hours of UNPAID LABOR GIFTED TO THE FLOSS TRADEMARK HOLDERS by the community of developers, writers, designers, trainers, testers, marketers who rally around their vision.
FLOSS trademark holders would not have anything to show and even less to cash out without the unpaid labor given to them.
so no. nobody owes them shit if they decide to enforce their trademark property rights & stiff the community.
And that means MAKE BACKUPS. I have seen a project successful change license because the book in this case managed to get all repos with old versions off the internet and no old copy was to be found. Awesome book change license and noone had an old copy because "it is always there on github"
Yes, and there are examples where things went sideways; "Hudson" was a tool to do Continuous Integration testing, and Oracle trademarked "Hudson" and claimed that they owned it. Community quickly continued under "Jenkins" that we now all know and love. "Hudson" was abandoned and donated to Eclipse, and largely a forgotten name by now.
@niclas AOO's failure was obvious far longer than 2.5 years ago, and everyone on the board since the handover needs to accept responsibility for fucking up the value of the OpenOffice brand
I agree. I opposed the acceptance of OpenOffice into the Incubator in 2011, pointing out it was going to be bad for the ASF reputation. However, the Incubator PMC majority was in favor of accepting it. I am pretty sure there was powerplay with IBM behind the scenes.
"2.5 years ago" was a reference to the woke invoking cancel culture on an individual from his own (original creator) project and Apache at large, because people were upset about what he wrote on Twitter.
No, no, see, piracy is only illegal if you’re an individual. If you’re a multinational, it’s called “the cost of doing business”, and they’re banking on the (very likely) fact that they can afford way more and way better lawyers, and bribe — sorry, I mean “lobby” — way more judges and lawmakers than you can.
My depression is really beating me up. I either can’t summon the will to do anything or when I can, it’s this enormous effort and I end up crashing out on my bed afterwards in what is somewhere between exhaustion and apathy. Trying to think of good things brings me to catastrophising and tears and I seem unable to have a sensible reaction to life. I’m afraid of losing the positive relationships I have either because of consciously keeping them away or because I’m afraid a depressed wreck will be too much for them. The idea of building new connections seems like some sort of impossible dream.
I’ve had my dose of antidepressants increased and it should be having an effect by now but I don’t know if it is as I seem overall worse than I was. I’ve booked some free NHS CBT in the hope that’s useful. I’m contemplating getting back in touch with the therapist I had a couple of years ago, see if she can talk my brain into shape. I feel trapped by the depression into this kind of ever shrinking world where the only focus is not bei
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My depression is really beating me up. I either can’t summon the will to do anything or when I can, it’s this enormous effort and I end up crashing out on my bed afterwards in what is somewhere between exhaustion and apathy. Trying to think of good things brings me to catastrophising and tears and I seem unable to have a sensible reaction to life. I’m afraid of losing the positive relationships I have either because of consciously keeping them away or because I’m afraid a depressed wreck will be too much for them. The idea of building new connections seems like some sort of impossible dream.
I’ve had my dose of antidepressants increased and it should be having an effect by now but I don’t know if it is as I seem overall worse than I was. I’ve booked some free NHS CBT in the hope that’s useful. I’m contemplating getting back in touch with the therapist I had a couple of years ago, see if she can talk my brain into shape. I feel trapped by the depression into this kind of ever shrinking world where the only focus is not being depressed and if I can’t do that I just cry and sleep.
Oh, I see. It's two-way from mastodon is it? The friendica post content is presented to me here as a link. But unlike RSS, if I comment on mastodon, the replies are federated to friendica?
I was confused, expecting either the content and replies to both be embedded within my mastodon client or else neither.
@kæt It’s two-way, yes. Or rather, they’re both activitypub servers so use the same protocol to exchange messages. Dunno why the content might just be a link though. Sorry.
If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse.
@taoeffect @jomo You do not seem to understand how this works.
If you disagree with something, you need to give links, citations, PROOF.
All you are doing is calling names, with infantile drivel like "REEE" (whatever the hell that means) and "hater".
You make yourself look like a foolish angry child... but that's what you're trying to say the adults in the room are. Which makes you look *more* foolish.
@ScottStarkey @bohwaz Does anyone want a browser that silently rewrites referrer URLs, or blocks web page ads but then shows you its own unblockable ones instread?
When I gathered the courage to tell my mother that I was her daughter, not her son, she simply said: "I have suspected so, ever since you were born." "Why?" "I was cursed when expecting you. A demon would take my firstborn son." "And?" "It came, looked at you and said 'Nah'." #MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories
Obviously, being a daughter born in a son body, while apparently unacceptable by the demon, they satisfies the curse: the demon could've taken them, didn't, its loss
I have booked my Winter Flu Jab for 14th September. I'm eligible to get mine free, but most pharmacies in England also have private jabs for around £20. In my case it was quicker to book the free one via my local chemist than to wait for the GP clinic in my village.
@therivercrow I think I'll be eligible for one (vulnerable enough) but I'm furious they're available on the NHS to so few people, and that they're not available privately either.
@goatsarah A friend based near Cambridge who is senior in healthcare provisioning says UKHSA is dicking private pharmacies around about provision of the flu jab at all.
@NatalyaD @goatsarah Some years it seems to take months and months before schools get doses too. Though I think that tends to be when they've changed their mind last minute about which variants of flu to target this year.
A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred to as wide binaries in astr…
The code that generates the little diagrams on my station pages like this one is written in PostScript. Well, to be strict, it’s PS generated by a Haskell program and exactly why it’s that way is probably a question for @Ben Harris who wrote the code during one of our station collecting holidays.
Anyway, today I noticed it had stopped working. "Last OS error: Permission denied” says Ghostscript on running the code. And yet, stracing the whole thing, nowhere is an EACCES to be seen. Turns out Ghostscript has made default a “safe mode” which restricts PostScript file operations to only those files you specify in advance. You can get around it by adding -dNOSAFER to the gs command line. Fine, whatever.
But what I definitely object to is Ghostscript sounding like it’s reporting an ordinary OS-level system call error, when in fact it’s reporting its own MADE UP ERROR. They could at least have had the decency not to call it an
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The code that generates the little diagrams on my station pages like this one is written in PostScript. Well, to be strict, it’s PS generated by a Haskell program and exactly why it’s that way is probably a question for @Ben Harris who wrote the code during one of our station collecting holidays.
Anyway, today I noticed it had stopped working. "Last OS error: Permission denied” says Ghostscript on running the code. And yet, stracing the whole thing, nowhere is an EACCES to be seen. Turns out Ghostscript has made default a “safe mode” which restricts PostScript file operations to only those files you specify in advance. You can get around it by adding -dNOSAFER to the gs command line. Fine, whatever.
But what I definitely object to is Ghostscript sounding like it’s reporting an ordinary OS-level system call error, when in fact it’s reporting its own MADE UP ERROR. They could at least have had the decency not to call it an “OS error”. Grr.
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it aliases horribly on my phone, probably monospace font size beating against sampling used to show the preview. If I was more awake I could probably figure out something from the alias period, but I'm not that awake yet.
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The Royal Mail swap-out form has a box for your old stamps and no constraints on how you arrange them. So I tried to do something pretty. #SwapOut #Art?
The Eritrean was among the favourites for the men’s elite road race in Glasgow but has withdrawn after the Home Office reportedly denied him an entry visa
@Nicovel0 yep. Here it's even more blatant because his schedule is so visible - the guy competes around Europe, he's not suddenly a flight risk because he's coming to Glasgow rather than Ghent. Britain is insular, racist and petty.
What I find most ironic with the British Government and their racist policies is, the most racist members of said government, and hoping I don't come over racist myself, are non-white.
IF YOU SPONSOR SOMEONE ON PATREON: go in and check your transactions for August, and re-send them if they bounced. The “retry” link is located in your billing history. (Maybe.)
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Patreon changed its billing from California, USA to Dublin, Ireland for this month. So a lot of banks rejected the transactions as possible fraud.
This would be recoverable ... except that Patreon’s systems seem to have automatically wiped all patronage relationships with a bounced transaction!
IF YOU SPONSOR SOMEONE ON PATREON: go in and check your transactions for August, and re-send them if they bounced. The “retry” link is located in your billing history. (Maybe.) patreon.com/settings/billing
Patreon are being vague and trying to play it down. We *assume* they are trying to un-bugger their screwup. archive.is/IlNRj status.patreon.com/
Also, payments via Payoneer have been disabled for now, so that hits me personally. how annoying.
(Nobody knows why the move to Dublin. Too many chargebacks in California? Irish tax advantages? Not thinking very hard? WHO KNOWS)
UPDATE: Patreon admitted there was a fuckup! And it's up to you to fix it. Sucks to be you, eh. circumstances.run/@davidgerard…
==== > We've traced the slightly elevated decline rates back to payments infrastructure upgrades required by one of our payment processing partners. Patrons might see some payments declined while changes take effect through the payments ecosystem.
> Contact your card issuer to confirm the charge is valid and retry that card, or, if that does not work, try a different payment method
> We're deeply sorry for the inconvenience this causes creators and their patrons. ====
This doesn't address the bit where Patreon removed the patronage relationship, of course. Thanks guys.
Doesn’t it charge your debit/credit card and let you choose the currency these days? Do you get slapped with a fee just because the charges originate internationally‽
@david it's because it's an international charge. All the pledges are in USD, the charge is in USD, and the separate "VISA international service assessment" is in USD.
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@slab Ah, interesting 🤔 My billing page looks like this (I generally choose to pledge in the creator’s native currency; I don’t know why @davidgerard is in dollars): I link them to a Mastercard that doesn’t charge fees and the charges come through in the chosen currency; I didn’t imagine you could have fees for a USD charge on a USD card!
Oh totally. People have shitposted literally throughout history. The modern image of ancient rome having clean white marble is only because surfaces have worn away over time. The few areas that are preserved (like say, under 15 feet of volcanic ash) reveal that roman walls were covered in graffiti. And that graffiti SHAMES modern shitposting. imperiumromanum.pl/en/curiosit…
In 2013, during conservation work on the wall of the corridor at the Colosseum, scientists noticed a previously overlooked drawing of a phallus erection - dated to the third century CE.
and the symbol for it is “℧”!! Literally an upside down ohm!!
The worst part is, this is a better option than the conductance unit that replaced it, Siemens, because it’s symbol is “S” which looks just like “s” for seconds and also hehe semen
The change in velocity over time is acceleration, right? Well a change in acceleration over time is called jerk, got it? If you're accelerating and slam on the brakes you'll "jerk" forwards so that makes sense. Well change in jerk over time is called snap. Everything still seems OK, a snap seems more extreme than a jerk. Change in snap over time is... crackle?... Wait, what? Change is crackle over time is pop? DAMN IT, SERIOUSLY?
Thinking about heat pumps, since there's been waffle on the radio about them recently. My mental model of a heat pump is that you have unit(s) outside, and aircon unit(s) indoors which you can run either to cool or heat your preferred rooms.
However, what's being talked about on the radio seems to consist of hooking a heat pump up to replace your gas boiler and warm your radiators. Is this more effective or efficient? It seems to me that as the chances of hot weather increase you'll want to cool your house for some of the year, and this doesn't do that.
Bit of a USian perspective; for instance, IIRC talks about ducted air for HVAC rather than a water system, which makes heating & cooling simpler. Does occasionally acknowledge that UK/Europe exists though.
@Peter Ellis If I were to do this I think I’d have ducts in the loft for the upstairs rooms. Maybe the two big downstairs rooms would be more of a challenge.
@Sion [main] I think @mobbsy has underfloor heating (wet, if I remember seeing the spaghetti of tubes rightly) and described it has having horrid latency so it takes forever to get to whatever temperature you wanted.
AIUI they're basically "drill hole through wall of the room to be heated; install unit A on the outside and unit B on the inside; supply with electricity. I think they'd be an adjunct to the existing gas CH rather than a replacement.
Airvent is a utility sans with near-monoline strokes with rounded terminals.
Airvent includes pre-built and OpenType fractions, smallcaps (including smallcap numbers and a couple of smallcap symbols), sub- and super-script numbers, ballot boxes, planets, and a typical range of daggers, section symbols, currency symbols, mathematical symbols, and so on.
@mirabilos firstly, thank you for commenting, i really appreciate it. Secondly, is "brrr" good or bad? And more for interest, what font do you use that implements the `zero` OpenType feature?
taste aside (i'm pretty sure i have at least a few friends that share your opinions), it can be difficult to separate undecorated zero from /O and slashed zero from /Oslash (especially in this particular font, where i inherited the basic shapes; for example, the /zero and /O are unusually close in width).
[edit: oh, and disappointingly i don't think there is an OpenType feature for dotted zero, despite IBM implementing this option on the 3270 terminal thousands of years ago]
@Sion [main] I tried them in my early transition (also lockdown!) clotheshorse phase and thought I looked kind of cute in them. They never stayed put though.
railadvent.co.uk/2023/08/polic… This is rather amazing. As in the the 1963 robbery, they interfered with signals to get the train to stop. There was an excerpt from an incident log on the birdsite which I’ve shamelessly lifted here but I have no idea of its provenance. I’d be fascinated to read more.
@geekylou :transgender_flag: Probably not quite that well informed? Most people kind of understand signals by analogy with traffic lights (though they probably don’t understand yellow) but are probably entirely unaware of track circuits.
Font Licensing. I would be interested in exploring a somewhat permissive license that is more restrictive than SIL. In particular, i would be interested in incorporating elements of firstdonoharm.dev . What licenses have people been impressed or intrigued by? (doesn't have to have an ethical stance)
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"In this composite image I wanted to represent the position and the changing phases of the Moon above the peaks of the Cridola Group, in Italy, during a lunar month, called synodic month." -- Giorgia Hofer
TIL the soldering iron that has been sitting in a box of misc stuff in the corner of my room is about as much use for melting solder as a rod of graphite wrapped in wood
32-bit RISC-V SOC 0.69 inch OLED monochrome display USB-C PD and QC 3.0 @ 12V-20V 3A Replaceable plastic housing Removable tips Go to Store The Pinecil is a smart mini portable soldering iron with a…
Nice! I got one a short while back, need to clear space and actually relearn how to solder now I'm not in a pre-GCSE CDT class with the kind of kid who thinks power tools are for putting in other people's hands
@benjohn Power tool to USB PD is one of those things that "feels doable" to me but I wouldn't want to touch implementing with a bargepole personally: it's "just" voltage conversion and a microcontroller running the protocol which means if it doesn't exist yet it's going to, but even so
The $100 DeWalt DCB094 USB Charging Kit lets you add a bi-directional 100W USB-C PD charging port to any DeWalt 20V power tool battery in a literal snap.
@flippac sounds like a sensible mod! so far i am not in love with the conical tip, tricky to get a good thermal contact, at least when soldering a breakout board with castellated edges to smt pads
Because there are images of child sexual abuse circulating on Twitter (or whatever it’s called) and Elon Musk has actively intervened to ensure the perpetrators retain their accounts, I judge it no longer psychologically or legally safe to remain on Twitter. I’ve deleted my account.
If I were a TERF, and I wanted to ensure institutional capture of a political party to further my bigotted rubbish, I wouldn't bother going for the tories, who are already there, I might go for Labour or the greens who seem susceptible, but in the name of all that's unholy I wouldn't go for the lib dems...
How many times do we have to vote overwhelmingly in favour of trans rights at conference? How many times do we have to move next business on their poison as they misgender people from the stage?
It's a waste of everybody's time, including theirs. I wish they'd just sod off.
This toot brought to you by me having to take time out from my life to respond to yet another substanceless bullshit complaint from someone objecting to me using the word TERF.
I've had a complaint leveled against me for liking a tweet, that compared dealing with their persistent attempts to make the party anti trans, to being like trying to get rid of Bed Bugs. Apparently TERFS a are marginalised people and only Nazis compare marginalised people to insects, so I'm bringing the party into disrepute...
What I’d ideally like, either in a client app or in Friendica, is the ability to filter outgoing posts to add content warnings (abstracts in friendica-speak) or possibly prompt to add one. But maybe this is just laziness; remembering a set of things to CW is probably significantly easier than getting individuals’ pronouns right, which I regard as mandatory brain work.
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That's a pretty significant bump in global mean Daily Sea Surface Temperature this year, to say the least.
Yes, this should be on every newspaper. And importantly it should be analyzed more deeply than a daily "reminder" of or, even worse, "evidence" that #climatechange is happening (which only confirms the idea, that this is something worth discussing by now, which it isn't). climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst…
Musk is obsessed with the letter X. At some point he suddenly decided he wanted to rebrand Twitter as X just changed it to the Unicode X character i.e. uncopyrightable.
Now it turns out even the trademark is owned by arch-rival cage-fighting lizard Zuckerberg.
And they didn't even tell the owners of their HQ building they were changing the logo, so police got called on the signage engineers replacing it.
Billionaire Elon Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated legally: companies including Meta (META.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) already have intellectual property rights to the same letter.
Kevin Marks
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •I can read people's thoughts.
Using an ancient technology, handed down over millennia, improved and refined along the way, I am able to read people's thoughts. And not just people nearby, or people I know. I can even read dead people's thoughts.
This gives me a great deal of power and knowledge - I can learn from their lives, their experiences, their dreams and fears, their insights and imaginings.
I can read people's thoughts.
epeus.blogspot.comErin O'Riordan
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •zendao42
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •ursuula
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •“literal magic” 😂
ISeeWhatYouDidThere.gif (:
Lisa Hay
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •SpeedStar
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •I feel sorry for the people that don't believe in magic.
They are the one who is missing out.
Salgood Sam aka Max Douglas
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •Tales from Absurdia
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •Sarah Marie Nicolosi
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •Grapeshot
in reply to Neil Gaiman • • •you know what else is magic?
Getting in your climate controlled coach, driving to somewhere 40 miles away and arriving about a half hour later, and all the while you listened to a symphony played by a 100 piece orchestra.
I admit it's not as magical as being moved by words written someone 1000s of miles away or centuries in the past, but it is pretty damn good nonetheless.