Spoilers for Fallout and Silo

Ok. Binged Fallout. Never played the game.

But it’s basically Silo, if Silo didn’t take itself seriously, and also there’s no nuclear war in Silo, and everybody outside is dead in Silo (humans anyway, the rest of the ecosystem is fine as long as it stays away from Fulton County, Georgia).

And Silo is set in our future, not some 1950s retro future.

But other than that, same idea. I guess Silo was influenced by the game. It’s very much “what if Fallout, but hard sci-fi?”

in reply to Sarah Brown

Spoilers for Fallout and Silo

Sensitive content

UK new builds: the builders will tell you that the toilet flushes are “European style” to save water.

This is a lie. I live in two new build flats. One in Portugal and one in England. The toilets they put in in UK new builds are just shit at flushing. The ones in Portugal flush properly.

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UK, mention of depression

I think I’ve put my finger on what coming back to the UK feels like. If an actual nation state could be suffering from clinical depression, this is what it would look like: Everything is slowly going to shit; the country seems to see no future for itself; it’s making decision after decision that is self neglect bordering on self harm; quite possibly the most unpopular government to be removed by democratic vote rather than bloodshed is about to lose an election by a cataclysmic margin, and when the opposition, who are set to clean up, are asked what they’re going to do differently, the answer is a shrug followed by, “nothing”.

And people here more or less accept it, because boiling frogs and suchlike, but then you go elsewhere (no, America, not you, sit back down), and it’s like the colour returns to the world and you didn’t even realise it was missing.

Famous American murderer from the telly, O J Simpson, has been in the news recently for dying. Here are some lesser known facts about him:

O J was known by his fans as "The Juice". This is because his full name was Orangejuice Jorangejuice Simpson.

King Edward VIII of England was forced to resign because he wanted to marry him.

In addition to being good at rugby and murder, O J was also the first man on mars.

He was acquitted after his lawyer, who was one of the Cardasians from Star Trek, convinced the jury that there were five lights.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

That's pop psychology at its worst.

Yes, there is still some development in "the brain" up to the age of 25, but it's mostly to do with the areas of the brain that deal with impulse decision making. The areas of the brain that deal with considered decision making are more or less fully developed at 15.

And despite how things look in transphobic fantasy-land, nobody is transitioning on a whim.

Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.

The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.

This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.

If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.

We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.

As you were.

Unknown parent

glitchsoc - Link to source

kæt

@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:

1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.

2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.

The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.

The public don''t need to "come round".

People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.

Apropos of a conversation elsewhere c, I’ve always been given the creeps by “Jonathan Pie”. It’s always struck me as “manufactured outrage click bait culture for left wing people who think they’re too clever to fall for that.”

The sceptics in the pub crowd had the same sort of attitude and it made them really really easy marks for the alt right to use as useful idiots in their culture war.

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Sarah Brown

@Ghost of Hope I think that’s a stress timed/syllable timed distinction more than anything else (stress timed languages tend to swallow syllables to make them fit, so if you don’t know to listen for the tonic syllables it’s really hard to get the words).

Curiously Brazilian Portuguese is syllable timed, which is the biggest difference. That I wouldn’t mind. What made my ears bleed was rendering all the consonants as “tch”.

in reply to Alan Braggins

@Alan Braggins there are things they can do about the bone. I needed bone regeneration because it was 4 years since the tooth was pulled. My surgeon specialises in it, and the X-rays when he put the implant in (covered over with gum) and then 4 months later, were quite different. The first showed an implant protruding into the soft tissue between the jaw and sinus, barely held in place. The second showed the same implant utterly surrounded by brand new bone.

It might be worth talking to someone who specialises in it. We get a lot of dental tourism here in the Algarve because it’s cheaper but you’re still getting top notch EU trained doctors and surgeons (mine studied in London and spent the start of his career doing surgery for the NHS before returning home to Portugal and a decent climate).

What I would have liked to have learned in English classes at school:

  • Grammar.
  • The history of how the language evolved from one with a rich conjugation and case system into the vastly structurally simpler one we have now.
  • Points of convergence and divergence with other languages, closely related or not. How did that happen?
  • How to speak and write beautifully and precisely with rhetorical flourishes if needed

What I actually learned in English classes at school:

  • Thomas Hardy really hated women.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

When I was at school English language lessons were firmly separated from English Literature, and it wasn’t until English language A Level (which I didn’t do) that you got the really interesting linguistics stuff. It was always a running joke at the time that in 11–16 education one learned most of one’s proper English grammar from doing foreign languages.

!Friendica Support Hi all.

Running via Docker behind nginx proxy manager. Got the three containers shown.

The UI is a bit sluggish. In particular, it takes forever for the notifications to show up after doing pretty much anything.

So my question is, is there anything stopping me spinning up another UI or cron container on another machine and trying to parallelise things a bit? Is there anything special I have to do to enable that?

TIA

in reply to Michael 🇺🇦

@Michael Vogel Should note in case it's not clear, the container called "friendica-cron" is actually running the daemon, starting with this script:

#!/bin/sh
trap "break;exit" HUP INT TERM

while [ ! -f /var/www/html/bin/daemon.php ]; do
  sleep 1
done

echo "Waiting for MySQL $MYSQL_HOST initialization..."
if php /var/www/html/bin/wait-for-connection "$MYSQL_HOST" "${MYSQL_PORT:-3306}" 300; then
  sh /setup_msmtp.sh
  exec gosu www-data:www-data tini -- php /var/www/html/bin/daemon.php -f start
else
  echo "[ERROR] Waited 300 seconds, no response" >&2
fi

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in reply to Sarah Brown

One of these devices is 24 years old and still mostly operational, so I guess not. It helps that two of them have a rotary dial used to set the clock. The third (which happens to be the oven) has that stupid short capacitive tap to adjust by a minute, medium hold to start racing through many 10-minute increments per second kind of scheme. On the other hand, the cooktop that’s part of the same physical device goes through its 17 regular power levels at only 2 per second.
in reply to Sarah Brown

The other thing that really marks this out as coming from a US perspective is the nature of the class system on display in this dystopia. There are basically 3 classes: CEO oligarch gods, middle management corporate drones in indentured servitude desperately trying to afford medical care from the company store, and the proles, who basically sell their bodies for medical research.

Christians: This Friday we celebrate!

Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?

Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.

Non Christians: You celebrate that?

Christians: There are sound theological reasons.

Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.

Christians: We call it “Good Friday”

Non Christians: …

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I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.

And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.

It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.

And then they came for the rest of you.

They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.

Maybe one day people will learn.

in reply to Sarah Brown

So many culture shocks, especially with financial stuff.
I arrived in '96 and the first thing my bank did after opening an account was to issue me a cheque book. The last time I'd seen a cheque in Germany was at least 10 years prior...
Later that year I wanted to transfer money to someone (I can't remember the reason) so went to my bank and they told me that was only possible if they had an account with the same bank... Bank transfers had been the standard in Germany since the 60s.
in reply to Ozzy

@Ozzy My UK bank keeps asking me, “what’s online banking like in Portugal compared to ours?”, presumably expecting effusive praise about their app, and their face falls when I say, “it’s at least a decade ahead of anything you have”.

So many Brits think they’re living in high tech utopia, when actually it’s backwards as hell in so many ways.

@Ozzy

BOLA be like, “I saw geese break someone’s arm”

Did you though?

Geese cheat code: they’re bullshitting. Make it clear that you know this and they will fuck off. Run at them screaming “Dinner!” and flap your arms. They fuck off incredibly quickly.

If that doesn’t work, grab the squawky cunt by the neck and practice Olympic hammer throwing. It’s funny, and it won’t give you shit again.

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