@ajlanes @Cassandra There are a load of golf courses in Tucson too - though I believe they're required to water them with some variety of waste water at least.
@jugglerchris @Cassandra US suburbia is mad. It’s practically designed to make people live so far from each other and anything else that they can only be dependent on cars.
So the background here is that I referred to TERFs as pests that are particularly recalcitrant, like pubic lice or bedbugs.
And various people liked the post, including some who are members or a UK political party.
And some pubic louse with nothing better to do is complaining about them because they liked my post.
And said pubic louse got told to go piss into the wind by the complaints process.
So instead of taking the hint that everyone hates them and all their bullshit works, they set out to prove me right by just being UTTERLY FUCKING UNABLE TO JUST PISS OFF AND LEAVE PEOPLE IN PEACE.
I’m sure the irony of this situation is lost on them. Silly fucker.
She must really hate it that I resigned from said party and then emigrated to get away from the likes of her and their bullshit, and as a result there is nothing they can do to get at me other than bother my friends.
I mean, I am annoyed on behalf of my friends, but I also appear to have triple residency now: Portugal, the UK, and rent-free in their heads.
What is the deal with Kettle Chips? They act like they’re a premium brand, but they’re actually very bad crisps with a relentlessly disappointing taste.
It’s the way they try to make out that they’re lovingly hand made by artisans dropping slices of potato one by one into a cauldron with a skimmer which gets me. When they say ‘hand made’, the hand will press the button which lowers a basket of 20kg of potato into a vat for a precisely timed period.
Sarah Ditum and Louise Mensch turned up in Bluesky, made one introduction post each, and then there is just page after page after page, full of replies telling them to fuck off.
And it's utterly glorious to behold. Gives me a bit of hope for humanity.
Oh, this is funky! Reading a book with the multi focal contact lenses in. If I close one eye, the page has blurred and sharp bits in a chessboard type pattern. If I open both, the whole thing is sharp.
@Rachel Lawson Yeah. It’s different to glasses where you can look around to change which bit you get. With contacts, they move with your eye, so, looking around makes no difference. You get distance vision in some bits and close vision in others. After a while, the brain sorts this out.
Oh I see, so the lens varies in a pattern over its surface and just relies on binocular vision and your brain to sort it all out? That’s absurdly clever (and suggests these contacts wouldn’t work for me). I think when I first saw you describe this I assumed the chessboard was an artefact of your brain rather than of the lens. (Like the weird kaleidoscope patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard.)
I mean, Hanlon's Razor is a thing, but someone who was actually setting out to destroy Twitter would likely be behaving indistinguishably from Space Karen right now. Just saying.
@kianryan I suppose therein lies a problem. While I don’t agree with much of anything Twitter does these days, I can kinda understand the idea that businesses using the platform to offer customer support while not paying does seem like a thing that should have been monetized. There are so many services out there monetizing that exact functionality elsewhere on the web.
@kianryan "As per Musk, the apparent big catch is that verified users only make money off of other verified users, creating what amounts to the combination of an MLM and conspiratorial echo chamber."
@cykonot @kianryan that’s kinda the point I guess. The business should be expecting to bear the cost of that interaction. The fact Twitter didn’t seek to monetize B2C interactions is part of why they’re where they are right now. They never grew the platform into a true business tool and got bought out by a Aparteid Clyde
people can compensate for a fair amount of retinal damage without being aware of it. E.g. I seem to have a fairly large blank spot in the right visual field of my right eye & I cannot make myself consciously aware of it. I only know it's there because of stuff suddenly becoming visible (like moving cars <AHEM/>) that I ought damn well have seen.
Expect the orca people will be along to explain about how he was a billionaire and deserved it any moment now.
Seriously, I think the main thing determining whether dolphins (including orcas) attack humans is whether they think they can get away with it. Nasty little twats, they are. asahi.com/ajw/articles/1495829…
Weather's been bloody awful though so I haven't been able to try them out on the bike, which is why I bought them. Need to see the road *and* my GPS device.
@Jason Bennett-Brown So I'm short sighted but also old as fuck. I need correction for driving, but with distance correction I can't read. My uncorrected reading vision is perfect.
As a result, I mostly don't wear the contacts at all.
But these, I think I will wear. I can see what I'm typing just fine.. I can see the horizon. It's like being 20 again!
I have varifocal glasses but the temptation to take them off when reading text is too strong. I guess multifocal contacts remove that temptation at least.
@Sarah Brown Multifocal (glasses) make a huge difference. I started needing reading glasses, but eventually had to take them on and off so often that my eyes couldn't catch up. I can still drive safely without them, but barely read a book. Now with these, I'm wearing them all the time. It took a while (a month or so) to get used to but I wouldn't want to be without them.
@Maria Karlsen so I was mostly just using distance glasses to drive, and nothing to read. It-s easy to take driving glasses off, and I don't mind the world being blurred.
But obviously that's harder to do with contacts. These, however, seem like a much better solution.
@Tobias I had to visit an optician (not sure if that's the right term in English) for mine. That included getting my eyes checked to get the right strength and also to make sure there wasn't any medical condition causing my problems.
Seminal "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" crap study, largely determined to be bullshit but often used as justification to abuse trans kids withdrawn on account of how it's nonsense: medscape.com/s/viewarticle/992…
convenient how the headline omits the fact that it's being withdrawn for violating standards of informed consent. Or that those were far from the only criticisms. No, it's all just "backlash."🙄
Shoutout to places which have 1 “free from” sandwich in their entire range, and it’s lactose free vegan salad on gluten free bread because that ticks all the “food intolerance” boxes in one go.
And by “shoutout”, I mean “fuck you”.
You wonder why nobody is buying your dismal sadness cardboard. It’s because gluten intolerant people like chicken as well (for example)
Being a vegetarian who's gluten and lactose intolerant, I can't believe they've actually made a sandwich I can eat! (Provided there's no vinegar-based dressing on the salad... nor tomatoes, nor onion... the list goes on)
@Kate Watson The shop worker was like, "that's the only one we have"
Probably wondering why they never sell any of them.
"Oh, we barely stock gluten free sandwiches because we tried sticking three pairs of cardboard with some dismal lettuce between them on a shelf and nobody bought them, so we assumed there's no demand"
@Alfred Chow - Maker of Things Although I tend to steer clear of stalls because, IME, they typically take no precautions against cross contamination. Learned that the hard way.
Looking like Bluesky is basically over. Jack Dorsey will not budge from the ideological position that content moderation is something that can be done as an afterthought with regexps.
It maybe worked well enough to keep the site viable as long as the number of bad actors was tiny. It clearly doesn’t work any more.
“I tried the fediverse and didn’t follow anyone and it sucked, so I stopped and went back to Twitter again.”
These people would have hated Twitter circa 2008 when it had pretty much exactly the same issue.
But that’s the point of social media: to find likeminded people with common interests. Somewhere along the line that changed into social media being a thing that tells you what you think, and what you should be liking.
That’s easy, but it’s mental refined sugar. It’s just incredibly crap for you.
If you want interesting, fun and stimulating stuff, follow interesting, fun and stimulating people.
@Kacey Yeah. Friendica is very much my second go at Fedi too, and it works out much better for me. It's a seriously underrated bit of software, and it's always nice to see the logo pop up next to comments 😊
I mostly entirely used twitter via 3rd party apps till He Who Should Not Be Named killed them. Masto is *entirely* the same as all the twitter I ever used 🤷♀️
@zimowski Z, you've been rude to everyone in this entire thread. That is not welcome here, & on Twitter I would have blocked you in an instant. (And I will here, if you respond w rudeness to me.)
However, on the chance you are genuinely asking in good faith, the other way to find people is to put a hashtag in the search box - #Taiga, #Java, a favourite band, or whatever you are interested in. It will help you find people w common interests whom you may wish to follow.
I can’t use oven cleaner in my 1980s era miele. Supposedly the surface is catalytic. All I know is it works great at keeping the junk off. Sadly, I can’t get new door gaskets, so I’ve got may a couple more years until I need to learn how to vulcanize rubber or something to make new ones
@josephholsten A cerium-based one? How exciting! Cerium is one of those slacker elements when it comes to applications and people always say "self-cleaning ovens" as if that's sufficient justification to occupy a slot in the periodic table. I've known a few folk with self-cleaning ovens and they've never been a cerium catalytic one.
@josephholsten The periodic table is at a wonderful point at the moment when period seven is finished. So it looks lovely.
I definitely think the pope of chemistry needs to say to the elements "okay, we're done" the way kids are dispersed at the end of a party when everyone's getting tired and silly.
(A genuine island of stability would be amazing, and I'd say "game on" if anything happened to have a half-life of >1s, say).
@kæt @Joseph Holsten Isn’t the issue with the island of stability that we have almost certainly passed it, but can’t create the right isotopes because neutrons?
@josephholsten Yes, as I understand it that's right. No way yet of getting enough neutrons in there. If someone manages that, I'll definitely take a grainy photo of that element in a suit and tie and make it Periodic Table employee of the month. At the moment I just feel bad like the way your heart sometimes sinks when a band says "here's some new material" and I know I *should* be enthusiastic.
@Alexandra Lanes @Joseph Holsten @kæt It may be. The issue is that we can't make transplutonic elements with sensible numbers of neutrons, so can't verify experimentally.
@sparrowsion @josephholsten It's the ones at Z=114 that I've heard called the island of stability most often, but presumably there are other shells up there somewhere. As a chemist at heart it would be wonderful to make something with an actual ground state g-electron though.
Heh. You're not alone, and it's not just online. For the past month and a half, until today, I've been working with a counselor that is not experienced in ADHD, and some of her advice was to think less because our "skull is only large enough to keep so much in our heads" and "you know, ADHD wasn't even a thing until 35 years ago". And a lot of the online stuff I've seen is focused on crises-level things. Having conversations with diagnosed people has helped me the most.
@Kris Hardy 🧐 I don’t feel in a crisis to be honest. I’d quite appreciate the ability to manage to actually be useful during the actual day, and not lie awake at 2am having bilingual arguments with myself in my head and reading weird shit on the internet while I should be sleeping.
And not getting weirdly defensive when my partner suggests minor changes to plans and stuff.
But apart from that, and the sudden need to clean the oven and install a fresh raspberry Pi (did you know they’ve broken the Docker install packages?), at weird times, it’s all good.
Oh, and not picking fights on the internet, but I’m getting better at that.
Oh yes! I do that too. When you need your brain to go up a few floors from "sludge" to "tired".
The only thing with caffeine for me, I think, is keeping the differential there, separating the land from the water etc, and not letting my just general consumption rise to the point of tolerance.
Most advice out there on *when* / *which* activities need it is total nonsense as I'm guessing you've found.
That's good. Crises suck. I read ADHD 2.0 and it helped me understand a bit of what was going on. I also expect that each person's path is different, and what works for one doesn't necessarily work for another.
David Tennant, of Dr Who fame, apparently said some pro trans things and now the TERFs are going after him on Twitter. His response is that he isn't worried because, and I quote, "I'll be fine, Terfs can't climb stairs"
I want that on a T-shirt. No, I NEED that on a T-shirt!
ETA: Apparently it was a parody account that said the stairs line. I still want it on a T-shirt.
I think there's a danger of confusing different types of intelligence and awareness. Humans are quite clearly as a collective super-smart intellectually in terms of our ability to creatively outwit other species and manipulate our environment. We mostly don't seem to have the type of intelligence, at least in our current mode of operating, to regulate that impulse that prevents us from going way too far with our 'advantage' and destroying everything.
It's not totally unique to humans, there have been monkeys that have also been observed overfishing their environment, but it's rare. That's not including the cases where we've set other species up to cause harm by transplanting them somewhere else.
Tennant didn’t say the line, but he is pretty awesome on trans issues. The whole thing exploded because of a t-shirt he was wearing. In addition, he’s been wearing a nonbinary pride pin to all his public appearances for some time, apparently in support of one of his kids.
Weird thing last night. Yesterday afternoon, I did an advocated SUP lesson and the instructor really got me working my core muscles.
Then in the evening win the way back, we stopped at Pizza Express at Cobham services on the M25. I was prepared to spend the rest of the trip back in pain, because I pretty much always get abdominal pain after eating a meal.
But it didn't hurt. I felt full, but without pain, and this is a vanishingly rare experience for me. Eating = pain. It's always been like that, and I basically expect it.
Except not last night.
Meanwhile this morning, I have massive stiffness in my abdominal muscles.
@Uraael I am gluten intolerant (not coeliac), so I avoid that, but that was because of extra-intestinal stuff (if I eat gluten, I get rheumatoid arthritis. if I don't, I don't).
I have tried elimination diets. I know my worst trigger foods, but ultimately FOOD = PAIN, and there appears to be nothing I can do about it.
Exercising beforehand won't work. I'll just opt for hypoglycaemia as the path of least resistance.
That’s an interesting observation. I have mild IBS as part of the bundle of fun that is fibromyalgia, and tai chi seems to have lessened the severity of it.
Whilst tai chi is very core-focused, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as high impact as your SUP session.
@Sarah Brown From the attached image, "God grant me the serenity to accept things change, to change I cannot courage the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." 🤔
British aircraft carrier heading out to sea from Portsmouth. It’s huge, and the engines are making a bass throbbing sound that’s penetrating my skull from a few hundred metres away. Hope shit isn’t kicking off.
Musing on the number of men with high profile careers getting brought low by sex scandals.
I'm wondering if some of them, the ones who value their career, might consider castration? Used to be a lot more popular for high powered career gentlemen, but has fallen out of fashion of late.
Honestly, as a satisfied customer, I rate it very highly.
@tiddy roosevelt If the orcas used computers, they would absolutely be using Windows, and they’d be using it to “ironically” post Nazi memes on Threads.
I spent three days on a 40-footer early last month. The toilet packed up in the first hour or so. Never have I been so glad to get to dry land and pub for a pint & a poo.
@Dr David Mills Anchor or heave-to, trail a line with a fender on the end. Get in the sea. Shit. Use sea to clean. Exit sea. 10 seconds in heads shower to remove salt. Job (lol) done.
If in UK waters, all you are doing is putting your shit with all the other shit.
Dear Wightlink Ferry helms: just because a sailing boat is almost certainly going to get out of your way if you make like you’re going to ram it, doesn’t mean you should.
The word "Wightlink" wandered around Sarah's mind lin search of something to connect with. Fifteen seconds later she was out of the quarterberth and lying in the Solent in front of a small ferry.
So, in the future, computers will be really popular. However, you will be having to get software from the “Git Hub”, there are Nazis everywhere, and the Russians will be trying to destroy society using something called “Threads”.
Oh, but you’ll finally be able to solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute.
As a Brit the name "GitHub" will never stop being amusing to me. (Git being British slang for a nasty, unpleasant person, generally a man.) So I'm like "GitHub? Sounds like some pubs I know, amirite?"
@Eve (?), she/her (?) Boat is currently on south coast of England. Planning to bring her to Portugal later this year. She’s rated for up to 200 nautical miles offshore. You COULD cross an ocean in her, but you wouldn’t want to.
She has over 950kg of iron ballast in the keel to stop her tilting over when sailing whilst it would be possible, you’d need a very strong anchor point to do it and it wouldn’t be kind to the standing rigging.
Dropping the mast is another possibiiity but that’s complicated. Easier to climb it.
This is a 50p that was minted to celebrate the UK joining what became the EU. It was minted in my birth year, and my mum gave it to me shortly before she died of cancer in 2021. It is one of my most treasured possessions.
It has 12 hands linked in a circle to symbolise the then 12 countries of the European Community. One of them is smaller, representing the hand of Queen Elizabeth II.
Sarah Brown
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Brian Dear
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Some history:
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Simon Waldman
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Kacey
in reply to Simon Waldman • • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Chris Emerson
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • • •Chris Emerson
in reply to Chris Emerson • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Chris Emerson • •@Chris Emerson @Alexandra Lanes @Cassandra I once changed planes at phoenix.
The view of the suburbs coming in to land made me despair of there being any future for humanity.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • •@Alexandra Lanes @Cassandra @Chris Emerson The suburbia around Phoenix is covered, and I mean covered, in golf courses.
How long has it been since the Colorado reached the sea?