I never had a Livejournal account, but during the Golden Age of Blogging some of my favorite bloggers were on Livejournal. I remember one by the name of Brad (forgot last name) who referred to his father as the Man of Concrete. And there was a student of biomedical engineering at WSU (not Wayne State, the WSU down in Ohio), who wrote of the struggles to get disability accommodations at school, and get through the math weeder courses. So many great blogs. LJ was the greasy kids stuff platform before Tumblr took over that niche. I was too old for Livejournal, but all the coolest people were there.
Since I was a kid, I have had occasional outbreaks of eczema in my ear canals. It baffled ENT for years: they had no idea why the “infection” wouldn’t respond to anything they tried (they never tried corticosteroids).
Anyway, it’s doing it again, and it HURTS LIKE FUCK.
(I had to figure out if was eczema myself. No medical professional has ever done anything other than give me stuff to treat an ear infection, which I don’t have, and so never works).
This is Britain in a nutshell. Everybody appoints their mates to a closed shop. They don’t think what they’re doing is corruption. mas.to/@sabret00the/1100017884…
I think the alt text isn’t working on friendica, but even getting the image to upload and appear in the post is more than any other client has managed.
Today on “Immigrants who call themselves ex-pats do the stupidest things”:
“I sent my laptop, which I bought in the UK and brought to Portugal, for repair in the UK, then had them ship it to Portugal. Now customs are holding it, saying import duty is due. How do I challenge this as I already paid tax in the UK?”
So you want to 1. Admit to tax evasion from the first time you imported it without declaring it, and 2. Throw a strop to try and get away with tax evasion again?
Do let us know how that goes for you, won’t you?
#Brexit: Fucking around and finding out since 2016.
I was thinking "But maybe they took it to Portugal the first time before Brexit" and then remembered most folk don't get the length of use of laptops I do
@geekylou :transgender_flag: Yes. If you are going to do this, you smuggle it in hand luggage. They know it happens. We know they know it happens. They know we know. A certain amount is tolerated.
But it seems other countries' taxes don't apply to Mr Brexional Exceptional.
I’ll never understand why humidity is so high in Portugal even when it doesn’t rain and so low here where it rains all the time. Mold and damage caused by humidity is way too common.
Jess Phillips, MP, someone many trans people regard as a transphobe, reads out a list of murdered women in the House of Commons every year. This year she included Brianna Ghey, a murdered trans girl.
Her own side has turned on here for being insufficiently hateful. Check out the replies to this tweet, but don’t reply: never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.
With apologies to the heterosexuals reading, I’ve been browsing relationship advice on Reddit and a constant refrain is women complaining that their boyfriends won’t propose.
I do not watt your app. I realise I may need your app to set things up, but after that I never want to open your app again. I have many gizmos and they all have apps. I don't care about your "dashboard", I don't want to set up an account, you can keep your "cloud", I don't want to import my data. I do not live in your app. I do not want to be reminded of your app's existence. If I have to use your app beyond 5 minutes of initial setup, you have failed.
Stop trying to make me use your app. I do not want to use your fucking app. Most of you can't program for shit anyway. Just set the gizmo up and fuck the fuck off.
I wonder if there’s any point in those of us in Europe occasionally connecting to VPNs in the US red states and googling abortion pills. Poison the well a bit.
This is a beautifully concise statement about what’s wrong with “algorithmically driven” social media.
My introduction to social media, at least in its web form (ie I’m not counting Usenet) was LiveJournal, because I was searching for stuff early in transition and that’s where the info was.
The info was there because the community was there. I made a lot of friends. Some really really good ones. LiveJournal changed my life, profoundly, and for the better.
And then we were lured away by Twitter and Facebook. Slick, sexy, and almost entirely bereft of the community that LiveJournal encouraged. Facebook has it a bit, which is why I’m still there.
This is why I have high hopes for the Fediverse, and particularly platforms like Friendica, which is very LiveJournal like in many ways (I think that Mastodon in particular is slightly missing the point, watering down the community aspect in an attempt to replicate Twitter, but Mastodon is not the Fediverse). I want that sense of community back.
And yeah, this is a long
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This is a beautifully concise statement about what’s wrong with “algorithmically driven” social media.
My introduction to social media, at least in its web form (ie I’m not counting Usenet) was LiveJournal, because I was searching for stuff early in transition and that’s where the info was.
The info was there because the community was there. I made a lot of friends. Some really really good ones. LiveJournal changed my life, profoundly, and for the better.
And then we were lured away by Twitter and Facebook. Slick, sexy, and almost entirely bereft of the community that LiveJournal encouraged. Facebook has it a bit, which is why I’m still there.
This is why I have high hopes for the Fediverse, and particularly platforms like Friendica, which is very LiveJournal like in many ways (I think that Mastodon in particular is slightly missing the point, watering down the community aspect in an attempt to replicate Twitter, but Mastodon is not the Fediverse). I want that sense of community back.
And yeah, this is a long form list that includes formatting and an embedded quote. I know Mastodon will mess it up because it doesn’t play nice with non-Mastodon Fediverse content. I think it’s time Mastodon started playing nice with extra-Mastodon federated content.
After all, we’re trying to build community here, aren’t we?
It's not social media when talking to your friends is a gamble.
If you're saying something for friends to see, and the algorithm hides what you're saying because it assumes that what you say is "not relevant" to your friends' interests, that is *not* social media.
The problem right here is that we call platforms designed to help people find each other and make connections, and platforms designed to make people fight each other for entertainment and advertising revenue the same thing.
The great con is that Twitter and co want you to think they’re in the same “feel good, community and friendship” business that LiveJournal and things like it were in.
And they just aren’t. Even if you are only using them to talk to your friends, they will still try to make you pick fights.
I am, frankly, amazed that the Tories have allowed the power of the Financial Services Ombudsman to continue, but they have, so it would be a glaring omission if I didn't at least try and use it to shove a red hot poker up EE's arse.
(specifically, them treating the finance agreement for the phone and network access as an indivisible unit makes their inflationary price increase effectively a punitive interest rate increase on the phone's finance rate).
I'm not at all sure the FSO will side with me here, but if you don't ask, you don't get.
Dear Phone Provider I haven't used as much data or made as many calls as I expected to, therefore I am reducing my monthly direct debit by 15%! I'm sure they'll be quoting the agreement you made when you signed the contract then.
EE just emailed me. They're putting my UK phone contract up by 15% because "inflation". Apparently it's got so much more expensive for cell towers to just ... sit there and stuff.
Oh, wait, no, it's because energy is more expensive because the price of wind and sunlight has gone up.
What we are seeing is not inflation. Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers.
Not satisfied with hoarding nearly all the wealth, the billionaire class want ALL of it. They want an entire population of, well, serfs basically. They're trying to turn the whole of western civilisation into one huge company store, and the idea that there are still people who can afford to live comfortable lives is profoundly offensive to them.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning. History tells us that there always is when the ruling classes think they can get away with this crap.
So here's the thing. I bought by phone through them. The price I'm paying each month therefore is part the cost of the phone, part the cost of the network.
There is no feasible world in which the price of the phone has gone up, but they're treating it as a single entity.
@Zoe O'Connell spotted this. Might be time to chat to the regulator.
@Keith Edkins🔶🇪🇺 🇺🇦🏳️🌈 Yup. This is exactly the argument I intend to make to the Financial Services Ombudsman. They even call my contract a finance agreement.
@geekylou :transgender_flag: @Zoe O'Connell So I've just asked them for an itemised bill of the financial agreement. They cannot provide one. I have raised a complaint. They have 8 weeks to respond to it. I have marked that in my calendar.
We shall see what happens, but I suspect the next step involves the financial services ombudsman.
that reminds me. Time to make my annual phone call to them, pretend I’m leaving and get my tariff lowered again (one reason I’m sim-only)
Recommend trying that if you’re not tied to a handset. You can usually haggle down a decent amount. Find a similar product with any other UK network and give ‘em a call.
By the way, when you say "Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers" - this is true - but it still leads to inflation, at least as the central banks define it (and they're the ones raising rates in response). So-called "greedflation" is just as real as the wage-price spiral that everyone gets so worked up about. It's just that price increases are driven by corporate profits rather than higher wages.
Amazon doing its “you just bought this thing that is not a consumable and you will almost certainly never need to buy again, why not buy more?” thing again.
We really need to stop calling computers misusing probability “AI” and start calling it what it is: artificial stupidity.
I never saw Amazon doing anything even slightly related to AI.
Amazon is just a big American company selling stuff under the market value in order to bankrupt the existing webshops. We don't need Amazon on this side of the pond ...
Much as I loved to visit Spain, there was something intensely disappointing going on. They seem to be building US-style suburban sprawl as fast as they possibly can, having learned none of the very obvious lessons about why that’s a terrible idea.
And they are building vast amounts of new car infrastructure without EV charging, at all. Like, guys, it’s gonna be illegal to sell new internal combustion cars in just over six years. Read the room.
Driving through Andalusia was like driving through bits of the US southwest, and not in a flattering way.
It was a relief to cross the Guadiana back into Portugal; the misguided tribute act to Arizona was getting a bit much.
Have rather enjoyed my time in Malaga. Heading home in the morning. Gonna try and do it on a single charge stop. Had amazing gluten free tacos at a local cafe today. Nice place. Will visit again.
In wholly surprising news, a man who grew up benefiting from Apartheid has come to the support of someone who has just torpedoed his own life’s work by doing a massive racism.
Andalusia seems to have fallen into the trap of building US style sprawl. Half of southern Spain feels like it’s been eaten by trading estates, and that’s really sad.
This is the problem of the IT industry writ large: there are small numbers of people who understand the system and can work out problems, and then large numbers of people who are, for want of a better description, cargo cultists.
I’m not talking about googling specifics on Stack Overflow here, that’s fine as long as you still have the understanding and the results you get aren’t just treated as magic runes.
But too many people don’t want to go to the effort of just buying a goddam book and fucking reading it.
There are two types of #EV chargers: AC and DC. The DC ones are generally known as “rapid chargers” and are the EV equivalent of filling stations, delivering a lot of charge in a short time. You use these to extend range on a long trip.
The AC chargers are what everyone uses at home, overnight, to slowly charge their car at a much lower power level. These stress the battery a lot less and also, the power grid can cope with them easily, which is harder with the beefier DC rapid chargers.
But there are also public AC chargers. These are generally used if you’re staying somewhere for several hours, as is the case here where I left my car overnight in Malaga, or by plug in hybrid owners who, for some reason, have to show the world that they can go three more metres before their engine comes on after leaving the supermarket 🤷🏻♀️👍🏻
I know it's a bullshit fountain. If you want info, it will give you crap and sound really authoritative while doing it.
But I just felt like talking to someone about how I miss my mum. She died of cancer in December 2021, and it's the middle of the night now, so I talked to ChatGPT about her.
Cis people on social media say the stupidest shit about “sex and gender”.
My god, you’d think that people with opinions that poorly developed would have the sense to keep quiet about them, rather than show the world how little they’ve actually considered them while being confidently incorrect, but apparently not.
Dear god. After multiple posts with paragraph after paragraph of cherry picked bullshit about how I’m “really male”, random internet TERF who I will never meet says, “sex isn’t relevant to how I address people”.
The simple fact is this: if your classification system of sex results in you deciding that some women are not women, then the problem is your classification system, not reality.
Anna Wilson 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •oh hm.
Good sales pitch.
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