These are...not optimistic times for most Americans. Across the world, the dangers of climate change and the terror of creeping authoritarianism present an increasing danger to all of us.
Εμμηνόπαυση (Eminopause) was the Greek word for menopause, so, while I don’t know what the -archy word be, but one would clearly refer to the rulers as “Your Eminence”
You might enjoy the novel The Gate To Women's Country, by Sherri S Tepper. Very cool take on such a government in post-apocalyptic future. No idea what its called tho. Love this book!
New British House of Lords appointments announced. UK politics is just a contest to see who can run the most transparently nihilistic grift and still get cushy life tenure in Westminster.
There needs to be a way to restrict the number of political peers who can sit in the Lords at a time. Either they can elect some number of their own body similar to the hereditary peers or have a first-come-first-served each day to allow them in.
The subject matter experts are useful, they help beat legislation into some sort of usable shape. That's the Lords serving a useful function.
One begins to fully appreciate why "May you live in interesting times" is a curse. I think the hope this time is that things will crash and burn so badly in the next couple of years that the whole thing is definitively resolved. Or that all the campaign promises are kept and we really do get lower egg prices.
Useful questions that in-universe characters could ask:
What kills the people sent out to clean?
Why, despite us clearly having been down here a very long time, does it seem that everyone sent out to clean dies after about the same amount of time? Why is the threat not diminishing over time?
Why were these very well stocked silos ready and waiting and apparently very well matched to the threat outside? (In the books, Lukas does ask this question and gets an answer, and the answer is correct but incomplete).
This is not mentioned in the books, but I’m assuming the secret library of the before times that IT has does not mention climate change. The vault library probably does, but if IT knew about climate change, they could learn something interesting by monitoring external CO2 levels.
It’s quite astonishing to watch the Bluesky people keep digging that hole.
Now apparently they auto remove any post that has the house number and street of Jesse Singal in. As a result, literally everyone on the site now knows what they are, thanks to the Streisand Effect.
@A Spectre, Haunting @Kincaid @kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈 I'm really wondering how they're going to handle the backstory parts of Shift though. The whole, "WHY were umpty-billion people murdered?" thing is kinda important to the storyline.
I'm confused as to why the wound on her arm is getting worse.
Atlanta was nuked, some of the surrounding area was nuked. The rest of it is all fiction.
There's no evidence at all in the books that the W.O.O.L. conspiracy succeeded in nuking the earth and cleansing everything. The only are the nanobots are active is in the area around the silos, because they're being replenished by the cleanings.
Thurman wanted all knowledge of nanotech erased and the entire conspiracy was to do a Bene Gesserit for 500 years to raise a society that would never again create the tech. Thurman saw it as an existential threat to humanity.
He specifically makes sure that Donald is at the convention because everyone else is going to die.
It's never mentioned in the books, but I strongly got the impression that the Atlanta incident was a FAE. They look like nukes (see Beirut), and would convince everyone inside that WWIII had happened. Using an actual nuke would have been counterproductive because it would have irradiated your breeding stock.
Thurman was convinced that a nano war was coming, and on entry day probably deployed enough into the upper atmosphere to kill every human on earth. If there's anyone left alive elsewhere at all, then his entire project is utterly pointless.
Note that the vault exists, precisely to restart civilisation, because there's nobody else out there.
It would be like sealing off Barnsley for 500 years to create a society that didn’t know about, say, plastic, and leaving a vault outside the sealed off area with loads of stuff in that nobody else touched because of the reason, and also you were so scared of your future civilisation knowing about plastic that you were willing to kill your self and your coworkers because you know about plastic, and by the way, the rest of the world is out there knowing about plastic and could rescue you at any time by just walking up and knocking and just decides not to, and by the way you literally have radios which you could use to call for help and they could hear you and you would hear them, and planes, which you would see in the night sky flying past, etc etc etc.
Humanity being dead is a central plot point. The entire premise makes zero sense if it’s not.
Local DIY barn is full of Christmas tat, except most of it looks like it’s been designed by generative AI. Upright boxer dogs wearing 19th century military uniform while looking vaguely cutesy and shit like that.
From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upsh
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From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upshot conversation took away some matters to note. Mainly that the RCDs work (I already know this from accidentally grounding neutral while wiring a socket. That’s so annoying), and an action going forward: if Sarah does something that trips an RCD in future, she will immediately swear loudly.
Federal and state governments acknowledge the widespread presence of lead pipes throughout the country—NRDC’s new map reveals where they are. The EPA, states, and cities must act now to solve this problem.
@KayEllen_OTS I mean, fair, but I was born in the early 70s and as was recently revealed, that’s peak lead exposure time, and I’m not yelling “OMG ALIENS!” at random Boeings.
Bluesky T&S have shat the bed and basically told all trans people on the site to go fuck themselves.
I've turned off my fediverse-bluesky bridge. Still have the capability to crosspost there, but I'm not planning to now. Am getting better engagement here anyway.
@AllysonShaw @Natasha_Jay you’re spot on, that’s usually the venture capital tactic: get something to grow fast no matter what the cost (financial, ethical or otherwise) and then cash out by either selling it or an IPO (making it a public company traded at a stock exchange)
@Allyson Shaw @Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @marlies They basically have no business model beyond “create a pool of content which someone will pay for”.
And generating harassment drives engagement, so it’s not in their interest to clamp down too hard on it. Their ideal strategy is “slightly less harassment than Twitter”
@Rachel Lawson @Roche Limit @krims Because they want to hurt you, and are responsible for lots of the things that have likely already made your life harder than it needed to be, and knowing who wants you hurt or dead is kinda necessary, if unpleasant.
It’s a bit like a mouse not knowing what a cat is.
@marlies @Natasha_Jay I just wondered why no one on Bluesky is talking about this-there seems to be a single minded focus on replicating ‘the old Twitter’ rather than considering the future of that platform.
@Natasha_Jay @marlies right- there’s obviously a lot of engagement just going on about this ‘dilemma’- I just peeked in there because I have friends who now only use that platform. It’s so messed up. Thanks for helping clarify this.
The same guy followed up with a news article about how the Russians are going to beat the Americans at stealth fighters (comparing it to an F117, a slow ass bomber that’s been obsolete for decades), by building one out of fibreglass (plastic).
Credulous cheerleading tankies are the worst kind. Believe any stupid shit as long as it’s out of Russia or China.
@Matt Hodgkinson The only weapon Russia has that actually works properly is the ability to throw expendable human flesh at a target until it gets exhausted. It’s low tech as hell, but very effective.
The rest of their shit is junk. Sadly they have so many nukes that at least some of them probably work.
Been watching the HBO Max Dune prequel thing and I’m thinking, Paul Atreides is like, “I am the product of a 10000 year breeding programme to produce turbo Hitler. I have enough morality left to avoid being tubro Hitler. Phew!”
Philosophy question: a randomly selected UK journalist or medic is told that a 40 megatonne hydrogen bomb will go off in London unless they write 5 sentences about trans people without deliberately lying.
Imagine being someone like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel and suddenly realising that your main legacy is for your obituary to get mostly laugh reacts on Facebook.
If you are a cis woman athlete, and trans women have been banned from competing in the women's category in your sport, a good way to show solidarity would be to refuse to compete in the women's category too.
It would be nice to see people doing this to help an entirely unjustified attack on us, but I feel it's unlikely to happen 😞
Interesting to watch American oligarchy join the “Charles Stuart, Louis Bourbon, and Nicholas Romanov club of having learned nothing and now wishing to explore the consequences of that”.
Only with a proletariat that’s armed to the teeth.
Well well well well. Turns out that the carnivorous housefly that’s been driving us nuts for 2 days is utterly pervious to my acetamiprid fruit tree insecticide spray.
@kincaid I call him a fucking quisling and I'm cis (but bi).
He is a fucking quisling and his memoir makes it very clear he is a power monger who says what he thinks will keep him in power, hence being nice in 2017 and a transphobic shit now. I will enjoy watching him regret it, but know many are suffering who will never get recompense.
We need to kick transphobes out of the queer communities. Not welcome, not queer, ahistorical hypocrites who can get in a big bin.
I don't understand how anyone rehabilitated Bindel, she's appalling.
I got monstered at 2013 Feminism in London con (just before it showed its TERF face) where I'd been asked to speak on being a bi and disabled woman (like you do). I named Bindel as a hateful bi/transphobe whose type made me avoid women's space for yrs. The organisers sat there and let a minority abuse me. But 30+ people thanked me 1 by 1 for speaking out against disablism and terfery.
@NatalyaD I was invited to that conference. They set me up to be ambushed by Bindel. I only found out when students protested against her inclusion. I said I wasn’t comfortable but was happy to be on a panel without her (she had already pulled out by then). The organisers said no. The rumour was then spread that I had organised the protests (I hadn’t even known they’d existed) and got Bindel removed (I had not), and this kicked off an internet stalking/harassment campaign against me which resulted in a nervous breakdown and a 6 month gap in my memory.
The organisers of the 2013 feminism in London conference are not my favourite people.
I don't think Bindel was at 2013 cos I'd have kicked off if she had been - I hate her.
I wonder if you mean 2014 which was the year of protests and lot of the same organising people for sure. I know a nonbinary black person who pulled out when they found out Bindel was involved. I no longer speak to my former friends who were organisers cos TERFery.
I'm sorry you got the blame for the protests, that's just barking, but standard for TERFs who really are horrible obsessive evil ppl.
@NatalyaD The harassment campaign happened in 2014 because that was the year I was standing for reelection and it happened as a result of the FiL conference.
Was it really early in the year, or really late? I had a feeling its as December, but if it was January then it was indeed 2014.
Memory doesn't work too well during that time period. There were psychiatric drugs. Quite a few of them.
Looks like FiL 2013 and 2014 were both in October of those years.
The 2014 organising kickoffs that I remember were in the several months running up to it as I knew people who pulled out after discovering Bindel and TERFery & the organisers trying to stealthily set them up for shit.
Anyway, best left in the past and protect yourself at all costs. I'll keep calling Bindel and friends out as the grifting bigots that they are.
American companies on Facebook advertising clever carry on luggage and not publishing dimensions, or making it not fit in a 55*40*20cm cuboid, and wondering why nobody in Europe buys it.
@Miguel Arroz Ryanair basically sets the standard here. They want to turn a plane round in 20 minutes which means the standard US “everyone spends five minutes playing luggage Tetris in the cabin” thing is right out.
@Nicovel0 @christineburns there's a video I can't find of a hill climb. It's up a streambed, ankle deep liquid mud. Rocks. REAL 4x4's sliding back down the hill
And some french farmer just boings one of them up, one handed, fag out the window* and roars off
I have an amazing "Carry On" training backpack that allows me to carry a laptop, regular clothes, training clothes, trainers and swim kit. Individual compartments, barriers, the works.
Designed specifically for the needs of travelling athletes.
Designed specifically for the needs of travelling American athletes.
Worked that out a bit late. Great domestic travel bag.
@Nicovel0 @christineburns They are, and they benefit from their lightness compared to suvs. However, they also have their brother on speeddial with a tractor if they do get stuck in the winter.
May just be the fact that I have Covid, but I just see the future getting darker and darker as a self fulfilling prophecy of our idiot politicians who think they have no choice but to drive society into the abyss.
Just unblocked a load of people I had server blocks on because they had animated GIF avatars and they were bricking my server’s job queue.
Have upgraded server software and it fixes the issue so I’ve removed the blocks.
If you were one of these people, sorry! It was nothing personal. I couldn’t even tell you because any attempt to interact with you in any way poisoned my job queue.
@Sarah Brown try using only the relative part of the image URL (I have only the relative path in my config). Remove everything before/photo/... (but keep the / in front of photo)
@Sarah Brown don't! Obviously developers had a too narrow mind when they implemented the logo thing 😀 (also with the frio theme it will not be shown on the website sadly)
gz
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Nile
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •On Christmas Eve in this year of grace twenty twenty-four, my beloved and I are preparing a bewildering variety of vegetables.
In the photo: a kilogram of beet roots, plural in type and in quantity.
Elsewhere, half a kilo of black salsify, and an unknown quantity of celeriac, kohlrabi, and radishes.
All of it heaved out of the ground, this morning, at the allotment.
Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Sarah Brown • •