Along with many people, I often peruse r/AmITheAsshole on Reddit. There’s the occasional gem of a post in there, but so many are from people who are basically doormats asking if they’re the asshole for setting some barely-there boundary, and it makes me sad.
Seen a bunch of people sharing this one idea that the Iberian orcas are attacking sailing boats because one of them was previously “traumatised”.
I think it needs to be said that this is a fringe theory and widely regarded by lots of people studying this emergent behaviour as implausible.
For a start, orcas swim at 3 times the speed a sailboat travels at. As far as they’re concerned, they are essentially stationary objects. Secondly, orcas weigh more than sailboats, and if they wanted to sink them, they could, easily, but they aren’t doing that.
What the orcas are doing is biting rudders. The sinkings that have happened have been secondary to that: water ingress caused by damage to the rudder stock.
The leading theory is that this started as hunting practice. The Iberian orcas eat tuna, and they hunt them by biting their fins off so they can’t swim away. Sailboat rudders superficially resemble tuna fins, and so are good practice.
The behaviour started with a few young males about 3-4 years ago. It’s now spread and a
... Show more...
Seen a bunch of people sharing this one idea that the Iberian orcas are attacking sailing boats because one of them was previously “traumatised”.
I think it needs to be said that this is a fringe theory and widely regarded by lots of people studying this emergent behaviour as implausible.
For a start, orcas swim at 3 times the speed a sailboat travels at. As far as they’re concerned, they are essentially stationary objects. Secondly, orcas weigh more than sailboats, and if they wanted to sink them, they could, easily, but they aren’t doing that.
What the orcas are doing is biting rudders. The sinkings that have happened have been secondary to that: water ingress caused by damage to the rudder stock.
The leading theory is that this started as hunting practice. The Iberian orcas eat tuna, and they hunt them by biting their fins off so they can’t swim away. Sailboat rudders superficially resemble tuna fins, and so are good practice.
The behaviour started with a few young males about 3-4 years ago. It’s now spread and around 15 of them are doing it. It’s nearly all young males.
It appears that what started out as practice has now become the orca equivalent of that arsehole on TikTok walking into people’s houses: they appear to be doing it because their mates do it, and they think it’s funny.
Sadly inaction by, mostly Spanish authorities is leading to people increasingly taking things into their own hands. Sailboat owners share information on orca locations and are increasingly travelling in convoys, WWII style. Initially putting the boat into reverse on engine seemed to work, but they’ve got wise to that, and so an arms race is developing. The current technique which seems to work pretty much all the time is to throw firecrackers into the water.
They’re starting to move on to other types of boats too. Small fishing boats are increasingly being attacked.
This is not going to end well. Either they will finally kill someone, which will likely result in a cull, or they’re going to fuck with the wrong boat. In a few months the tuna migrate north towards Normandy. The orcas follow them. If they start attacking French fishing boats, I can’t imagine those guys taking any shit. Sail boats are pleasure craft and our response has been to try and avoid them, but that’s not going to be the case with fishing boats, and the French are not known for calm and gentle responses to things that threaten their livelihoods.
Watch this space, I guess. The hope is that this behaviour is a fad that will go out of fashion. If it doesn’t, it’s going to end up in deaths; possibly humans, definitely orcas.
From Aug 22, 2000. 60 minutes episode describing the teen elephants in Pilanesberg Park, South Africa. I't's also called the Biggest Big Brother Program in t...
Surely people can be a bit more inventive rather than resorting to a cull and creating an antagonistic relationship between Orca and people. Orca interact with people every day here and they're never aggressive or destructive. But we did have a leopard seal that liked biting boats we learned to work around her. Maybe find something that gets in their way or otherwise puts them off without causing them pain.
@CooperJ this has been going on for about 4 years, and various such things have been tried (slowly reversing, different sounds, etc), but they always seem to adapt.
The authorities won’t help. They seem utterly uninterested, and it is likely going to take human deaths to get them to act, or maybe not even that. There are some marine researchers trying to look into it, but it’s kinda small scale.
If the first people they kill are leisure boaters, then there will likely be a bigger push for action. If the first people they kill are fishermen, then I suspect we’ll just start seeing orcas washing up ashore with bullets in them.
@graydon Yes! There's gotta be nonlethal ways that work, or at least try them first. Humans are the most dangerous apex predator. #OrcaConservancy #OrcasGoneBad
@Alexandra Lanes @Sylvia Knight @Zoë O'Connell And a bit of still life, in a separate post, because Mastodon gets weird about long form posts with more than 4 photos in.
@bonkers @bipolaron I bet if a pizzeria opened a fediverse account, they could gain some local followers right off the bat by sheer novelty of being a local business with a fedi account. If they actually posted something more interesting than pure ads, they could probably grow a worthwhile following *and* extend their reach through boosts.
Honestly I would love to follow an account that posted good looking pizza pics (with alt text)
I don't think advertising on Mastodon is all that hard. Create an account, get followers, and then tell them about your product. You could even ask them to retoot your ad to reach an even bigger audience.
@bipolaron @jepyang that's actually my point, the format of advertising and also doing business has to change to fit in the fediverse. It will be pretty exciting to see how people and businesses invent new models.
How do I advertise at my local anarchist book-fair? Everyone keeps telling me that they're "not interested" or "broke" and to "fuck off" - is this an instance of market failure?
and that kind of thought is encouraged by "wait and see" stances on a Facebook corporate instance. absolutely no ads on fedi, ever. refuse to tolerate anything else!
I know I have several TERFs hate-reading me, because I live rent free in their heads. Hi guys! Just want to let you know, in case you've forgotten, that you are terrible human beings and you should be utterly ashamed of yourselves.
I should also note that TERFs are so utterly fucking pigshit thick that a bunch of them were in a shopping centre the other week, and got stuck for hours on an escalator because the power failed.
The year is 2030. Prime Minister Starmer continues the policy of TERF appeasement because he can’t be arsed not to. TERFs have created five million fake email addresses in order to boost a gov.uk petition to sex-segregate the sewage flowing onto UK beaches so that they can swim in adult human female shit, an important “sex based right”, they say. This friendica node continues to exist but consists entirely of me reviewing Portuguese wines while drunk, in Portuguese. TERFs still send fifty complaints a day to Lib Dem HQ about it.
Astonishingly, it seems I still live rent-free in the heads of many UK TERFs. I was not expecting this.
Ladies, I emigrated from your dismal little island ages ago. I’m not involved in your stupid culture war any more. Move the fuck on, or get therapy, or something. Sheesh!
So the Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly told their resident TERFs to go do one at their spring conference. They voted by around 9 to 1 to not even hear their hatred and simply remove it from the agenda.
The transphobes are showing their usual complete and total lack of introspection and utterly failing to take the hint.
This is a lesson for us all. Just constantly frustrating them and hoping they go away does not work with these people. If you have them in your organisation, they will not leave by themselves.
TERFs are like bedbugs, or pubic lice: once you’ve got them you need to actively make them go away.
it’s best to make your environment as hostile as possible, to try and prevent them arriving in the first place. if you get them, they will multiply and before you know it, you have an infestation that will not fucking shut up about trans people and “females’ sex based rights” (yes, they talk like Ferengi, or incels. They can’t seem to quite manage to successfully mimic actual human communication and this is a good way to spot them if you aren’t sure whether or not you have an infestation).
If tou leave it too long, they start sending pretend legal threats. it’s best to get rid of them before this point because dealing with this will become very time consuming. They’ll also stalk you and probably your friends and family too.
The Lib Dems did well this weekend, but they still have a largely untreated infestation, and it would have saved them a lot of trouble if they’d nipped this in the bud about 5 years ago.
bedbugs (at least, bat bugs quite closely related to our common bedbug) are very interesting from a sex and gender perspective researchgate.net/publication/5…
Ooh, it's fun having a federated timeline! I was always scared of the firehose so didn't bother subscribing my #friendica micronode to a relay, but I took the plunge, it's not killing my internet connection, and because it's Friendica I essentially get full text search of the English language fediverse (please don't kill me).
@Sion [main] In terms of "the fediverse that isn't Mastodon", it's quite popular. Of the types of servers I federate with, it's the 4th most popular platform. Here's the top 10:
What I don’t quite understand is how the problems with mastodon.social don’t appear to be there with mastodon.online even though as I understand it the two instances are effectively equivalent.
I would probably attempt to migrate to friendica but tuits and I don’t know if there’s a documented migration route.
@Alexandra Lanes The mastodon "move account" process does not work onto Friendica.
You can pull your follows in easily (save CSV, load CSV), but it won't bring your followers. Best thing to do is to announce what you are doing, and then ask people to refollow you.
@Sion [main] Mastodon got the press and because it's "like Twitter" (Friendica is "like Facebook"), it's where everyone went when Twitter imploded.
Friendica also has far fewer active developers, so has a bit of a steeper onboarding process. It is getting updated though. Uploading images was laborious as hell prior to the current (2023.03 Giant Rhubarb) release, for example. Now it's lovely: just drag and drop an image.
Users of non Mastodon fediverse platforms watching Mastodon instances go to war for implementing stuff that other fedi platforms had before Mastodon existed because they are “contrary to the culture of the fediverse” be like … 🤷🏻♀️
One of the nice things about being on mastodon.social is that we only see echoes of that. Like, folks want to fediblock us? OK, that's dumb but honestly it's not gonna have much of an impact on my experience because a lot of folks I follow are outside the mastodon-fediverse, & a lot of the mastodon instances I see posts from aren't gonna play that shit.
I probably will end up rolling my own & it probably won't be Mastodon (stack is too heavy & I just have this feeling it's got first-mover-disadvantage). *key? maybe, but right now it doesn't have what I want. WordPress? Light stack & I need to get better with it for professional reasons, but I really do loathe it as a platform. Streams sounds cool but it's complex.
!Friendica Support Is the auto discovered contact database actually doing anything useful? I only ask because tuning it on makes my MariaDB five times bigger than it is if I turn it off.
When crossings are blocked for hours, kids risk their lives to get to school by crawling through trains that could start at any moment. Ambulances and fire trucks can’t get through. The problem has existed for decades. But it’s getting worse.
The Tories are going to lose the next UK general election.
And this is going to be their response: openly embracing the most disgusting, base hatred that humans are capable of. They will appeal to the worst instincts humans can possess, to explain who to blame for their lives, in the country their own hard right Brexit project destroyed, being crappy.
And enough people will lap it up that it is a viable electoral force.
They will be out of power for a generation, but with opposition parties that have largely abandoned any pretence that social democracy can ever be a force in UK politics again, their “National Conservatism” (that sounds terrifyingly familiar) will be a respectable political force.
And so, in 10, or 15 years time, when the Tories regain power, it will be with the politics of brutal repression of anyone whose face doesn’t fit.
The Tory Britain of the 2030s is going to be a very, very, very scary place.
@Nikkileah What comes next is a pause, nothing more. None of them has the balls to turn round and try rebuilding a society along lines similar to the postwar consensus, because they can’t stomach the upheaval that would require.
So bland grey men in grey suits will give bland platitudes until the public decides it’s “time for the Tories to have another chance”.
And then you will see what these “Nat C’s” will do when they have nothing to restrain them.
What do the following countries, AND ONLY the following countries have in common? Specifically, a natural resource that could potentially be worth shedloads:
Brazil São Tomé and Principe (maybe) Somalia Maldives Indonesia Kiribati
!Friendica Admins Is there any way I can mimic Mastodon’s “limit” moderation function?? Getting some spam from Mastodon.social, and defederation seems like a rather blunt tool.
@Michael Vogel If server A limits server B, then posts from people not followed by people on server A do not federate to A. It is like "defederation lite" in that your users can still follow and interact with people on the limited server.
@utzer [Friendica] @Michael Vogel No. Just discard the posts from people nobody follows. I follow people on .social. I want to stop the spam but don’t want to defederate if. “Limit” does that.
@Sarah Brown yes, the mechanism is relaying, direct relay or via an actual relay. At least that is what I thought, but maybe Mastodon sends all posts to all servers? @Michael Vogel will know better.
When was the butter? (and do you mean actual butter, or a polish lady churning butter because I'd guess the latter was a preview for the "here's some Eurovision classics" bit in the interval)
Honestly, it was funny seeing people go "oh this serves Rammstein" to Germany's act when... like, I knew what was coming. (I mean, between Germany and Croatia only one entry this year is ever likely perform with a giant inflatable phallus. Assuming they haven't already.)
I only know my M1 mini has a fan because of teardowns and feeling cold air coming out from the back. Whatever I do, it stays quiet. These chips are magic.
Only issue with a new Mac is making the mistake of signing into iCloud. OK, it makes setup a million times easier, but then IT DOWNLOADS ALL THE SHIT I DON'T WANT.
Like, it's a server. Don't need any of this stuff, so then I have to go round after it turning off Photos, Messages, etc etc
@Sarah Brown I don't run a server but I'm very concerned about how tech companies use my data, so to the extent that I can, I cut them out of the loop.
@Florida Ted Were it Google or similar, I would agree.
But Apple's business model with their cloud services is to sell their hardware, and to sell the service directly. I pay them for a big encrypted hard disk in the cloud, they provide.
Nearly finished crunching my way through the Silo trilogy. One thing I can’t work out: the author is American, but the books are written in British English.
The copy of Neverwhere I bought in the States had Richard falling on the sidewalk in the opening chapter. In Edinburgh, some publishers localise a bit too much at times
Started reading the Silo trilogy after seeing the first two episodes on ATV+ and can’t get over the world building being utterly ruined by the author’s complete inability to work out how long it would take averagely fit people in typical physical shape to walk down and then up 150 flights of stairs (4 hours, give or take, if you take it easy and stop for lunch; it’s like half the Llanberis path up Snowdon).
Watched the first episode yesterday (didn't read the book so I don't know the plot). What amazes me is someone had the technology to build a seemingly self-sustaining world underground and didn't think about lifts. 😄
Also, not knowing the plot, I may be saying something silly, but I couldn't stop thinking “take of the helmet, you're being poisoned!" during the last part of the episode.
I may subscribe to watch this when all the episodes are released.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •Initial work. It creates separate Fediverse and Bluesky posts, so it's a crossposter rather than an integration, but shows promise.
It worked, by the way.