Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Just a personal heads-up for everyone I interact with: we've reached a point where if I see you in *any* way aligning with Trump or Musk, you are immediately going on my mental 'fascist' list with no further discussion and I will not speak to you anymore.

I don't care if you "didn't know how bad it is". The time for learning that is well past, so if you still "don't know", then I'm going to conclude that you didn't *want* to know and decide accordingly.

Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:

No, I will not be at #38c3. I *could* have squeezed it into my schedule despite an upcoming transplantation, but they have *once again* failed to implement any COVID safety measures.

A few days of Congress is not worth the risk of brain damage or (in my case) severe illness or death.

If you want to see me at your event, push for appropriate safety precautions like sufficient ventilation/filtering and (particularly where that is not possible) mask distribution and ideally masking requirements.

#CovidIsNotOver

If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:

After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.

In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.

I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.

If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.

So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.

If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.

Because they're like oppression lootboxes.

The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.

This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.

With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.

With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.

Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.

I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

I have finally finished my raised beds (aka plant tables)! This isn't the first woodworking project I've finished, but it's the first that I *started*, back in 2020. Plenty of setbacks in health and circumstance delayed the project, but I got there eventually 🙂

Now all that remains is to put some permeable plastic in there to help keep the dirt and roots inside while still allowing drainages between the planks, and filling it with soil and plants!

#gardening #woodworking

"Common sense" really just means "the views I was personally brought up with and never bothered to introspect on", huh

BurstDebugInformation_DoNotShip

(Also it seemed like the circus infrastructure was cobbled together from a mix of old second-hand stuff and brand new equipment? It made for a pretty homey feel)

What I found really interesting about this circus, is that many of the performers were clearly pushing the limits of their abilities.

You could see them struggle sometimes, and one of the (balancing) acts needed a retry because it failed once. About which the audience was really supportive, and cheered on the performer even more the second time around!

And honestly, I actually prefer that over the kind of performance where everything looks easy and flawless, because it makes you more aware that these are actual, real people who have put in real work to get where they are, and it isn't just some spontaneously acquired skill.

polish polish

Just got back from the circus that's in town: https://www.magicalworldofcircus.com/

It was quite good! I was kind of surprised at how good it was, given how cheap the tickets were... I'm not really sure how they're making this work financially, to be completely honest