Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Hoewel ik content warnings graag meer gebruikt zie worden, zal ik iets of iemand niet snel direct erop aanspreken.

Maar FTM maakt het wel heel erg bont; dan denk je een artikel te gaan lezen over retentie van gegevens door politie, dan krijg je ineens een gedetailleerde omschrijving van een gruwelijke moord in je gezicht gegooid in de inleiding, zonder enige waarschuwing vooraf.

What the fuck, FTM, had daar nou echt even geen waarschuwing vooraf vanaf gekund? Dit gaat echt wel heel erg ver.

There are three main things that helped me get my teeth into a healthy state:

1. I changed toothpaste to Elmex. I don't generally care about brands, but crucially their formulation is different and it doesn't cause slimy-throat for me like most other toothpastes do. The exact reason is unclear to me. It made it much less unpleasant.

2. I got an electric toothbrush (one of those 'sonic' things, but from Lidl) that is waterproof and so can be used under the shower. This made it easy to integrate into my evening shower routine, so I could brush my teeth in relaxing comfort (important because my Tourettes is triggered by repetitive movements... like brushing teeth, and I need to be very relaxed to suppress this).

3. I got a water flosser, one of those that pumps water into high-speed bursts. Instead of just flossing, I also aim it carefully between my teeth and gums, to flush out the crap that's causing inflammation and infection. This is important because my executive dysfunction prevents me from reliably brushing twice a day, and so it builds up. An alternative but less pleasant solution is to use chlorhexidine mouthwash (note that it can have side effects).

These things, combined with a long-running deliberate effort to get things in order, and quarterly teeth cleaning at a very helpful dentist as a temporary measure, are what helped me ultimately get my teeth in very good shape again - after a literal decade of barely brushing due to a litany of brain and disability issues, and never visiting a dentist.

Long story short: yes, it's possible to recover from even very bad dental hygiene. But you need to think very deliberately about *what* it is that is preventing good dental hygiene for you, and try to find concrete solutions to it. Just "trying to remember harder" is not going to fix it, regardless of what your parents/friends/etc. say.

There are most likely many other solutions to these issues too, if the above are not accessible to you for any reason.

And most of all, there's more than one way to get there. The nominally 'correct' way isn't necessarily the right way, when things like disability get in the way. Sometimes you just need something different that does the same job better for you. There is no shame in that.

I have reached infection zero 👏

Just visited dentist to have a final check before transplantation, and they found zero current issues; only a slight risk of future issues for my wisdom teeth, but they are currently issue-free (and the risk of removing them could actually be bigger).

This has been a many-year project for me, honestly, and it started before I knew I needed a transplantation.

So, Twitter is no longer designated as a "core platform service" (gatekeeper) under the DMA. Twitter's reasoning for this is.... interesting:

"First, X Holdings Corp. argues that X does not constitute an important gateway
for business users to reach end users within the meaning of Article 3(2)(b) of
Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 for the following reasons: (i) X is not part of a
digital/platform ecosystem, (ii) X operates on a small, decreasing scale, and (iii)
X’s relative user engagement is low and declining"

ref. https://ec.europa.eu/competition/digital_markets_act/cases/202441/DMA_100041_631.pdf and https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/113316593914664643

There's a 2023 compliance suite for XMPP still in experimental state and no 2024 compliance suite at all? 🤔

(Referring to this part of Midori specifically: https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/)

Bonus frustration: Microsoft almost, *almost* resolved this problem, most likely, with Midori (being one of the very few organizations that could put their foot down and *make* people care about this) - and then axed the project and only took parts of it.

I find "supply chain security" discussions so exhausting, even in their genuine form of "how do we contain malware on the average person's system"... because they are all identical carbon copies of each other in the end, and no new conclusions are ever reached.

It goes something like this:
- All these plugins and packages are a security disaster! Anyone can publish them! We should limit publishing to a curated set that's been reviewed.
- Oh, turns out nobody has the review capacity to do so, and/or it would break the world by creating a centralized gatekeeper for everything, so I guess we need to make it possible to run untrusted code safely instead. Sandboxing!
- Oh, turns out sandboxing is imperfect, so we actually need to fix the problem at the root, and adopt secure programming practices and tools like capability security and explicit authorization grants.
- Oh, turns out it's impossible to convince the majority of developers to collectively work on that (which is needed to make it succeed) because most of them don't recognize the problem and keep waffling on about curation and sandboxing. Guess we're just fucked then and it will be broken forever!

Rinse repeat for three decades.

Hey fedi, let's play a new(?) game! It's called "Stories That Could Have Happened".

The game: Someone picks a phenomenon, a saying, an event, or something else, where we don't actually know for sure how it happened or came to exist, and then we collectively write a Story That Could Have Happened about its origins! It doesn't need to be true or based on history!

There are only a few base rules, to keep it fun and non-confrontational for everybody:
1. You can either post a top-level reply to start a new story about the topic, or reply to someone else to continue on their story chain so far.
2. If you reply to someone else, you must either add to it or refine it with more nuance - you cannot outright contradict their post!
3. Posting with public visibility is encouraged, but make sure to add the #StoriesThatCouldHaveHappened hashtag, so that people can mute it if they want.
4. Keep your post short, and leave enough room for the next person to build on it.

So, anyone up for playing? 🙂 Let's start with this topic:

"Turning lead into gold"

Where did the idea come from?

(If your local waste collection program has different instructions for "when in doubt", then follow those; but almost no collection agency seems to specify this, for whatever reason)