Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

Ok mastodon, (or at least the part of it currently going through a big freeze), show me your strange ice pictures, your weird ice spikes, needle ice, hair ice and frazil ice, your beautiful ice crystals.

Is #icetodon a thing yet? It should be. I'll start.
#NeedleIce in the park today.. typically forms.when ground is warm (above zero) and air temperature cold (well below zero).

#Ice #BigFreeze #StrangeIce #IceSpikes

I am watching a video about someone being a prison abolitionist and one point she brings up is that in court when she tried to talk about the violence that happened to her in an emotional and violent way rather than straight forward one is she felt herself being sexualised.

She says this is because a lot of the language we have around erotic situations is already violent and I wholeheartedly concur with this sentiment. I have heard and seen it in various media, person-to-person situations and spaces set up to be 'erotic'.

I have a strong distaste for this being the norm around erotica and erotic situations etc. Not just because it leads to this normalisation but because it then also possibly leads to the softer and potentially what might be thought of as the more mundane side of erotic language and situations around this as either not being seen as interesting, or folks not knowing what to do with such language or in such situations. 1/2

"De verhalen die ik hoorde waren verbijsterend: vrouwen die gepest en ontslagen worden wanneer ze de avances van hun chef afwijzen, afschuwelijke huisvesting waar de ratten rondlopen, schijnconstructies om mensen geen loonsverhoging of contract te geven. Gedwongen doorwerken tijdens ziekte. Potige medewerkers van uitzendbureaus die mensen intimideren of in elkaar slaan, levensgevaarlijke werkomstandigheden, werkgevers die zwaargewonde arbeidsmigranten voor hun woningen dumpen."
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/01/05/onderbetaald-bespuugd-en-zelfs-aangerand-de-arbeidsmigrant-wordt-niet-gezien-als-mens-a4186092

@inthehands I just got inspired to meme by this awful statement.

Every part of this is good news
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/travel/europe-new-trains.html
#climate #travel #trains

Trans mood

I've discovered a very odd service that runs from Reading all the way through to Salisbury.

So I've decided to take it!

Why is it odd?
- It's SWR. Usually trains from Exeter and Salisbury would run through to Waterloo, not to Reading.
- It only runs both ways throughout the day on weekends
- On weekdays it does something even more odd, and only runs one way (Salisbury to Reading) twice in the evening!
- I don't think this existed before

If anyone knows why this exists I'd love to know 😅

Last night I found out why some of my repos on my forge have weird language stats: because Markdown and Org documents are generally ignored for Reasons.

I do not like when such decisions are made for me. I very much want my repository stats to include prose in the language stats! In more than one repository, the prose is the code, it is the main content!

This is especially jarring when HTML is considered for stats. Consider this repository: with prose disqualified, it's 56% HTML, 25.9% SCCS, 11.5% Nix, and 5.4% Pascal.

With prose enabled, it's 39.8% Markdown, 32.4% "text", and only 15.7% HTML and 7.2% SCSS.

The difference is stark. Flagging HTML as the main language here is just plain wrong.

Or take my NixOS configuration! 49.7% Shell, 26.8% Emacs lisp, 23.% Nix. But when I don't disqualify prose: 87% Org, 10.6% Text, 1.2% Shell, 0.6% Emacs lisp, 0.6% Nix.

So of course I am going to do something about it, because wrong stats make me Angry. Pull request against #Forgejo coming up shortly, I'm writing tests already.

Listening to my husband argue with the cat.

"I can't make it stop raining, Pica."
"Maarah!"
"I can't. It's not like the sink or the shower."
"MaaaaraHH!!"
"You didn't like it when I opened the door. It's January. It's wet and cold."
"RRRAaanah!"
"OK OK"
*opens door*
"MARAAAHH!"
"I know it's cold!"
"rrrrah?"
"I can't turn off the rain."
"murrah."
"I think you're unreasonable too."

Hi! If you're finding me, this is a stress test of the ActivityPub ecosystem's IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) support.

It isn't great! The software works fine, but mentioning this account on Pleroma/Akkoma right now is impossible with Markdown, unless you change the TLD to Hiragana (minna in romaji)

Other software seems to handle it alright, switching between without effort.

--

IDNs are rare; you likely will never see this in the wild! The whole "xn--" prefix is by design, this is how the internet "ASCII"-ifies domains that aren't plain ASCII.

I am not breaking your instance. Your client is fine. It's doing its best. Even if it adds an emoji.

Love you~

if you replace "the economy" with "my investments" in most financial articles it all starts to make a hell of a lot more sense

I think I'm starting to get the hang of hex grids.

I’m starting to think fedi needs a two-tier follow system.

“follow” as in “I want to see all public posts from that account on my timeline”.
“folllow” as in “I want to actually be a follower and see followers-only posts”.

now we only have 2. but there are valid use cases for 1. that I am encountering both as a follower and as someone others want to follow.

as far as I can tell, there is no reason for 1. to not exist: those posts are public anyway. is it possible and practical at protocol level? is there a way to get the source instance to federate all such posts to the “follower’s” instance despite no “real” follow? no clue. someone who knows activitypub would have to chime in.

as for my use cases: I am posting almost everything public, but sometimes do a more personal post (usually related to mental health) that’s followers-only. I restrict my followers to queer neurodivergent beings that pass my vibe check because that’s the audience I’m comfortable sharing this with.

but there are others interested in less personal things I post and right now they have no way to get those things on their timeline. this is annoying.

sure, I can do multiple accounts. but that feels like a kludge that got carried over as a “solution” from tw*tter instead of doing it right in the first place. also, using multiple accounts is a pain in existing frontends. they implement an impractical paradigm of switching the context of the entire application, instead of presenting a combined timeline. then there’s the entire bullshit with having to boost things from the other account so they reach the rest of the relevant audience and so on. kludge.

I wonder exactly how much of the internet would evaporate instantly if you detonated a high-altitude nuclear weapon over the bay area?

I'm not saying it'd be a good idea to destroy silicon valley in a flash of nuclear fire, but just EMPing the area would take out a frightening amount of servers all at once.