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

New type of mask interaction today, when I had to go to the hospital for a yearly check-up (sadly unavoidable). Nobody wore a mask, not even medical personnel when they had to physically interact with patients. There was still disinfectant gel around, but I was the only one using it.

An unmasked nurse came to pick me up from the waiting room and when she dropped me off at the room, she pointed at my mask and said: "Miss?! Do you have corona?!"

I explained: "No, I'm trying to prevent it."

Her: "So you don't have any symptoms?"

Me: "No, none, just wearing this to protect myself."

Her: "Are you vulnerable?"

Me: "Yes."

Her: "Sorry about that, I just have to check when I see something, you know? With these new guidelines, anyone could be having corona anywhere! And most don't even wear a mask!"

Me: "True, I heard the coughing in the waiting room."

Her: "Yes! And they don't stay at home! They don't even mask! I bet people like you could use people like them like a tooth ache!"

Me: "Indeed, I wish people wore masks."

Her: "Unbelievable, such people!!! Coming here of all places!!! Anyway, I'll get the doctor, be right back."

I was kind of surprised that she felt so strongly about unmasked sick people (I'm used to everyone minimizing the severity or covid or claiming it's gone), but I was also annoyed that she wasn't masked herself either. I don't have energy for those types of conversations anymore though, I'm just trying to get in and out of the building as quickly as possible.

A little while later I was waiting in the treatment room for the doctor to arrive, when I saw the door open a tiny bit. I heard the same nurse explain to someone: "The patient is wearing a mask, but I checked and she doesn't have covid, she's just one of those vulnerables, you know? So don't worry, she's not sick."

Then the doctor came in, unmasked, and no further comment was made about my mask.

If only there was a simple way for all these medical people in the hospital to prevent the spread of covid to themselves and their patients... 🤡

#covid #covid19 #CovidIsNotOver #WearAMask

What is something you have learned you wish you could have told your younger self... but, you also know your younger self would never believe you?

Here are mine:

* Even if you are a smarty pants you still need to study, probably a lot.
* Brush your teeth twice a day. Not once. TWICE.
* The few things about your appearance you have (some) control over are not very important in romance.
* No, you really do need to sleep.
* Don't just study what's hard & impressive study what fascinates you.

usb-c is amazing until you plug your phone in to a usb-c power bank and your phone starts charging the power bank

one of the lessons of being an adult that suck a lot but are necessary to learn is to say "I can't do this to, simply because I don't have the additional capacity at the moment for that" ...

people need to realize that dissolving the lines between gender also means dissolving the lines between sexuality. you cannot say gender is fake and then say sexuality is strict and rigid.

there are multigender/genderfluid people who are lesbians and gay men at the same time. there are mspec lesbians/gays/straights who have a complex relationship with gender and their sexuality. there are gay men who are women and lesbians who are men because male isn't the opposite of female.

"conflicting" labels are a part of many people's queer experience, because the human experience isn't simple enough to be put into neat perfect categories. if you truly support trans and genderqueer people, you need to accept the fact that gender and sexuality is complex and there will be people whose identities you don't understand.

malicious glee at seeing the desperation in the advertorial “The History of Natural Diamond Tennis Bracelets”

because even women who are curious about the most traditional flashy diamond looks are thinking lab or moissanite more and more

Being an anarchist (and actually having studied power dynamics and decisionmaking in that process) means constantly seeing people make the same governance errors over and over again, consistently having things fail in the same ways across a wide spectrum of topics, and then being told that *you're* the naive one when you try to point out this pattern

Was just thinking again of Ibby, who decided to burn his passports and travel from Norway to Morocco on foot, without any money: https://www.shareable.net/walking-from-norway-to-africa-without-money-or-a-passport/

I met him in 2013 at an Occupy camp in NL. Very inspiring person, who pretty much lived the world in the way that so many folks imagine. Could listen to him talk for hours.

I don't know where he is now or what he's doing, but he seems to have published a book about it: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43562112-the-hitchhiker-s-guide-to-not-hitchhiking - I do hope to get back in touch with him some day.

https://todon.nl/@joenepraat/111727595354496158

A reminder that the most useful feedback often doesn't come from the people who love your project or the people who hate it, but from those who have serious concerns but continue using and recommending it anyway

Your periodic reminder that the root cause of slow/inefficient software is not laziness, or Javascript, or Electron, or "interpreted languages", or people not understanding how to do software development, or not understanding memory management, or libraries, or abstractions.

None of those are the root cause. The root cause is capitalism, and the incentives it creates to build software that works barely well enough to make money under impossible deadlines, often leaving developers no choice in the matter and affecting the broader software development culture.

You want to fix bad software, you need to start by addressing those capitalist incentives. Telling people that they are doing a bad job will get you nowhere, and you will likely get things wrong in the process.

Have you tried taking it off the wall and turning it upside down?

(Whoever designed the Virgin Media access point clearly lived on a planet without gravity. It’s left an unsightly bit of unpainted wall showing for the moment but otherwise should be far more robust now.)

#VirginMedia #coax #cable #broadband #gravity

Have you ever experienced that waking up to fake falling while trying to fall asleep thing that some peoples brains do sometimes?

oh, so when *I* throw shit at a problem until something sticks and half-assedly improves it, that's called "unproductive" and "lack of expertise", but when a COMPUTER does it it's suddenly "machine learning" and a "promising technology"?!?!

*sigh* I probably should own crutches and a cane as, just in case items..... given the bugs my body has. It probably would have been doable already for me to get groceries if I had crutches and maybe a cane would have sufficed.

Anyone have recommendations, what to look for (Netherlands or at least EU shops ideally) and feel free to boost.