Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Good morning or afternoon or evening or night everyone, depending on your timezone! Holiday announcement time!

As we do every year, we'll be taking a chunk of December off from work. This year, our cheeky little holiday will be from the 12th of December up to and including the 2nd of January.

What does that mean, you ask? During that time, we'll make the Matrix help, general, and code channels read-only, and we'll make the Github repository read-only as well. This means that during our holiday period, you won't be able to create issues or pull requests or ask us questions.

We do this to give us time to relax, enjoy quality time with friends and family, play video games, eat gingerbread, drink tea, and pet our various animals, in order to recharge our batteries for the year ahead without worrying about new issues coming in.

This doesn't mean that development work will completely stop for the duration of the holiday, just that the "user-facing" side of the development work will pause, as this is the part that we find drains our nerd batteries the fastest. We are, after all, computer-touching hermits.

So there! It's been a great year for GoToSocial in our opinions, and we're looking forward to working on cool new shit for you all (and for ourselves) in 2025, once we're raring to go again after a break. Thanks for reading! Now pet the sloth:

xoxoxoxo #GoToSocial devs

Doctor: "you definitely have clinical burnout."
Me: "Oh man. Well, how long is that going to take to fix, because I've got a _lot_ of stuff that needs doing."
Doctor: …
Me:
Me: what?

@mcc I did an internship in a recording studio where I learned one day they had five (5) identical vacuum cleaners.

I asked what's up with this and the owner said "I did the research, these are the best vacuum cleaners, so I bought five which should last me a lifetime without ever having look into it again or worry they stop making these."

I thought it was a bit wacky at the time, but I understand it more now.

Interesting proposition: *dont* keep pushing to ban an app that virtually half of the country uses regularly and has millions of small businesses and creators financial wellbeing tied to it without any plan for compensating for the economic impact it’ll have

conflict avoidance and the sentiment “never go negative” merely allow unprincipled pissants to move unhindered in your spaces. do you believe in a cohesive compassion or do you just want to make nice, never recognizing who is absent for who you allow?

i wonder how much of the decline in social group membership would be amended if we could measure people’s mmo guilds and d&d groups

conversely, it would be cool to see how many of those do generally prosocial things like more old timey associations used to: charity drives, scholarships, etc.

Remember kids, if someone asks you to sign something. *read it first!*

(we have a plumber currently trying to find out why his pad tried to charge us more than what was agreed to because I did)

I can understand the emotion behind using words like "us as a species," "humanity," and "human nature." But with these words people also make a false equivalence of the perpetrators and the victims. These words erase the 90% of us struggling to survive under this hostile, death-making system, suffering premature deaths for the profits of a very small group of people.

Name the perpetrators, because it's them and the destructive systems that benefits them we need to fight.

#AntiFascism #AntiCapitalism #Capitalism #CapitalismKillsLife #ABetterWorldIsPossible #ClimateJustice #colonialism #StopWars #imperialism #LandBack #patriarchy #consumerism

something that wasn't clear to me until i asked about it online is that IR lights in tv remotes or pokemon cartridges or whatever are, not lasers. they are light bulbs. if you could see IR light, you'd see them slightly light up everything in some vague direction, and maybe behind it a bit from reflections

and i can't put my finger on why i think that's cool. like, i guess i'm used to the idea of information being beamed directly between computers using invisible light, but the idea that the whole room is getting bathed in that information just for the other computer to pick it up is so fascinating to me

ayy, my Pokémon event spoofer got accepted as an art project at 38c3!

if you have a copy of Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold or SoulSilver (even some ROM hacks work), bring it by for some Mystery Gifts :D

there'll be re-runs of old events (Shaymin, Darkrai, etc.), some unreleased content (The Azure Flute), and a silly illegal Pokémon to collect - all hacked to allow DS-to-DS sharing, even after the end of the event

thinking a dwarf fortlike where you have to program their individual brains would be fun, especially if it was a weird scripting language

A small shrub-like British Soldier lichen (Cladonia cristatella).
You can also see part of this lichen in the photo in my last post.

#lichensubscribe #Mosstodon #nature #macrophotography

https://mastodon.social/@gwynnion/113607346695073991

just got told about this: Windows 1.0 Developer Release 5 running at 8K resolution. Original author is jb881122.

cc @jernej__s

The centring of puberty blockers in the care of trans youth is actually a compromise position designed to placate cis discomfort.

Desistance rates during this period are so low that it effectively amounts to holding young trans people in limbo for a few years and lying that it's for their benefit.

There's no medical reason that young trans people are unable to begin medical transition in their teenage years.

The roadblock is only a combination of cis anxiety and the erroneous belief that young people lack an understanding of their own identity and the capacity to exercise bodily automomy.

I don't think the amount of stigma and shame around STIs is doing anyone any favors. The majority of common STIs these days are nearly completely harmless provided they're identified and treated early. And those that aren't treatable are still something you can absolutely live with, again, if they're identified. The issue is that people are often so ashamed about this stuff that they just won't get themselves tested or won't talk to their doctor about it at all even though it really isn't such a big deal!

Take Chlamydia for example. One of the most common STIs out there. Its symptoms are so mild that most people don't even realize they have it until they get tested. It can cause more severe symptoms if left unchecked but it just so happens that usually a single round of antibiotics is enough to cure it. Terrifying and shameful right? /s
I'd be more worried about oral herpes cause that's something that actually sticks with you forever and is annoying af.