Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

that's certainly one way you could do this, Valve

Edit: I have signed a lease on a place that seems pretty close to ideal! So many friends within a 2.5 km radius! 🎉

——

I'm looking for an apartment in #Ottawa and I would like to ask the community for help.

I'm an excellent tenant. I've never missed a rent payment. I’m quite quiet, except I do on occasion like to sing.

My absolutely ideal setup would be:
- in Centretown / Little Italy / Hintonburg (within walking distance of many friends),
- tenant control over HVAC (including a/c, because I overheat),
- dishwasher and microwave and space for more kitchen appliances (so I can cook and share),
- two bedrooms (so I can host people on occasion, e.g. if there is a power outage elsewhere).

If we're getting crazy fanciful, I would love to have access to a tiny garden and space for a solar battery.

The reason I'm asking the community for help is because I'm having a lot of trouble with corporate landlords. Many of them, experienced tenants advise against. Some landlords say they have available units but refuse to answer phone calls or emails. Some may be perfectly nice but my life circumstances don't fit within their corporate forms and therefore I'm out of luck. (This is a recurring #ActuallyAutistic experience.)

I would love to find a long-term rental from someone who appreciates a reliable if somewhat unusual tenant.

Need a hopeful story? 22 students at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, 4 years ago, set out to "really inspire people and the market and society to accelerate the transition towards a more sustainable future. What we’re trying to do is to show people and show companies what’s already possible.”

So they made a #solarpunk campervan fully equipped with living essentials including a double bed, sofa, kitchen area and a bathroom with a shower, sink and toilet. It can fit two people, who can drive, cook breakfast and watch television using just the vehicle’s solar-charged battery.

Then they took it on a tour of Europe driving 1,200 miles without stopping for fuel or plugging in to charge. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/stella-vita-solar-campervan-netherlands-spc-intl/index.html

Normalize calling Native Nations what they call themselves.

Chahta, Tsalagi, Numunuu, Wazhazhe, Lakota of the Oceti Sakowin, Tsistsistas, Diné, Hopituh Shi-nu-mu, Ka'igwu, Mvskoke, and Semvnole Nations.

They stole our land. Don't let them steal our names or sovereignty anymore.

I think I've told this story here before, but I might as well do it again.

In the shopping center of the town where I live, Rosmalen, we have two branches of Jumbo, a supermarket chain. The two branches aren't *quite* within viewing distance of each other, but only really because the view is blocked by a building inbetween.

Why? Well, according to local legend, that story starts with a newly-to-be-built neighbourhood...

De Groote Wielen is a major expansion of Rosmalen; it adds about half the town's size again, to the north of the existing urban area. It's a mixed development, but like the rest of Rosmalen, pretty Dutch-suburban in its nature; Rosmalen is glued to the side of Den Bosch, a bigger city, and so mostly functions as a commuter town.

De Groote Wielen has been under construction for a long time now; I believe more than 10 years. Every once in a while, a new zone gets completed and people move in. Even though the project is not done yet, it is already a living neighbourhood.

Now of course, a neighbourhood needs shops! So the plan was to build a shopping center for De Groote Wielen. Jumbo acquired a promise from the city that they would have the primary supermarket location in that newly-built shopping center.

But these plans got delayed, and residents complained about the lack of a supermarket for so long, so a stopgap plan was set up to build a temporary shopping center out of portable building units. Jumbo couldn't immediately construct a functioning temporary supermarket, so Albert Heijn, a competing supermarket chain, offered to do it instead. The city agreed.

But then things got murky. Albert Heijn started making noises about not wanting to give up their branch, and saying that now that they were already serving the community, they should have first right to the primary supermarket location in the new shopping center - the spot that had been promised to Jumbo!

Jumbo was not amused. So what'd they do? Well, the primary shopping center of Rosmalen was getting partly renovated, and a new supermarket location was being constructed as a part of that. Jumbo already had a branch in the old part, but they expressed their interest in establishing a branch in the new part too.

I guess people assumed they would move their existing branch to the new location. But that's not what happened. Instead, they kept operating both branches concurrently, and there is no plan to get rid of either of them; the one in the old part was recently renovated too!

So the rumours are that Jumbo is deliberately occupying both supermarket locations in the central shopping center as revenge on Albert Heijn for their backstabbery in De Groote Wielen; because AH had wanted to establish a presence in the central shopping center of Rosmalen too, but now they can't, because there are no free locations - Jumbo is occupying both of them!

Now, how much of this story is exactly true, I don't know; there's no formal documentation of all this anywhere. But this is the story that I've now heard from multiple folks around here... and it's difficult to find a different explanation for the two branches!

@chirpbirb found on bsky

PSA

Cleaning screens with alcohol (e.g. generic IPA) is *NOT* safe and may cause damage to the screen

Please use dedicated screen cleaner spray/foam

fill your code with asserts, kids

that's how you find out the input data is wrong

Wenn Union und FDP sagen "Leistung muss sich wieder lohnen", dann übersieht man leicht, dass hier nicht gemeint ist, dass diejenigen, die leisten und diejenigen, für die es sich lohnt, dieselben Personen sind.