Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:
No, I will not be at #38c3. I *could* have squeezed it into my schedule despite an upcoming transplantation, but they have *once again* failed to implement any COVID safety measures.
A few days of Congress is not worth the risk of brain damage or (in my case) severe illness or death.
If you want to see me at your event, push for appropriate safety precautions like sufficient ventilation/filtering and (particularly where that is not possible) mask distribution and ideally masking requirements.
Heads-up: I'm likely going to be unfollowing quite a few people in the next week or so. The reason for (almost) all of them is going to be the same: continuous posting of negative/doom-ish/inciting/etc. things without CWs.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep my feed from becoming a depressing hellscape, and it's apparently not possible to keep these follows in a list without also having them show up in my main feed.
Note that I'm mainly talking here about people tooting 'news' articles and such, calls to action, and so on. I understand that these are meant to 'make people aware' of a topic, but I am exceedingly aware of these things by this point and it does not help anyone to overload my emotional system with it constantly, least of all the people affected by the tragedy being described.
It is simply Too Much, and it is actively keeping me from actually being able to *do* anything about any of it. It paralyzes through depression.
So I've decided, for both my own mental health and my ability to actually work towards effective change, to start unfollowing the people I mainly see this from. This will, unfortunately, include almost every Dutch person I follow too, since CWs do not seem to have caught on on Dutch fedi.
It is not a personal thing but it also sort of is; if this stuff would be behind CWs consistently, or even just most of the time, it wouldn't have been an issue. So it's not about who you are personally, but it *is* the result of a choice you have made to not CW things. I will occassionally check in (there is a reason I followed you in the first place!) and reevaluate if that changes.
PSA: personal health, surgery and risks, availability
If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:
After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.
In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.
I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.
If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.
So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.
If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.
Why I do not like hanging around liberals anymore
Because they're like oppression lootboxes.
The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.
This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.
With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.
With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.
Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.
I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.
I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".
But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!
While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!
Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!
★ New blog post: Otherkin-friendly CAPTCHAs, revisited.
Some folks have asked me how I make CAPTCHAs respect my non-human identity. The short answer is I copied code from @mavica_again. The longer-ish answer is this.
https://beeps.website/blog/2023-04-27-otherkin-friendly-captchas-revisited/
who is the archivist for all the magnum opuses that get written online and are intelligible to nobody but their creator, that is an enormous body of literature
Uh oh, apparently Atari bought the IP for Transport Tycoon in November of last year. I sure hope that isn't going to result in problems for the #OpenTTD folks...
Fun fact: it is literally, objectively impossible to legally watch Ultra HD Blu-Rays on a desktop computer, because Cyberlink PowerDVD is the only legal way to watch Blu-Rays of any sort on PC at all and it dropped support for UHD BRs.
Once again, DRM exclusively and disproportionately affects legal users without being a blip in the way of pirates (MakeMKV works just fine)
If a company goes out of business in the Netherlands, does the NDA its employees had to sign still apply?
Edit: The overwhelmingly common answer is contact a lawyer, which is good advice. Thanks everyone! :)
Say it with me:
"IQ IS JUNK SCIENCE INVENTED BY WHITE SUPREMACIST EUGENICISTS TO JUSTIFY THEIR IDEOLOGY"
It is not an "inconvenient truth". It is not an otherwise robust instrument that is misused by some people with an agenda. It is not something that's pretty accurate but that is complicated by societal factors.
It's bullshit. Bupkis. Bunk.
As Johnathan Frakes says in that one show, "We made this one up. It's a total fabrication. It's pure fiction. It's a made up tale. This one was invented by a writer. It's an urban legend... that never happened."
Don't forget. Remind yourself if you have to.
Chinese Hanyu, known across East Asia, began life as a symbol pictographic system that showed what it described: over time, the symbols became more abstract and it became a full-blown writing system used by billions. #MythologyMonday
re: rant
Linux UX opinions
Bring back the File / Edit / View / etc menus at the top of apps/the top of the screen in Linux
It's a step backward in usability that I have to go looking for where this particular app's devs put the icon to open the menu, then I have to open it, figure out how they designed it, scan through it looking for the option I need, etc
Before, everything was kinda standard, and you could even use keyboard shortcuts to navigate
It wasn't as uh Design I guess
But it was more usable
#AskFedi: It's recommendations time again! :boost_requested:
I'm looking for games that are high in simulation and strategic complexity, but that are not *obtuse*; ie. I should be able to learn and discover the complexity through gameplay, rather than through reading hundreds of pages of manuals.
Good examples are Factorio, Rimworld, Project Hospital, Workers and Resources, Software Inc., Airport CEO, and so on (but those games I obviously already know about).
I prefer games that also involve some kind of layout/design/building process, where the design choices meaningfully affect the outcome. Also especially interested in more obscure games, including indie ones and graphically unpolished games!
Also, no war-themed games please. And preferably no turn-based, as I tend to find those too slow for my liking.
One of the reasons the "nobody is protesting" take sucks is it denies the empirical reality that some people *are*. People sharing this take are not among them, otherwise they wouldn't be making that point..
Which brings me to the second reason it sucks: it puts agency here on other people. Everyone can do something, can pick something they can do; and furthermore should not belittle the work of people who are doing visible and less visible stuff.
/end rant
Pro tip: throw out any "norms" that don't help you.
I was taught to brush my teeth standing up, but after I became very ill and fatigued a few years ago, I dragged a chair into the bathroom and sat down.
And it's so much better. Not only do I not waste energy unnecessarily, but I don't rush through brushing my teeth, I do take the full two minutes to brush them, because I'm more comfortable and get less tired.
People look at me like I'm a weirdo when I tell people this, but seriously, find what norms you follow in your life "just because", and see how you can change them to make your life better.
Re: dansup; pixelfed.social being almost completely unmoderated
If I woke up one day and someone told me "here, moderate this 200k person instance all by yourself, don't worry, photo sharing is just less toxic than other forms of social media so you'll be fine", I would immediately shut down sign-ups and drop everything else I was working on in order to get moderators on board ASAP, and start fixing the reports functionality and moderation tools. I would be fucking panicking and having cold sweats about the potential harms that could arise, and feeling sick in my stomach about all the harms that were probably already occurring on my watch. I would not be fucking gloating about it. The utter fecklessness of this "it'll sort itself out" attitude is revolting to me.
@fedor @joenepraat alsjeblieft niet zeg. "Buurtpreventie" groepen zijn broednesten van racistische wannabe-politie groepjes die ieder niet-wit of dakloos persoon verdacht maken. Werkt vigilante gedrag in de hand en wekt het idee dat er continue onveiligheid in de buurt is waartegen gewaakt moet worden. Liever buurtsolidariteitsgroepen gericht op mutual aid en verbinding.
My hot take is that banning masks prohibits disabled, immunocompromised and covid-conscious people from public life.
It should be resisted as vociferously as trans bathroom bills, which are also intended to ban a category of people from public life.
We know why that's bad. We should understand mask bans the same way.
daughter: I'm trying not to overdo it but I find it very hard to feel guilty for missing classes. teacher is angry because I was late and I'm like, "I'm sorry that the park was so beautiful and I stopped to enjoy the rare sunlight and look at the plants starting to come up"?? I'm not sorry actually??
me: many of my most precious youth memories were skipping school, and I don't recall a single time I regret not going to class.
daughter: not helping lol
Technical debt collector and general hype-hater. Early 30s, non-binary, ND, poly, relationship anarchist, generally queer.
Sometimes horny on main (behind CW), very much into kink (bondage, freeuse, CNC, and other stuff), and believe it or not, very much a submissive bottom :p
Feel free to flirt, but if you want to actually meet up and/or do something with me, lewd or otherwise, please tell me explicitly or I won't realize :) I'm generally very open to that sort of thing!
Further boundaries: boosts are OK (including for lewd posts), DMs are open. But the devil doesn't need an advocate; I'm not interested in combative arguing in my mentions. I am however happy to explain things in-depth when asked non-combatively.
My spoons are limited, so I may not always have the energy to respond to messages.
Strong views about abolishing oppression, hierarchy, agency, and self-governance - but I also trust people by default and give them room to grow, unless they give me reason not to. That all also applies to technology and how it's built.