Notices by Christopher Phin (chrisphin@mastodon.social)

Been using this for a while, and it’s nice! I could daily drive it except for:

🤔 No TouchID
😰 No inverted-T arrows
🤯 No Escape??

Could live with the first, the second would be annoying as fuck, the third, what the absolute twat?

This has been a godsawful year but I draw such strength from my friends (and them from me, I know). One of them, Matthew, crocheted me this beautiful blanket for Christmas and I’ll be taking it to my parents’ tomorrow where I’ll be doing solo caring for a couple of weeks; it will help to wrap myself up in queer community. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

@glennf Holy crap I missed this entirely, Glenn I’m so sorry. (My own issues making me much less present than usual.) I’m glad you’re getting back on your feet. I’ll promote your sales, but let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

@glennf I don’t understand what the latter part means because I don’t understand how your insurance works, but ‘heart surgery for free’ sounds good :)

Just to show off, they did Cyrillic too!

(Small serious point: with a name like Dmitry Lamonov, it seems reasonable to assume Cyrillic is at worst familiar to them, and possibly even the thing they did first, and I don’t like the framing that Latin letters are necessarily any easier than any other script just because I’m more familiar with them. Just a silly, throwaway line that I have made waaaay too much of in writing this caveat 😅)

Suddenly and viscerally obsessed with these letterforms. Why has that never occurred to me, and why is it the first time I’m seeing the idea??

(Font is ALS Lamon by Dmitry Lamonov.)

@HauntedOwlbear WHICH REMINDS ME I meant to include this on my original thread so dropping here for some onanistic self-reboosting:

I've stopped using ‘deadname’ and adopted ‘necronym’ 😈

Then I got to know someone very sweet of that name and it kinda rehabilitated it for me, hence my wandering mind just now thinking again about what ‘changing my name’ would look like. The awkwardness of asking people – would they think it was an affectation? A mid-life crisis? A stupid name?

And then it hit me afresh how (especially) trans people have to deal with changing their name, and what strength of character it takes to do that — when I’m just fretting about:

For a few years I’ve toyed with the idea of ‘changing my name’ to Kit. I like it. It’s sparky, and seems better to fit me than Chris or Christopher. ‘Changing my name’ is in scare quotes because Kit is an accepted diminutive of ‘Christopher’, so it’s really only like a David preferring to be called Dave.

There was a point where I considered it more seriously, but there’s an arsehole Tory politician of that name and I didn’t like the association.

swapping a cis name for another cis name; not even _swapping_ my name, just switching to a different diminutive. I wouldn’t even need to change any documentation, I could just remain Christopher but style myself Kit. It’s all-round the simplest, least-socially-frictional change one could make. And yet.

Fuck, man, trans people are fucking incredible.

As I walked down my driveway yesterday, I snapped a photo of some snowdrops poking up through the frost in pale, watery morning light. And then as I walked down my driveway the morning, I snapped the same shot because the light was warm and beautiful — and that struck me afterwards as a tiny, tiny, welcome moment of hope for rebirth and progress.

#bloomscrolling

In the face of Stephen Fry’s mask-off transphobic betrayal of the queer community, please remember this world contains Sandi Toksvig.

A little early Christmas present to my fellow neurodivergents: did you know that you can tap 🌐+control+C to centre a window in macOS Sequoia? (Or fn+control+C on older keyboards). More here: https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl9674d0b0/mac

So cool! A one-pixel-wide font that exploits subpixels.

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/slGDHG3oyt cc @elliotjaystocks @glennf)

I had any heard this metaphor before, that product design (or indeed any creative endeavour) is like a corkscrew, in that you feel like you’re going in circles but those circles are actually leading you somewhere. Yaas! (Yes it’s technically in a paid ad, but Simone Giertz is awesome so she gets a free pass.)

https://youtube.com/shorts/cq0wJWQmVE8

It’s an ancient meme, but my wife and I still dissolve into giggles at “I think they prefer the term ‘white people’.”

This¹ popped into my feed again, and I want to add something else: being a bit shit at stuff and doing it anyway is specifically a radical, anti-capitalist act. ✊🏻 An underlying reason you want to do things well is because you’ve internalised the lesson that stuff only has value if it literally has economic value – if you can sell it.

Post your wonky drawings. Throw an ungainly pot. Make sub-par dinners. You’re literally smashing the system. ♥️

¹ From @ITOmarHernandez, reposted by @girlonthenet

They’ve figured out the secret of ancient Roman concrete’s durability! And it’s really cool! https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106