Notices by Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot)

HM Govt is flushing another **fourteen billion pounds** down the toilet that is Sizewell C, a plant which will certainly never generate a kilowatt hour of unsubsidised electricity, probably never generate a kilowatt hour of needed electricity, and certainly cost our descendants far more to decommission than it costs us to build.

At the same time as stealing money from tidal and wave installations we urgently need.

#ClimateEmergency
#NuclearEnergy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gr3nd5zy6o

@ntnsndr you're right about cathedrals, of course. But bazaars?

@quixoticgeek see, this is one of the things I know I get wrong. I've been doing 'ps aux' for decades, from when I used BSD, which is more than thirty years ago. I know I should read the GNU ps man page and work out what options I really need... But 'ps aux' is good enough, and I have (increasingly) limited brain space for new knowledge.

Humbaba was born on May 19, 2022, and was killed yesterday. Why did I choose to kill him? I wanted an animal to go in the freezer -- I eat about one animal a year -- I didn't want him for breeding, and he'd managed to rip out both his ear tags. So although he wasn't in any way a troublesome animal, he drew the short straw.

He was shot by a local vet who is licensed to shoot animals in the field, using a 9.2mm rifle.

Please, someone, check for me that the media in the post above is marked as sensitive? It should be, but I'm not seeing it so.

@amszmidt @khleedril @iris_meredith literally, how could it possibly be simpler?

@iris_meredith at least you don't #Lisp. Everyone knows that all queer people lithp.

@iris_meredith indeed. Significant whitespace is so much more macho.

@iris_meredith to write the same piece of functionality in #C as in #Lisp, you'll use exactly the same number of bracket ({[]}) characters; plus in C you will additionally have to use many other punctuation characters that you wouldn't have to use in Lisp. You will also, typically, have to write many more lines of actual code.

But of course Lisp syntax is much more complex.

@hellomiakoda It's interesting how different people's approach to, and motivation for, gaming, varies. Perhaps you are not the audience for which those games are intended?

@marjolica @jbenjamint in the Highlands there are no "alternative routes". There are very few roads at all, and many of them are still single track.

If you block it up, **nothing** gets through.

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint ... For those sufficiently privileged (and sufficiently profligate) to have a car.

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint The Highlands is not 'wilderness'. It's stolen land: intentionally depopulated land. The legacy of extreme environmental degradation for profit, of radical enclosure of commons, and of ethnic cleansing.

In the seventeenth century it was both populous and -- for the common people -- prosperous land.

#LandReform
#ScotPol

@marjolica @Wen @jbenjamint all of the Highlands is former forest. The treeline in Norway is well above the top of Scotland's highest hills. It is partly ship building, partly iron foundries, that have deforested Scotland. But it's mainly sheep.

@hellomiakoda I wouldn't trust it to come up from cold. I think the boot sector is long since corrupted.

Wanted to write some software today, but my brain just isn't functioning well enough.

But there are no good, rich characters in Rowling's world. By becoming rich, she became a Death Eater, or, as we call them in contemporary English, a #TERF

I'm still puzzled about how that happened. Was she a Slytherin from the start? I don't think so. The books read as sincere. I think she was the victim of what in software terms we'd think of as a #SpearPhishing attack.

#5/N

So what happened? Well, life imitated art. Rowling became extremely rich. She became extremely rich on the backs of books bought, of movies watched, by an audience which contained, I believe, a statistically significant excess of #ActuallyAutistic, #Trans, and trans-curious young people. Young people who hero-worshipped Rowling, as the writer who had written their stories, for them.

#4/N

Our heroes are poor and/or outcasts. Potter himself is an odd, troubled kid brought up by a dysfunctional foster family. Grainger is a Muggle-born, a despised class within the magical community. The Weasleys are hard working and conscientious but poor.

The whole arc of the story (because each book essentially recaps THE SAME story) is of the triumph of the underdogs through unity and collective action.

#2/N

So I'd like to cast your mind back to before Rowling came out as a raging TERF. I know for a fact that #ActuallyAutistic kids tended to identify with Potter and co; I'm guessing that #Trans and trans-curious kids did as well.

As uncomfortable outsiders, they had a lot in common with the position that Potter and Granger had in the fictional world.

#3/N