Notices by Preston von Gabbleduck (backupbear@aus.social)

Them: "What day is it again?"
Me: "Blursday. It's definitely Blursday."
Them: "Ah, Thursday."
Me: "No, Blursday."
Them: "What's Blursday?"
Me: "When every day of the week blurs together because you've lost all sense of time."
Them: "So every day is Blursday?"
Me: "For sure."

Conversation this week:

Them: "How did you learn about regex? Javascript? Python?"
Me: "sed"
Them: "Oh I've not heard of that. Is that new?"
Me: <laughed in greybeard>

@Em0nM4stodon @otfrom I convinced some non-tech family members of this by explaining "Imagine if the government mandated that you kept a copy of your house keys in a box on the property that everyone knew about but the government would make illegal for anyone other than law enforcement to use."

lol, someone posing a question along the lines of "after you're laid off, how long should it be before you stop answering emails from former colleagues about projects you were working on?"

Honey, the answer is a femtosecond after they stop paying you.

I've always lived by the rule that you see the true measure of a person by how they treat people in the service industry – cleaners, waitstaff, etc.

But let me add, for those who are confused: you also see the true measure of a person if they do a Nazi salute.

Man who became a billionaire by erasing individual privacy annoyed his private words are becoming public.

https://www.404media.co/zuckerberg-says-everything-i-say-leaks-in-leaked-meeting-audio/

Apropos of {waves hands around}, everyone in global tech who has not read IBM and the Holocaust should fucking well hurry up and read it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Recommended reading:

#Ukraine #Freedom

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/24/vladimir-putin-ukraine-freedom-stability-wealth-war?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Listened to ABC News Radio this morning while doing PowerPlate. This involved a 5-minute sycophantic discussion about the Royal Cancer Recovery and how Kate had done it tough, enduring the "same challenges" as everyone else that goes through cancer.

With all due respect and sympathy for anyone suffering from cancer, it's a load of fucking bullshit to suggest that someone who has no concerns about continuity of income and who has an entire fleet of staff to take care of her needs has any fucking parallel to some poor bastard single parent who somehow has to keep working and providing for their kids while going through chemotherapy/etc.

Could. We. Stop. Pandering. To. These. Welfare. Parasites. Please.

Them: "Let's start this meeting by telling everyone a fun fact about ourselves. Preston, you can go first."
Me: "Sometimes I eat a slice of cheese by holding it carefully with both hands and nibbling away at the corners until it's a perfect circle before spinning it around and around nibbling more of it."
Them: "O....K.... I think we've done enough of that, let's get on to the meeting now."

Random ad on Facebook, "Gift the magic of Montblanc".

Honey, I'm not even willing to pay Montblanc prices for myself, let alone someone else. Wrong. Market.

Periodic holiday reminder to LGBTIQ+ folk with difficult family relationships that another interpretation of "blood is thicker than water" is "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb", meaning that chosen families based on shared bonds, adversity, etc., can be considered to be more important than classic familial relationships – you don't have to subject yourself to toxic holiday encounters just because "family", since other forms of family are equally valid.

New patient form for a medical appointment. Question: "What are your hobbies?"

Me: <skips question>

Gets to end of form. "You didn't fill out all the details."

Refers me back to the question, "What are your hobbies?"

Me: "Refusing to answer irrelevant questions on a new patient form."

Me: "#Frankenstein ... wow, what a monster."
Them: "That's a popular misconception, Frankenstein was the scientist."
Me: "That's a popular misconception. Frankenstein was the classic #techbro who didn't give a damn about the consequences of what he did and ignored all common ethical considerations. By all reasonable modern-day measures he was indeed the damn monster."

@georgetakei I mean the slogan to get it passed into law basically writes itself. "Your fingers will thank you."

The year is 3349. Humanity has been extinct for centuries. A new civilisation of sentient Chickens has arisen.

One such chicken discovers a room with one pulsing light in it. Still powered by feebly working solar panels.

They press a button.

There's a whirring, churning noise and the small Brother laser printer, the last remnant of humanity spits out a test page without issue.

Boomer investors: "If young people would just stop ordering so many coffees, they would be able to afford a house."

Boomer managers: "Young people must return to the office so they can buy coffee and prevent cafes from going broke."

Beginning to think the problem is not the young peoples.

"Dear Sir, we are reaching out to you to advise that your account data has been regrettably exposed in a data breach.

To help secure yourself from cyber-impersonation, we recommend taking the following immediate steps:

1. Change your name. Use a mix of upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols. For instance, have you considered the potential benefits in a name such as 'P3t3r $mithe_'?

2. Move to a country in a significantly different time zone that you can claim a change of your birthday (+/- 1 day).

3. If you have children, send them to live with their Nanna and adopt new children with different names.

4. If you have pets, dispose of them.

5. Failing the above, we recommend moving to a small roughly built log-cabin in the Mongolian Hinterlands and becoming a hermit. Be sure to leave no forwarding address.

Again we regret that your data has been exposed in a #DataBreach and if you have any questions on the above, please hesitate to contact us."

Every time someone praises Wikileaks and /him/ and starts their inane rant about "if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide" and therefore what Wikileaks was doing was good, I immediately go to this.

https://www.thepinknews.com/2016/08/23/wikileaks-outs-gay-people-in-saudi-arabia-in-reckless-mass-data-dump/

@hannu_ikonen I read "My existence hurts" as one of the simplest/elegant summaries of adulthood possible :)