Notices by Clifton Royston (cliftonr@wandering.shop), page 2

@timberwraith @FlashMobOfOne

I remember from the late '70s and my lesbian friends then, that "wimmin" was another popular alternative. The idea of course was to bypass the linguistic implication that woman and women are subcategories of man and men.

Spelling it womyn or wimmin isn't and wasn't the problem, it was identifying physical gender as the source of our societal "masculinity" problems.

That both interferes with recognizing men as its other victims, and promotes "gendered" exclusion.

@timberwraith @FlashMobOfOne

Back then I found that it was perfectly possible to have lovely conversations with a number of dedicated lesbian separatist feminists - the ones who wanted to establish a separate society without men - because they had nothing against men as people, only against socially "masculine" behavior.

Even back then, I was able to understand the difference and not take it as a personal attack, and for them that made it clear enough that I wasn't invested in it.

Y'know, I was wondering how the media and FBI could be so quickly and confidently describing the New Orleans attack as 'terrorism'. Other instances of crazies - usually right-wing crazies - driving trucks into parades, pride marches, or pro-Black rights rallies have instead been met with extreme caution and warnings not to assume it's terrorism.

Then I saw the suspect has an Islamic sounding name.

I'm so damn tired of this shit.

Jimmy Carter was the only US president in my lifetime who I am comfortable saying was a good human being.

I'm not sure how good a president he was, although a lot better than he was made to look through deliberate sabotage of his presidency by the Republicans, but AFAIK he seems to have genuinely been a good person all the way through.

I believe he is the only President in recent years under whom the US didn't invade or participate in a war against another country.

Edit: fixed typo

@skinnylatte

Those might be the best taro puffs I have ever seen!

@xgranade @ireneista

Exactly so.

@cstross @Infoseepage @Steveg58

It happens that I did some work on a similar system for the Tongan govt when I was living in Tonga, in the early 1980s.

MP/M was pretty nifty - the system I coded on, from a small Australian company, had shared disk storage, but a separate CPU board for each terminal/user, so users had no contention for RAM or CPU resources. That's quite the achievement for a system built on 8-bit CPUs!

Well into the '90s Tonga was still running the invoice app I wrote them.

@Steveg58 @cstross

I had a pair in the early '80s.

They were pretty common in the earliest home computing days when the only "home systems" were S-100 boat anchors, but once luggable computers came along (Osborne, Kaypro) and then PCs, they became a thing of the past.

You could however fit just over 1 MB on a double-sided double density 8" disk. It was a long time before smaller floppy disks caught up to that.

@Steveg58 @cstross

BTW, an interesting trivia bit about the 8" floppy is that it actually came out in 1971, but originally just for a specific niche use as boot media for IBM 360s and 370s.

A couple engineers at IBM invented it because IBM wanted something fairly simple and self-contained as mainframe OS boot media, to replace booting from tape reels.

(I had thought I remembered that but checked it on Wikipedia to be sure.)

@xgranade

Well. This is very sad to see.

I was expecting something like this would happen eventually from the moment Microsoft acquired it. Microsoft ends up killing anything good it touches, especially anything involving FOSS, and it's only a question of how long it takes them.

But that's no consolation for all the people who have contributed to it or depended on it.

@cstross

In my latest reread of the Laundry Files, I *finally* noticed the "preta manger" joke.

I really really should have gotten that the first time around, since I actually knew what pretas are.

Hey everybody, remember when Kristi Noem put into her memoir and then very vocally told the world that she'd wantonly and pointlessly shot a puppy to death, and "everybody" was horrified?

Everybody except for a few people who pointed out that she was advertising her qualifications for a major role in a fascist government, by clearly demonstrating her willingness to do anything regardless how morally and viscerally repellent?

Proposed Head of the DHS, how about that, huh?

@graydon

Your second paragraph is an interesting perspective I haven't heard before.

I'm not sure I agree with you on that - I think a lot of other factors went into it - but it's definitely something to think about.

Oh shit, another Tetris block just snapped into place for me.

If you have kids, get them vaccinated for everything you can ASAP, before the end of the year. If they're in the middle of a series, ask your doctor if it's safe to get the next shot in the series ahead of schedule. If you're an adult, get any vaccines you can or are behind on.

If Trump follows through on his claimed plan to put RFK in charge of Health & Human Services, vaccines could be banned in 6 months.

@cks @ireneista

As usual I have fixated on a small tangential point mentioned in this history:

So there was a SIGLOST signal at one time, to signal that a resource (or lock) was lost, but then it got lost?!?

That seems entirely too fitting, like something out of HHG2G.

@cstross @Menhit

When we return from a trip - usually with a cat-sitting friend watching our cats at our house - one of them acts delighted to see us and follows us around asking for attention, the other will wait for us at the door, then ostentatiously turn his back, walk away, and disappear for several hours to show his extreme disapproval.

@aeva @ireneista @erincandescent

It's honestly a relief to hear that from someone else.

I have the same problem, and it's become a major stressor for me. It makes me feel bad that I'm not on top of it, but it just keeps on and keeps on pouring in.

If I get any actual wanted personal email from someone, I'm very likely to miss it because it's a drop in an ocean.

@blogdiva

Oh you too?

It's the bane of my existence. I have had so many utterly humiliating experiences because of my prosopagnosia.

@irina

That is a pretty unbelievable level of arrogance, indeed. It's the equivalent of saying,
"You don't know what you know - *I* know what you know."

I can easily see why you were left shaking with nerves and anger. My sympathies.

I'll tell you one of my own which was so over the top it became funny, and perhaps might amuse you a little.

@irina

Last year when filling out a form for a medical cannabis shop here (still very strict about access) I filled it out and handed it over with my special ID card from the state.

The guy at the desk looked at them and told me "Hey that's funny - you misspelled your last name twice on the form."

I took them back to see, and of course they had issued the ID with a typo in my name.

I still can't fathom how anyone could conclude that the ID card is right, but I can't spell my own name!