Notices by Mx Amber Alex (she/it) (amberage@eldritch.cafe)

What a week huh

Next in the non-stop onslaught of shit going wrong: my beautiful, new shoes have cracks. The leather is tearing.

Life just doesn't stop kicking me when I'm down. Every week, there's a new catastrophe.

That now makes two bad health news, one cancelled nice thing, and one favourite belonging destroyed, all in under two weeks.

@siege will we see you anywhere else after Octodon sunsets?

putting the ho in mahogany

mahogamy

@hakan_geijer a weapon the user is not familiar with is a danger to themself and everyone around them. Someone who can't draw reliably will have the gun wrestled from them.

"Only aim if you're prepared to shoot" is the inviolate rule of firearm safety.

And under stress, all that gets 10x harder. I've had the opportunity to fire a gun in a recreational, supervised setting a few years ago and I got the hang of it pretty quickly. Now last month, I nearly got robbed at night and had to leg it out of there and I barely managed to get my phone from the pocket with how badly my hands were shaking and my heart was racing.

In dangerous situations, thinking is hard. Muscle memory is what saves lives.

Sure, maybe make it 50/50 hours instead of 100/100 hours, but either way, it takes a substantial commitment of time and associated costs to become proficient enough with any weapon – knife, club, pepper spray, gun, martial arts – to reliably employ it under real self-defence conditions.

I'm all for targets of fascism arming themselves to defend their lives and communities, but someone who shoots themself in the foot and then drops the gun or jams it doesn't save anything.

@hakan_geijer and crucially, while "just shoot to scare them off" might work against opportunistic wannabe-bashers, it certainly won't work against neonazi militias who roll up with military-grade gear and 100s of hours of range training live fire doosmday larping under their belts. If your threat model is "Hank McRedneck who wants to punch me in a Walmart parking lot", sure, just flashing the gun might work. But that's not the only threat.

@hakan_geijer a gun is an investment. You need to put in ~100 hours at the range, which costs money and ammunition. You need to put in another 100 hours dry fire practice learning to draw and aim rapidly.

Sadly, "people who really need a gun in the future" and "people who can afford all that time and money" has very little overlap. And "people who can afford a gun" and "people who will look away rather than intervene" is a fucking circle.

Hab ich schonmal erwähnt, wie falsch "mastodon.de" aussieht? Das hat einfach so kartoffelige Vibes. Völlig unabhängig von der eigentlichen Instanz.

@annika not a Tumblr user?

Pretty sure I asked before, but can anyone recommend a good #Peertube instance?

"Good" meaning:

• stable, no downtime every other week
• well moderated, strong blocklist
• reliable future (i.e. won't disappear all of a sudden – more than one person can run it, funds secured, etc.)

@HauntedOwlbear @babble_endanger if a trans person says hey do you wanna join my matrix server do NOT agree

it is NOT code for sex they WILL message could not be decrypted

@HauntedOwlbear but doctor, I am U-haul lesbians! /jk

@annika it is. latest 4.3 beta

Whoever came up with those radio buttons that you can barely tell are checked?

EUUUUUGEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNN

@DelphineUnseen and usually there are better words.

Ignorant, reckless, irresponsible, inconsiderate, hot-headed, absurd, ridiculous, or sometimes just downright evil.

@brecht @bastianallgeier scientific findings are often contrary to "common sense", aka people's gut feeling. And elections are won on gut feeling. So by nature of their job, politicians mustn't be too receptive to science.

@brecht @bastianallgeier "professional" politicians in general tend to be very anti-science. Science consistently proves their pet policies – from trickle down economics to increased policing, killing the welfare state, etc. – are counterproductive, so it seems to be an unwritten requirement for politicians to be anti-science.

I said years back that COVID could have been an unprecedented chance for Trump. He could have campaigned heavily on "I, the good American, and our good old American know-how, will protect you from the filthy China virus and keep our country safe".

But the price would have been acknowleding that scientists were right about COVID, and that price was too high.

Discrediting science and spreading the idea that scientific findings are just another opinion that can be ignored is a key project across virtually all political parties. Germany's Die Linke did it when it embraced the anti-trans moral panic, the SPD for their anti-welfare and anti-labour policies, the FDP did it to continue their "tax gifts to the rich" course even before they started catering to nazi voters, the CDU does it for just about everything they do.

Even the Greens do it to justify their heavy pro-policing stance. And the fact they keep acting as if politics is a genuine contest between people who want the best for the country and engage the AfD nazis as if they're serious shows they believe it, too, and aren't just eschewing political science to further their careers.

What I feared for a long time finally happened: my bank just bricked my online banking.

They rolled out a mandatory update for the 2FA app and, that's my guess at least, pulled Windows 7 support.

I have a laptop here that has a top of the line, state of the art, up to date Linux on it. But unfortunately, my bank doesn't have a Linux app.

This shit should be illegal.

To complain about the fact that they mandate Windows 11 (and are apparently wholly unconcerned with Windows Recall), I had to agree to a ton of cookies.

Data protection is apparently not valued at all at this bank.