Notices by Kit Bashir (unixbigot@aus.social), page 4

@cstross well i started to write “15 year old novel” then realized it isn’t, quite, by the 2011 pub date. How about we just both pretend i wrote “timeless classic”?

Rereading @cstross ‘s teenaged _Rule_34_ as a “beach novel”. I reckon you could tweak a few names and publish this today as a prescient vision of post-{brexit,trump,genAI} dystopia. maybe sprinkle on some cryptocurrency.

Like that old trope from the sci-fi show with the girl in the box, we got into the habit of marking our skin at every incident when visiting distant family. “Let me see your arms” my spouse said as, homeward, I got into the waiting carriage.

I proudly displayed unblemished skin.

“How?”. Utter disbelief; my trip to see my parents being unaccompanied was due to unwillingness, not inability.

“Nothing good. I just splurged on racism cancelling earbuds at the spaceport”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

The smilodon kitten that came through the prototype voidgate in the basement has been growing fast. My initial decree that “she’s gotta go back to her mama” ran up against the fact that since the gate was /malfunctioning/ at the time, we can’t be sure of the origin coordinates. A long night swearing at the oscilloscope and trying both my spare Russian-surplus flux capacitors convinced me that a return trip is just not gonna happen, unless the box of FCs I ordered from AliExpress turn out to have closer tolerance than these cold war relics. Look, I’m a responsible mad scientist, i’m not going to drop a kitten into a random date in the Pleistocene without her mama.

“She’s gotta stay in the basement”, I told the Kid, “and keep the door shut”. Which explains why I’m looking at a saber toothed catling stretched out on the living room sofa with our two tabbies nestled into her belly fur, and her head on the Kid’s lap.

“Comfy?” I ask in my best mumsarcasm voice.

“We’re watching squirrel tube.” the Voice bounced off the Kid, “hey Mum, did they have squirrels in the wotchucallit plasticine age?

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Oh. Oh no. Oh fuck me. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck with extra fuck and a double helping of fuck sprinkles. This cannot be happening!”

“Something wrong, Chief?”. I have a gift for understatement.

Chief de la Luna had both hands in her hair, gripping it like she wanted to pull it down over her entire head and torso to make the Universe go away. “Some utter MUPPET left this transporter in level 2 diagnostic mode. A WEEK ago”

“Aaaaand…. I gather that’s”—I’m told I’m very perceptive, too—“bad?”

“This console has been logging every item transported to the pattern buffer. Pattern logging is supposed to ONLY be used for test weights”

“So, what, we gotta reboot it and clean out the buffer?”

“I could do that,” she said glumly, “if I wanted to murder the fifty seven people in the buffer.”

“Oh, fuck…” the horror was dawning on me. “…and pass the sprinkles”

“Now you’re getting it.”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I felt a tingling in my toes. I looked down and my toenails were bright red.

Uh, what. I pushed the game controller stick the other way. Back to normal.

I looked up at the TV. The character editor in “Battle Shell” lets you change *everything* from species to earring length, but I had never noticed the “player” checkbox in the edit screen before; I’d reflexively toggled it to see what it did. To be fair I skipped reading the release notes for the update that downloaded overnight.

I adjusted the hair slider. Oooh that felt weird. I sat forward and long red hair fell down my chest, from where it had been bunched up behind my head. Hmmn, chest… could it be?

It could. I am gonna be here for the /day/.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Graziers love solar panels. The land makes extra money from power generation, while the sheep, cows or goats keep the grass down, enjoying the ever moving shade of the panels throughout the day. The water supply needed for washing the panels also allows convenient siting of drink troughs.

Emboldened by these luxuries, it was the goats who went on strike for faster internet.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

@cwebber @spritely Fighter planes don’t even NEED two wings. Why isn’t the war insurance senate committee denying these unnecessary claims?

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/that-time-an-f-15-landed-without-a-wing/

The Unicode Consortium announces release 17.2.0 of the Unicode standard.

A. Summary

41 new Emoji characters have been added, most notably:

◦ The smell of rain
◦ The feeling of being asked to remove your headphones on public transport by a stranger hitting on you (U+F0AD)
◦ The sound of standing on your spectacles while trying to locate them in the dark
◦ The moment at 5am when a cat is delightfully making biscuits on your abdomen but you need to get up to pee

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

“Aw, they’re cute, I didn’t know you had kids”

It was the small human that answered.

“I don’t, but if you don’t test your lifelog and genebank restore procedures, you don’t really have backups”

The small human addressed their prototype. “All good, boss”.

**ZORCH**

My host placed the disintegrator pistol on a table, oblivious to my dawning horror. “Now, what brings you here?”

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

How to misog:
* neglect study of medical conditions that affect women
* ignore women with pain
* label them drug seekers
* ban over the counter strong painkillers
* boggle over uptick in overdoses on supermarket analgesics
* more bans will fix it

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/paracetamol-restrictions-prompted-by-overdoses-women-young-girls/104645168?utm_source=misogyny

@skinnylatte that second photo “why are you scritching the clicky bed and not meeeeeeeee”

"Fairies in the machine room? Again?"

"The little blighters are attracted to the electrical wiring. They're not evolved to handle so much of it, they get addicted to the buzz"

"How did they get in?"

"Dead cabling, old coaxial ethernet from the 80s. It's gonna have to be all ripped out"

"Anything we can do in the short term?"

"Baits. Going to set up some old cathode-ray TVs in the break room, the fair folk go crazy for electron beams"

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Quantum computation turned out to be bunk; computer geeks were secretly relieved that the encryption that protects global finance didn’t dissolve to nothing. It wasn’t all wasted research effort tho, quantum RAM works wonderfully, storing a million bits in a single transistor (plus its analogues in a million nearby universes). Nobody stopped to consider whether all those universes were trustworthy.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Americans are in food coma, quick let’s save the planet.

Yes I know the process is called “spaghettification” but it’s not actually spaghetti. Okay it does look a bit like a mop of spaghetti on the end of a stick, but I assure you it’s a highly technical and rather expensive graphene-cored silicone microfilament. We call it a gravity-gradient visualization probe. When placed in proximity to an event horizon the filaments align with the gravity gradient, not unlike how iron filings reveal the shape of a magnetic field. The graphene core allows the magnetic resonance imager in the probe positioning armature — NOT a broomstick shut up — to determine the field strength, and with careful positioning, the exact boundary of the event horizon.

It might *look* like we’re just waving a bundle of spaghetti around in a lab full of synthetic black holes in the hope that they don’t eat our fingers, but I assure you it’s a very sophisticated piece of safety equipment.

How often do we lose a researcher? Oh, hardly ever since we developed the spag-uh gravity gradient probes. Not for weeks.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

It always takes a while for an older cat to warm up to a new kitten, or at least reach cordial coexistence. But it’s been three years and a face to face encounter between these two still results in snarling spitting and general stress, especially for the Old Lady of the house. So i’ve had to make hard decision.

No I’m not getting rid of one, what kind of monster do you take me for. The older cat gets a vortex manipulator collar and they time-share the living room. If they try to use the room at the same time, she gets bumped forward an hour. Once they get closer in age they will hopefully coexist better.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

"You know, those things used to just be a bunch of nichrome wire and a bimetallic strip, no electronics at all"

"Toasters? That's preposterous, how would they calculate the ideal cooking temperature? How could they verify the Darkening Rights Management proteins in the bread?"

"Oh we never worried about that crap"

"Wait, did they not even cryptographically sign the char layer? How did your butter sprayers know how heavy of a coat to apply?"

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Back in the dirt ages, computers were enormous things. Some of them were the size of your hand. Really enormous ones could be the size of your torso. They hooked up to household power, hundreds of volts (and people TOUCHED these things!). They were so inefficient they needed cooling fans, like they were some sort of information furnace.

These days we kind of forget computers exist, they're just there, woven into the nanomaterials of our homes and furniture and appliances. Only those of us who write software for them really notice them. This can be a problem, if you've had one rice-grain-sized compute unit go berserk and start sending out spurious notifications. I'm wandering around the building with a scanner, but I did too good a job implementing stealth mode, I can't find the little blighter. I really hope I don't have to EMP-burst the house (again) to make this one JUST. SHUT. UP.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

I was patting gracie and she interrupted me to lick my hand (she ALWAYS grooms back) and then fell asleep on it. And that’s why my homework is late.