Notices by Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life)

Well, shit.

My ISP blocks half of Europe's websites, because apparently they have the entire fricking Hetzner cloud blocked.

But now that I use a Squid proxy to get around the ISP's bullshit, Cloudflare blocks me from accessing websites, because accessing from a Digital Ocean IP is suspect or something.

Remember when the fricking web had "web sites" and we had "web browsers" and they just fricking WORKED..?

Now, all this paranoid bullshit is just splitting the web up and disconnecting us all.

This sucks.

@evan

As the nit-picker I am, I have the problems of, like, I may have done this once in my life or something, so technically that would be "rarely" rather than "never", and also what is "lunch"? Is there a time-range for this? In what time-zone? Do we mean relative to my circadian rhythms, or the orientation of the Sun relative to a point on the Earth's surface? After all, as Douglas Adams tells us... time is an illusion, and lunchtime, doubly so.

Yeah. I just picked "Never". 🤭

@darnell

Pretty sure the Christian Nationalist extremists opposing Trump are all further to the Right / Fascist / Theocratic side.

The Christians on the Left are generally among the mildest, most polite opposition, whereas the extreme Leftists are generally against Christianity as part of the "establishment".

But of course, MAGA insists on attacking all enemies as "Leftists" because they really want more ammunition against Democrats (whom they also insist are Leftists, although that's a wee bit inaccurate 🙄 ).

@evan
The interesting thing is that I generally don't want to be precise, for privacy reasons. So regional names for that.

But if I actually want to pin it down, OpenStreetMap sounds like a great idea to me.

If your website ever asks me to scan a QR code with my phone to see it, you are BURNED. I will never use your site again.

DUMP GOOGLE.
Find a different CAPTCHA system if you need one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu_J_QBUKNA

So much panic over TSA not being funded, so little remembering that TSA does not make us measurably safer from crime or terrorism, and introduces a new vector for crime and abuse.

@apLundell @mycrowgirl @Fragglemuppet

Fortunately, either will fit nicely broken up on a breakfast taco.

@rl_dane
Yeah. The "time is the fire in which we burn" quote is intense!

Was Soran (and the script, I mean) actually quoting someone there? I got the impression it wasn't original.
@killyourfm

@evan @preinheimer @joergi

The health of the project is really a separate question. If you don't trust it, that's YOUR problem.

Either you offer to pay them 💰 or you... ahem... fork off. 😅

Free software is the proverbial gift horse. You want to look at the teeth, you need to pony up the cash.

IMHO. 🤨

I'm seeing a lot of concern over heavy news today and boosts. So I want to call your attention to a useful, but perhaps little-known Mastodon feature:

If you want to follow an account on Mastodon, but you don't like the posts that they boost from others, you can hide these from an option on their profile (in the web UI) without having to unfollow them.

There are many strongly held opinions on the "correct" use of CW and what ought to be boosted, so this can be a useful way to cope.

"Sinners" (2025) really is a very good movie. People are going to be talking about this movie for a long time.

I mean, no one really uses Windows on purpose, right?

It's forced on you by your employer or your school. Or it's just what came on your computer and you don't know how to re-install or can't be bothered.

I mean, how many Windows users have actually INSTALLED their Windows O/S..?

Same reasons people use Android. Or iOS. Or Apple anything.

I think that Linux (and to a lesser degree other free/self-installed O/S like BSD Unix, etc) has pretty much saturated the "market" for everyone who's actually willing to *think* about what O/S they are using on their computer.

The rest are people who just don't want to think about computers.

Something similar is happening with respect to the Fediverse, I think. If you don't *choose* to be here, then the social media you use will be one of the corporate platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

It's a hell of a filter, that kind of intentional choice. I think we underestimate it.

@HumanServitor

@evan talks about the "Big Fedi" and "Small Fedi" agendas/factions to describe this, I think.

I"m mostly on the "Big Fedi" side, myself. But I can understand the benefits of the Small Fedi. Google+ was like that, too: you were on with a bunch of computer experts, and if you were a computer person, those are largely "your people", so it's kind of nice.

But it's still a bubble. I try to live in the "real world". Sadly, a big chunk of my "real world", particularly in my geographic area, is it's fully of MAGA people. Who keep saying absolutely batshit things that they think are true, because the regime says so. 🤦

It's hard on the sanity.

@msh @Daojoan

Every study I've seen that made the claim that increased wealth didn't correlate with greater happiness had a VERY important, but often omitted parameter: it was always above some minimum. And that minimum was pretty high. I remember one using $70,000/yr.

So basically, ABOVE the middle class, more wealth doesn't correlate to more happiness. And that basically makes sense to me.

But BELOW the middle class is a whole other story.

@youronlyone
I have seen/heard "neurospicy" as a slang synonym for "neurodivergent". Your examples sound like they're being used to be more specific to Autistic or ADHD divergence.

These terms are used by/for low-needs autistic/ADHD people who want to talk about their issues without offending people who think "autistic" and "ADHD" should be reserved for people more disabled. Often these are self-diagnosed/undiagnosed.

Personally, I find the "-spicy" terms a bit too kitschy, though.

Selection pressure on animals that live near humans -- supporting the "anthropocene" concept (defined here as saying that human activity becomes the primary driver for evolutionary adaptation):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ0eQrKF4g

@inthehands @xris @blogdiva

Watching the stargate sequence after having read the book 2001, it's surprisingly comprehensible what's supposed to be going on.

Of course, the movie is really based on the short story "The Sentinel", but Clarke wrote the novel more or less in parallel with producing the movie, so it's neither exactly source text nor novelization.

Which makes it all the more weird that he stuck with putting the monolith on Saturn's moon Iapetus in the book.

It's been a long time since I did hobby crafts and I kind of miss it.

So what do I do?

I buy kits. And then they sit on my shelf. This is sub-optimal.

I need to clean up my workbench, I guess. And reserve some time to do this kind of stuff.

I have a styrene 1/48 model of the Voyager spaceprobe, a wooden shelf room miniature, a ArcBotics spider robot, a couple of solder practice boards, and a digital clock kit just sitting there. Not going to assemble themselves, are they?

@blogdiva

I'm old enough I could've seen them all on the big screen, but I think I only saw "Star Wars"? I was a little young for R rated films, and my parents were strict about that (also poor). 🙄

I may have caught indy or university theater showings later. I saw "Alien" first on my uncle's laserdisc player.

I definitely saw "Aliens" on the big screen, though.

Later I had a season pass at UT that was about to expire, so I watched "Aliens" 20X in a row.

I had the coolest nightmares after that.🤭