Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

Your last saved meme is now you moral philosophy

The street I live on is treeless and lined on both sides with 4-story stone buildings, and buses, ambulances, cars, and trucks use it nose-to-tail. Ambient noise can hit 90dB at pavement level: noise-cancelling earbuds are a survival tool.

Not to mention that folks on the spectrum are prone to noise pollution induced meltdowns.

TLDR: this guy is a pompous prescriptive ass who needs to be fucked in one ear with bagpipes and in the other with a road drill.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/09/the-hill-i-will-die-on-earphones-music-humanity-headphones

RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/117059179821644960

I did not have "Trump starts a shooting war over oil with another NATO member" on my bingo card this year after the Iran fiasco.

Obviously I'm too optimistic for this time line.

@pluralistic Fortuitous screenshot of my mastodon timeline JUST NOW:

German authorities have thwarted a Russian intelligence operation to assassinate executives of defense companies supplying weapons to the Ukrainian military. One of the main targets was Stefan Thumann, an executive at German startup Donaustahl:

https://militarnyi.com/en/news/germany-thwarts-plot-donaustahl-executive/

(Coming the day after the drone attack on Antonovs at Leipzig, this suggests Russia is significantly ramping up attacks in Germany.)

#WritersCoffeeClub 5 Aug
Share a small selection of something you wrote recently that you're [satisfied with]

From my current WIP. (Text in alt.) 30 years condensed into 158 words!

So, it occurs to me that a silver lining of the near-duopoly of Android/iOS on smartphones, and device convergence, is that it is now possible to assemble a cheap travel kit of electronics circa-2006 that will cause maximum pain and friction for state border guard searches without being obvious. And the bits are cheaper than an iPhone.

E-ink reader, trad iPod clone, dumbphone, camera, writerdeck, Linux deck where you read your email in a terminal window over ssh using Mutt …

I'm very tempted.

RE: https://windbag.org/@adam/117017288466721450

Infantino: "Having listened carefully to all the views, it has become clear that the project has created divisions of a nature that, regardless of the level of support, are no longer in the interest of the objective set out in the first place.

"Our purpose has always been — and will always be — to unite and improve. As a result, this proposal will not proceed."

I see *not one word* about the sport here.

(Disclaimer: am not a sportsball fan, just aghast at the naked self-dealing on display.)

#PennedPossibilities 1080: "Do any unseen forces have power within your universe?"

WIP is a space opera, with interstellar transport mediated via wormholes. There is a wormhole generator, but while it's active it prevents similar devices from working throughout the visible universe. So it's infinitely valuable—it grants its owners a monopoly on FTL transport, which they profit from. And this secretive Authority guards its location jealously—because slower-than-light thieves are a threat ...

#WritersCoffeeClub 24 July. Should a reader be forewarned about any and all erotic content, no matter how small?

No!

It's the reader's job to curate their own boundaries. Books don't leap out and grab victims then force words into the reader's head: a reader has to deliberately keep reading and can stop whenever they feel like it. So any harm is self-inflicted.

@anthracite After I'd ordered mine they released a version with a case that used the tooling for the original Commodore 128, i.e. a lot slimmer/sleeker. Dammit.

So, I just unboxed the first C64 I've ever owned. It was too expensive for 16-year-old me in 1982, but the C64U costs the same in real terms and I'm not 16 any more.

It also comes with 128Mb of RAM, a 50MHz CPU (emulated in hardware by an FPGA), 64Gb of various C64 software and demos on a "cassette" (actually a USB drive), and has a bunch of 21st century bells and whistles like wifi and an SD card drive emulator.

REMINDER that it's not dieselpunk unless you've got zeppelins *and* VTOL cargo airplanes. But Friedrichshaven has both …

It never ceases to amaze me how today's techbros vision of the future they want defaults to fully automated leopard-face-chomping neo-feudalism rather than fully automated luxury gay space communism

@mattblaze @Gilgamesch Being rude to trolls in front of an audience is one of the few perks of being slightly famous on social media.

Nice evening for a jaunt across Lake Constance and a beer in Switzerland! (That's all I can afford.)

A homegrown catnip lotion has proven “just as effective as Deet” as a mosquito repellant in trials carried out in Uganda:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jul/07/catnip-lotion-as-effective-as-deet-at-repelling-mosquitoes-study-finds

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Keltounet/116872903119872127

WHAT—

(Just because something is possible it doesn't follow that it's a good idea!)

@futurebird The reason search is enshittified is complex but boils down to: because, capitalism.

The web is huge. Scanning and indexing it requires enormous bandwidth and gigantic storage. For better or worse we chose to leave it to the "free" market, so our search tools are provided by advertising corporations (notably google) who use search as a lure, to attract eyeballs to ads.

Of course, google prefers to serve you ads than to service your search requests …

/1

Congratulations to all my US friends on making it to the end of your epic 250 year experiment with democracy! May the subsequent imperial phase be mercifully brief and the aftermath painless.