Notices by Patch Arcana (patcharcana@furry.engineer)

@silverwizard You mean the sudden change of useful headphone base prices from sub-ten-bucks to whatever it costs for even cheap BT headsets?

Yeah, almost certainly.

@mcc Miniminuteman being miniminuteman, it probably contains nothing but the actual, incredibly boring truth about the bass pro shops pyramid.

@silverwizard I'm rusty, I thought that was Glorfindel.

@silverwizard Plus, again, now that I think of it, I think the one time we see Galadriel do Flashy Combat Magic she did it through a ring of power rather than in her own right.

@silverwizard Yeah, I'm trying to think of concrete examples now.

Galadrial "pulls down the walls and uncovers the pits" of Dol Goldur (or... whatever the Necromancer's dungeon was).

The PJ movies made it a bit flashier, but the msot they did was the odd flaming sword.

I think Gandalf blew up a pinecone once.

@silverwizard That's... actually weirdly true.

And Gandalf was at least an order of magnitude more powerful than even the Eldar.

Wait, wait wait.

I love a woman in real armour as much as the next man.

But Galadriel is supposed to be a powerful mage. Why is she swish-swish-slice-em-in-half-ing a troll when she could just blip it halfway across the ocean?

Apparently NaNoWriMo are both happy to accept money from an AI startup and say that refusing to "write" with the use of AI is "classist and ableist" in their statement.

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege.

I cite my sources.

Not only am I deleting my own NaNoWriMo account but I strongly encourage all writers to do so.

As with previous years' shenanigans surrounding Inktober, by all means continue the practice of NaNoWriMo, but do not associate with the organization.

(Though, I will say, on a personal level, waiting to a specific month to start work on a project is just silly, and in this unrelated essay I will-)

#writing

@silverwizard We're scating perilously close to the NDA fire but for some reason we're deploying Services and inventorying ContainerNames and dear god I sometimes want to just start swapping labels at random in the coffee room.

@silverwizard I've been reading up on this systems mathemetician named Theodore somethingorother that's been giving me some ideas.

@silverwizard It doesn't even SCRAPE well, silver.

The JSON that populates their stupid UI for the service doesn't contain the names I need for the deployment list as strings, so it's not even really an inventory-per-se.

From a "responsible for DIsaster REcovery" perspective I'm really considering causing a disaster to demonstrate how inappropriate these approaches are.

After three months of arguing with devops that they need to expose the inventory in a way we can crawl it to keep certain lists updated, I am now updating that list by trying to batch-deploy everything on the list, and then deleting the services that aren't in the inventory.

I fucking hate it here.

I AM ABSOLUTELY BEGGING Y'ALL.

If you are bringing back personal/hobby/small-business websites (and you should be), enable RSS.

And TLS, but that's a whole other thing.

Last boost: Yeah, working with microcontrollers has actually taught me just how many of the Old Ways are all but dead in the desktop.

The amount of marketing spam I get sent to my company email FROM MY OWN DAMN EMPLOYER

@silverwizard there's the afforementioned fabricville and a Michaels. If I strike out there I'll kitbash something.

Both are a pain in the hole to get to which is part of why I am so annoyed I can't find one anywhere else.

@silverwizard it really is a maker desert here. I'm gonna have to schleppe to the Weird Dying Mall and see if the fabric store has summat.

Things that are shockingly hard to find locally, niche fibre arts skills edition:

I just want a goddamn embroidery hoop. That's by far the least exotic of all tools on my pick-up list, how in the hell can I not find one?

@ajroach42 The writers of this season know that "Andrew's Life" doesn't make them eligible for may sweeps no matter how many plot twists they throw you, right?

Google and DDG are being equally crap on this: does anyone remember who that person was//where the github was that had created a bunch of charts for basic life skills? They were hex grids with each hex being some milestone for the skillset, like the baking one had "prepared a yeast-risen dough"