Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 4

Four firefighters, three princesses, and a few pikachu, John 117? The plague doctor without his mask! I guessed immediately, of course and he said “how did you know?”

‘Aight let’s keep track. Our adorable candy-yeller was a fireman, and came with a witch. Next crowd was five young women done up as two witches and three sharks! I said, bhalaj? And they said, with authority: bhalaj. These women will go far.

#trickortreaters

Four mouseketeers? _The_ four mouseketeers? I said this in a bad Dr. Doofenschmirtz imitation, that got me a look.

Holy shit, Easy-E? There’s a kid here dressed like Easy-E, saying “I’m Easy E”?!!! Hot damn that’s a deep cut. Somebody’s raising their kids right.

A traffic light! Two bananas and two Elsa’s, who all looked kind of confused what I called them Team Smoothie.

We’re split about fifty-fifty on the princess/witch axis tonight? I wonder if there’s a historical trend there.

My favourite, bar none, is when the kids in the homemade costumes I don’t recognize at all roll up and say trick or treat, and I say “… you are?” And they take a deep breath, and you can _see_ them physically restraining themselves from dumping three hours of lore on you before they say “I’m this character from that anime”, and I know that I’m looking at the purest, undiluted kind of fan love.

Solid Men In Black look from two kids just now. One of them flashed me in the face with a light and said, you don’t remember giving us candy, we just got here” so yeah, that’s a good enough gag that I’ll play along.

I have just given candy to a young woman dressed as Charles Hayden Savage from Only Murders In The Building. I know that Steve Martin has achieved some number of notable things in his career, but now he can say that somebody in Ontario is cosplaying his pretend stunt double on Halloween, which I think we can all agree is the only real measure of thespian success.

Also the best: families going after a theme. Mom-catwoman rolling up with a baby dressed as the penguin in a harness? With tiny Batman holding her hand, and Larger Penguin Dad nearby? Outstanding.

First -time trick or treater who was about two feet tall and super adorable just pushed open my door and yelled “Candy! Candy!”, this year’s cohort is starting out strong.

Good Twitter was only Good Twitter because state actors and the oligarch class didn't know what it was yet. We won't re-create Good Twitter on BlueSky or under any other centrally-controlled regime, because it's a recognizable and understood system; the dilution-and-mitigation tooling is already built.

What was good about what Twitter was can only be reborn in systems the hegemon does not recognize yet and can't own or co-opt. In federation, distributed safety, and consentful participation.

Rumours from the inside are that the real story here is "Dropbox is killing itself trying to become an AI company without any real idea what that means."

https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/an-update-from-drew

This is both amazing and hilarious. Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson have formalized a novel kind of proof considered impossible for at least two thousand years. The hard part? Dealing with LaTeX.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/teenagers-pythagorean-theorem-math

Lazyweb: do we have a Strongly Preferred Bluetooth Dongle?

USB-A, good range strongly preferred over form factor questions, "has big antenna" totally fine, works reasonably-out-of-the-box on Linux required.

Update! You just have to let it oxidize slightly, for a day! It works perfectly now that the shine has dulled just a bit. This is great.

Verdict: you should replace your trackball with a silicon nitride bearing machined to micron precision. You will definitely not regret replacing your trackball with a silicon nitride bearing machined to micron precision.

I am saddened to report that using a high precision silicon nitride bearing in a trackball is absolutely decadent to the touch, oil-on-glass smooth with the perfect slight hint of heft in the motion, looks absolutely amazing and does not work well at all.

Reminder: Europe ends DST on October 27th, but North America ends it a week later, on November 3rd. If anyone you work with or anything you work on is on the far side of an ocean next week, double check your calendars.

https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/usa-end-dst-2024.html

https://www.timeanddate.com/news/time/europe-dst-end-2024.html

The Insane Clown Posse have endorsed Kamala Harris.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/insane-clown-posse-endorse-kamala-harris-now-i-remember-why-i-hated-trump-3805419

Y'all, face paint be damned there are just not very many people in the world who’ve managed to bootstrap a durable subculture out of basically nothing and who turned out to be decent, growing people standing in front of a decent crowd of inclusive, stand-up folks.

They say free speech right up until it's about them.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/22/24276546/meta-threads-instagram-elonjet-celebrity-jet-tracking-suspended

1 Gigawatt of solar per day.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/world-is-installing-1gw-of-solar-a-day-new-figures-show/