Kinda want to go back to when the furry fandom was small and I knew, or had at least heard of, almost everyone in it. I feel kinda lost in it these days.
So, today is osprey hatchday, and though it was the two days before that we went to #furway, it was like getting a great gift to be with so many nice floffs. We got to meet some old friends that we have not seen in "forever", and meet some new people with all sorta odd tails.
The meet brought back memories of the "long forgotten" Eurofurence#4, and it was nice to again be at a "smallish", camplike con.
The #furry fandom has been an integral, lifesaving part of my life since I stumbled over it in '94, but life getting in the way and the fandom growing at an insane rate has made us feel a bit alienated from a lot of the new crowd.
Furway felt very inclusive and friendly, much like how things were in the early days of the fandom.
And some peeps told me some very sweet stuff that meant a lot to hear. Apparently I was not as forgotten as I thought.
Albatross also brought her costume, will post pics of her later :)
#Fursuit and I know it is not #fursuitfriday but heck, were too busy being there then :P
The problem today is that if you start out with a small meet, it'll either get lost in the seas of other small-ish meets with like 15 to 20 people, or rapidly escalate into a function with hundreds of attendees and you've essentially got a convention from 10-15 years ago on your hand. It's the sheer numbers that are doing this, and people coming from all kinds of backgrounds instead of the university/IT inclined crowd of the 1990s Internet.
So, today is osprey hatchday, and though it was the two days before that we went to #furway, it was like getting a great gift to be with so many nice floffs. We got to meet some old friends that we have not seen in "forever", and meet some new people with all sorta odd tails.
The meet brought back memories of the "long forgotten" Eurofurence#4, and it was nice to again be at a "smallish", camplike con.
The #furry fandom has been an integral, lifesaving part of my life since I stumbled over it in '94, but life getting in the way and the fandom growing at an insane rate has made us feel a bit alienated from a lot of the new crowd.
Furway felt very inclusive and friendly, much like how things were in the early days of the fandom.
And some peeps told me some very sweet stuff that meant a lot to hear. Apparently I was not as forgotten as I thought.
Albatross also brought her costume, will post pics of her later :)
#Fursuit and I know it is not #fursuitfriday but heck, were too busy being there then :P
We do need penthouses with a view on the moon for the billionaires. 😁
They would sip their cocktails and look out the window at the earth. The rest of us on earth could clean up the mess they left behind and lead happy lives.
Last week it was where are the #butterflies, now it’s where are the #bats ?
The wet spring and summer are being blamed. That in itself is the result of climate change, but I can’t help but think there is something else impacting our insect populations which bats feed on.
I've seen a couple of bats here. I've seen bees, large and small. But no ladybirds. Some butterflies, again not many. But also I've seen insects I don't know. Things aren't quite right.
I share a rampant buddleia with my neighbour, it has butterflies. Just not many. I saw a gorgeous Red Admiral yesterday, but didn't have my phone on me...
Yeah, it's still here, but something is up. Maybe a shift in geolocation of species as we warm up, I jokingly said it's more like the south of France here, may not be too far from the truth?
living here, in rural France, we see lots of wildlife. From the birds that inhabit the trees, bushes and prairies around us, to the butterflies, dragonflies, damselflies that live by the marshes close by. Today, we saw a red squirrel carrying a baby in its mouth, hopping down the lane in front of us. Yesterday, a pine marten. We have three different species of owl living on site as well as at least two or three different species of bats. The mosquitoes are very evident here at the moment, which is food a plenty for the bats and the swallows.
I think they're all coming to my garden to race each other by doing laps every evening! I stand in the kitchen and watch them for a bit most days at dusk. The dog even sits outside and watches them now.
But yeah, if numbers are declining that makes me sad. Love bats! 🦇
I commented on this very thing last week. Normally I'd see several bats over my back garden at dusk but I've not seen a single one this year. I wondered if it was something to do with a decline in the insect population.
You only have to think about how, years ago, your windscreen and registration plate used to be pebble-dashed after a car journey. Now? Nothing.
As I think someone else said in the thread, there is a definite change. It's very worrying.
Oh, I've noticed a sudden influx of spiders. Isn't it usually autumn when they seem more visible in homes. It's not just that it's a different time of year, but there's a different type of spider that I don't recall seeing in the past. Lots of 'em! They're invading my daughter's too.
Increasing the frequency of patching, of updates, of releases, of deployments does not promote a healthy, secure ecosystem, but a tumultuous, chaotic mess where little to no QA, testing or staging is done.
Every single part of the absolute mess that people think of as "infosec" is basically trash-ass busywork that people think is "normal" because it's what they know.
And then people write "compliance" standards based on that mess that result in millions of meaningless compliance actions.
Start with a secure platform, then reduce attack surface. Secure the ingress, reduce or eliminate interlayer trust. Centralize complexity, distribute work in as simple a form as possible, with as little power and surface area. Aggregate events centrally, eliminate node individuality. Enforce class compliance. Replace security theater with end-to-end individual auth and change management.
The Labour Govt. has launched an ongoing 'structured' set of meetings with the EU, aiming at re-establishing normal regular relations rather than the ad-hoc posturing on Europe that we experienced with our previous government(s).
This is explicating about building trust & reliability; so, I expect to see a number of tightly constrained sectoral deals made so each side can 'test' the other's commitment to rapprochement....
I've said before I'd like the opposite, too: something for desktop computers so I can hit a key that says "I know I misspelled that last word, but I basically got it. Go apply the first suggestion".
Because then I can just hit it instead of having to switch to my mouse and click it, and to be honest I can't actually remember how to spell "alienation" but I'm sure you can, spellchecker.
cleaning products come in like three variants: * normal consumer product, snazzy branding, entirely useless * “green” consumer product, branded as sustainable, even more useless * the blandest branding you’ve ever seen, absolutely obliterates dirt instantly, used as a chemical weapon in ww1, marine wildlife dies from you even just looking at the bottle
Sandi Toksvig - There are only two countries in the world where representatives of the state religion automatically get seats in Parliament. They are the UK and Iran. #BishopsOut
@DeltaWye From past experience ... more likely it's a mixture of exceeding the rated duty cycle (how many minutes of use per hour), and a small number of likely-drunk people deciding to see if they can trip the weight sensor and make the lift go "beep, overweight". Problem is, sometimes they trip the cable break sensor too, and that makes the controller lock the lift offline until it's checked out by a technician.
@DeltaWye I haven't looked at these elevators (I always stay in the hotel across the street) but I assume furs are hitting an emergency stop or fire alarm button.
I expect to see other failures of similar nature to the crowdstrike issue, in other companies and their products.
My expectation is informed by the massive number of layoffs in the past couple years, and a suspicion that many companies' internal infrastructure has been running in a degrading or possibly entirely unmaintained state since heavy layoffs occurred.
I just digitized a VHS tape produced by Yggdrasil Computing, Inc., titled "Linux - Installation and Beyond" that doesn't seem to be preserved anywhere. It's an interesting look back at what Linux installation was like in 1995, and hopefully should provide some historical context for those of you who weren't (un?-)lucky enough to live through this period of Linux.
A seminar produced by Yggdrasil Computing, Inc., in 1995, demonstrating how to install Linux, recorded from VHS tape.Contents:- Introduction - History and ca...
PSA: delete your old Photobucket account now! Don’t put it off.
You know those emails you’ve been getting for a year from Photobucket threatening to delete your old account and you were like lol who cares and ignored them?
Turns out they didn’t delete them anyway, they repurposed the business as a broker of biometric data to AI companies and they’re using your old pictures for that. You have to actually go in and delete your account to opt out, and you only have until Monday, July 22 to do it.
Steps for how to access and use the recovery tool Microsoft created to generate a USB recovery drive to expedite the repair process from the CrowdStrike issue..
Normal folks hating on C++: it’s an old and memory unsafe programming language.
Me hating on C++: there is a convicted rapist and registered sex offender on the C++ committee and the committee leadership worked really hard to keep him there.
just heard someone call the people who can't resist looking at their bright little phones in a movie theatre "moth people" and I will be using this moving forward
Apollo 17 launched from the moon to return to earth 51 years, 7 months and 6 days ago, and no one's been back since. I'm 50, and no one's been to the moon — or even outside low earth orbit — in my lifetime. The (manned) space age finished before I was born!
The idea that we should now attempt to colonise a planet or moon within the time it takes us to trash the earth into unlivability is fanciful, to say the least.
A factory belonging to a Polish snack company Aksam burned down last weekend, restricting its production capacity to only about 35%.
However, the CEO announced that no employee will be fired.
"Employees will be employed in a two-week system. Then there will be a crew exchange. I want everyone to have a job. However, a two-week job does not mean a reduction in salary. It will be full. In our company, we always put the human being in the first place and this will not change" - said the president Adam Klęczar
W poprzedni weekend spłonęła fabryka produkująca m.in. "Paluszki Beskidzkie". W związku z tym właściciel wprowadził rotacyjny system pracy. Zwolnień jednak nie będzie.
‘In this area of healthcare, like no other I know of, the professionals with the requisite expertise are positioned by their critics as having been “captured by ideology” and therefore lacking in credibility. Meanwhile, those without the expertise are positioned as “independent”, which critics argue makes them better able to evaluate the evidence – despite having never worked in the field and having no understanding of its complexities’
Decisions around the tiny minority for whom the option could be helpful should be made by clinicians, not Wes Streeting, says clinical psychologist Aidan Kelly
Mastodon is the world's biggest community of people who deeply love computers and also think that the world would probably be better off without computers
