floof.org
My constituency, with changes, has been a safe Tory seat since 19-FUCKING-10, so previously my vote really didn’t matter.
Thanks to boundary changes and the Tory collapse, it’s now a Tory/Lib Dem marginal, so I’ll be holding my nose and voting Lib Dem on 4 July, because I’d vote for Sutekh himself if it got the #ToriesOut.
It’s worth checking how your own constituency stands this time round for #tacticalvoting:
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/newseatlookup.html
A tactical voting & voter informaton campaign from Best for Britain.GetVoting.org
A few years ago, a kid mourning his dad handed me over 300 DVDs his dad had made of local bands in his London Suburb in the 2010s before passing on. He didn't know what do with them. I did. All of them are up at Internet Archive, hundreds of hours of cover bands playing in a bar, and now, thanks to a volunteer, Ducky, we have them all with dates and descriptions, where known. Enjoy.
https://archive.org/details/hamiltonpubperformances
Today, June 17, is both National Mascot Day and World Crocodile Day, which is also why it’s Croc’s birthday.
He’s meant everything to me over the past 30 years, he’s helped me come to terms with liking myself, he’s been a beacon of kindness and a way to bring joy to strangers AND friends.
I don’t know why or how it happened, but Croc and I are permanently embedded in each other and I’m so grateful for him.
Thank you so much to everyone who has ever liked, loved or supported him, and me.
That is indeed a really cute fursuit ..
"This is the best I can do" ( me and my big plush ) 😂
I was gonna reshare the best parts of this thread, but in the end that turned out to be most of it, and that would bung up people's timelines too much. So please click through to the original site and read the whole thing, it's very relatable.
I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
I think I'm becoming utterly disillusioned on tech stuff lately. I'm hugely aware of the "you like stuff you grew up with" and "you have less patience for stuff as you age" biases, but even so...
Streaming is shit.
Searching is shit.
Researching is shit.
Shopping is shit.
Troubleshooting is shit.
My phone is shit. Autocorrect, touchscreen keyboards, Bluetooth, AI, Android Auto, Spotify, all shit.
It's not even capitalism or consumerism, I'm just tired of arguing and fighting with things I own.
That 168-hours-and-a-bit slowly cycles later and later into each passing week, and you fucking dread when it reaches late Friday afternoon, because it means Monday morning will be written off by logging in, rebooting, and patting multiple Microsoft applications on the head, and you're useless to your busy colleagues until you do.
This program with no icon or name is preventing you from restarting. You click Cancel. It restarts anyway.
Also, how likely are you to recommend Teams to a friend?
Your cheap home PC doesn't have the physical space for another hard drive inside, so you buy an external one and your wireless keybbbbbbbbboard starts acting up when you're backing up.
Seriously, USB 3 devices put out a bunch of 2.4GHz interference and it fucks up wireless gear. Put your dongles on cheap USB extension cables and blutack them to the underside of your desk, I promise you'll stop hating Bluetooth quite so much if you do this.
Bluetooth is still shit, but this one's USB's fault.
You buy a second-hand but still quite new wireless gamepad. It dies unexpectedly at the approximate age of 16 months. There's a listing for a replacement battery on Amazon and a disassembly guide on iFixit, so you take a punt on a new battery and swap it in.
The gamepad's still dead, so you email its manufacturer for A) a repair, or B) spare parts, or C) to offer them even more money to fix it, but they don't provide any of those for a device still sold new today.
Get fucked, Steelseries.
And here's the thing: None of this stuff makes me angry. Annoyed, sure, but I've been around computers since I was a toddler, and I have to solve shit problems like these for myself every day.
What makes me angry is: What about all the folks who aren't computer people? How the absolute fuck do they survive in a world where you can no longer function as an employee, a family member, any sort of citizen without encountering this stuff?
Those people are fucking heroes, and I'm angry for them.
This shit is why, when banks announced they were going to stop processing physical checks and a whole wave of elderly folks protested, I understood. It's one of the last fleeting vestiges of anything in their lives that still makes sense, and arguing about the cost of supporting obsolete systems is an absolute red herring.
It's not about the money. It's not about the tech. It's about kindness, and being fucking human to each other.
Do you work in IT? Do you support a system? Do you work on a helpdesk? Do you take calls, answer emails?
Congratulations. That's no longer your job title. From the moment you read this, you're a user advocate.
Process issue holding something up? Bug in the app? Is a particular system always down? Advocate for your users. Go to bat for them with the teams responsible for their struggles.
Folks will say "oh thank christ, it's you" when they hear your voice on the phone if you advocate for them.
tl;dr: In a world where companies will fleece you, scammers will steal your grandmother's savings, your chat program algorithmically charts your gender, and your car's manufacturer sells analytics about the way you drive without a second thought:
The only thing that matters is kindness, and we could all do with a lot more of it.
Also, I'm going to go have a drink or two now. Holy hell, that little rant has been building up for a while now.
Surprise! You're logged out of this website you were using ten minutes ago. Surprise! You're also logged out of LastPass, so first you have to pull down the notification shade, tap the LastPass icon, wait for some boxes to appear and move about, then you can log into LastPass. Then you can pull the shade back down, tap on LastPass again, tap the one matching site in your vault, and finally log back into that website.
Surprise! Would you like to save your login for this website to LastPass?
Dominos Australia's website having a totally normal one today. I appreciate the camelCase in the second screenshot here.
Not even going to address the derangement required to categorise "butter chicken" as a "traditional pizza" - you work with the system you've got, and they probably have decades of marketing research telling them "Traditional" is an incredibly valuable category name.
My wireless keyboard gives me so many varied and wonderful settings to handle what it does when I haven't touched it in a little while. I can make it dim the lights, or pulse them; I can set the brightness of them; I can tell it how long to wait after I stop typing to dim, and whether or not to turn the lights off entirely.
What I actually want it to do is use a $1 sensor to know if I'm sitting at my desk, and light up if I am, and be dark if I'm not. That's it. Where's that option, Logitech?
This description of a wireless gamepad on eBay is AI-generated, right? No human would describe it as weighing "only 1.5kg", that it is "compatible with games and controllers" and "has an unknown cable length" (I repeat: wireless gamepad), and that it "comes with an unknown manufacturer warranty".
This is worse than just leaving the description blank. I can't wait for the day I have to force a seller into processing a return and refund because the automatic lying machine misrepresented an item.
Oh, and here's Intel's white paper on the USB 3.0/2.4GHz interference thing: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/327216.pdf
It's from April 2012. The industry's known about this for 12 years, and it's been so well-communicated that you absolutely knew about it before reading my post on it today. More shit.
I just deployed a Mastodon bot that posts forecasts for the most dangerous upcoming heatwaves
You can follow it at
To determine how dangerous a heatwave is, it uses wet-bulb temperature, which is the temperature that a body can be cooled to by evaporation
Sweating works to cool you because generally the wet-bulb temperature is lower than body temperature
As wet-bulb temperature increases and approaches body temperature, people can no longer cool themselves by sweating and will die
Lol Neil Gaiman says
"ChatGPT doesn't give you information. It gives you information-shaped sentences."
This is one of the better ones I have seen.
Everyone's tired of the standard test values you make up by writing English words in hex, like 0xDEADBEEF, or 0xDEFACED, or 0xC0FFEE.
But if you're writing in C or C++, you can get a few slightly less familiar ones by making use of the U, L, UL, LL or ULL suffixes on integer literals. 0xBA5EBALL, 0xDAFF0D1L, 0xDECE17FUL.
Or maybe you think those are still boring? Then just stick with 0xDULL.
0xABAD1DEA is always handy for magic numbers for stuff you have to write despite explaining it's dumb along with 0xB055F00D and 0x5ADFACED
Others I sometimes use are things like 0xBADA110C for free memory blocks 8)
You know those anti-censorship add-ons that Mozilla recently blocked from the Firefox add-ons store in Russia by Kremlin request?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/mozilla_firefox_russia/
Mozilla just said, "No, you know what? Fuck you, buddy."
Browser maker decided not to follow Putin's orders. Well doneMatthew Connatser (The Register)
Furries need to spend less time going or trying to go or complaining about furry conventions they don’t like and more… just going out and meeting specific furries that they actually want to meet or hangout with (with the other’s approval obviously).
Been kinda pushing for this for a long while (2013-15-ish? The beginning of the end of furry cons.) but it’s like pulling teeth. Don’t want to impose or weird folks out.
Gaz, Emejn and I went and fursuited at Stonehenge for the summer solstice. Gaz unfortunately had to leave early, which is why there are no photos of him enfoxed, only Emejn (otter) and me (husky).Pippin (Flickr)
I think this *may* be enough info to get the point I was trying to make, though it unfortunately validated another point of concern I had with reachability I have with fedi. As cool as the platform(s) is, I just can't seem to get the reach on the things that actually matter, and I'd prefer to get the reach, instead it's always my shitposts that get the numbers. I don't really care much for numbers and interactions most of the time, but there are cases where I very much care about it, and getting data like this is very much one of them. I hope this changes, but unfortunately with the amount of people I see sticking with Shitter no matter how much Elon pile drives it into the ground, I honestly don't see that changing any time soon. Sorry for the mini rant, guess it just kinda stung a little.
PSA for artists still using X. Stop announcing shit exclusively on X.
And if you still announce things on x, always include the link in every post, because users without x accounts can't see any posts without direct links, or even browse your profile to find *litterally anything else about you*.
Nobody wants to use that platform anymore and the only thing keeping most people I know there are announcements from creators, that's it.
Visibility on the platform has gotten so garbage, whenever someone posts something from x that doesn't include a direct link to the thing its talking about; we have to send out search parties to dig up the links so the announcement is actually announcing something its possible to *find.*
Cute toony donkey partial fursuit in excellent condition. Includes, head, removable mane, hooves, paws, arms & tail.www.thedealersden.com
"UK ‘morally incoherent’ for sending arms to Israel and aid to Gaza, says Oxfam chief"
Charity granted permission to intervene after ministers rejected calls to suspend weapon salesHaroon Siddique (The Guardian)
"Teachers and GPs ‘staggering’ under extra demands caused by poverty in Great Britain"
Schools and health services forced to offer crisis help in the form of food, clothing, money and advicePatrick Butler (The Guardian)
"Almost half of UK adults struggling to get prescription drugs amid shortages"
"Survey finds more people blame Brexit than anything else for supply problems"
After 14yrs, the RickRoll is no more. It's finally been taken down.
Another internet meme bites the dust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ just shows an error msg now. 😞
The official video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. The new album 'Are We There Yet?' is out now: Download here: https://RickAstley.lnk.to/AreWe...YouTube
This photo isn’t shared to highlight that wind turbines can provide livestock much needed shade.
This photo is shared to highlight the importance of trees.
#nature #climate #environment #climatechange #tree #trees #earth #renewables #renewableenergy #animals #animal
Since people seem to be pissed off at me today about private messages for some reason, now is as good a time as any to repost my blog on how to test Faraday containers, which also, inexplicably, seems to infuriate a small set of people.
I didn't react to this the way they hoped. Every time the locksmith guy complained about me, I'd give a talk to the undergraduates on the relationship between cryptography and physical security, using my master key attack as an example.
Which would, of course, further infuriate the locksmith.
Eventually I figured it was time to move on, and wrote a paper about how safecracking works and its relationship to security metrics. The locksmiths appreciated it every bit as much as I had hoped.
![Screenshot of the tumblr post at https://www.tumblr.com/sailorbryant/149429272264/a-fragile-sort-of-anarchy-bad-news-our-boss.
OP by a-fragile-sort-of-anarchy:
Bad News: Our boss locked the keys inside the building.
Good News: We didn't have to wait around for a locksmith.
Bad News: My boss finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks, and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory™. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at thirteen, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.
Good News: A cute girl saw me do it.
Bad News: It was Maggie, and since she's already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too damn small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she'll never think I'm cool no matter what I do. It's too late. She knows.
[End OP]
Reblog reply by sailorbryant:
There are million dollar blockbuster movies that were less entertaining than the rollercoaster this post just took me on.](https://floof.org/photo/preview/640/503535 "Screenshot of the tumblr post at https://www.tumblr.com/sailorbryant/149429272264/a-fragile-sort-of-anarchy-bad-news-our-boss.
OP by a-fragile-sort-of-anarchy:
Bad News: Our boss locked the keys inside the building.
Good News: We didn't have to wait around for a locksmith.
Bad News: My boss finds it very concerning that I know how to pick locks, and tried to unlock my Tragic Backstory™. I was too embarrassed to admit that the reason I learned was because, at thirteen, I figured that was the kind of skill that would impress cute girls.
Good News: A cute girl saw me do it.
Bad News: It was Maggie, and since she's already seen me fall out of several trees, cry because I saw a fawn that was just too damn small, and knows I can ride a unicycle, she'll never think I'm cool no matter what I do. It's too late. She knows.
[End OP]
Reblog reply by sailorbryant:
There are million dollar blockbuster movies that were less entertaining than the rollercoaster this post just took me on.")
Looked at this polling map by New Statesman yesterday I was very suprised. There are constituencies in #Norfolk long considered to be ‘true blue’ that are set to change hands.
https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2024/05/britainpredicts
It will be interesting to see if it does all come to pass in areas like rural Norfolk…I think a change to Lib Dems is more likely than Labour in some of the constituencies they’ve shown changing.
But this will be without doubt a seismic election result.
Who will win the 2024 UK general election?
Ben Walker (State of the Nation)