WASHINGTON—Claiming the fantastical creatures were “way too cool” to leave their investigation to a handful of so-called experts, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The scariest part about this, is that with how upside down things are today and how bat shit crazy the current administration is, I could see this headline being just as at home on NBC or CNN as I could on The Onion.
I've spoken to eight delivery drivers from that company now. Mostly they were picking fights with customers.
One had worked at Longbridge, couldn't find work after. Wife left him, took both his kids. Gambling and Crypto/NFT debts. Robbed by dodgy bosses. From "a job for life" to "deliveries fill the gaps between building gigs".
25p to £1 a parcel. 300 to hit minimum wage. 8am to 10pm.
How is that not exploitation? It's OK because some rich Dutchman runs the company?
"I voted Reform the other day. I'm sick of wages being so low because the foreigners will do it cheap."
I said Farage reminded me of someone I once knew, a compulsive liar. "Aren't they all? I voted for Labour with Corbyn. But they abandoned us when they threw him out."
Asked him what he actually wanted.
"What everyone wants. Something that pays the bills. Play footy with my lad. No wolves at the door. A life."
There is no amount of hardship that will make me believe RUK's lies. Fascism comes in as your friend.
However I believe the country is packed to the rafters with people like your Longbridge delivery driver.
Barely noticed by the Westminster machine and on the occasions they are; they are despised. Labour was the party that represented people like that and they have had even that taken away from them. Now they have nothing to lose.
Their numbers are growing by the day as late-stage-capitalism creates more and more of them. What happens when there are multiple millions of them?
Liberal Democracy in this country (and the entire western world it seems) is in deep trouble and (judging from the attitude of Starmer) would rather go down in flames (and taking minorities like us with it) than break bread with folk of average means and try to come to some settlement for them. So hated are they by the North London set.
@avon_deer I think the solution remains entirely obvious and if people get the option for a choice that does deliver what they want in life, what they actually want, they will take it.
Labour/The Liberals have ensconced themselves deeply in the world divorced from the concerns of the people they used to represent and cloak themselves in the language of tolerance while continuing to be massively exploitative. Which has of course left a gap for the right-wingers.
Blair, Badenoch and Farage…three different parties, all raging against science, all saying ‘fixing #ClimateBreakdown is too expensive…so we just will condemn you and your children to being toast, without saying the bad bit out loud’
The EU is introducing an energy label for phones, together with mandatory requirements for phones sold in the EU;
- 5 years of software updates (AFTER they stop selling the device in the EU)
- providing important hardware parts (during sale and for 7 years after), including free software (if needed), to every repair shop, within 5-10 business days
- batteries have to make 800 charging cycles and still be above 80% original capacity
And on top of that, phones and tablets need this energy label from 20 June 2025, which also includes a fall damage durability and repairability score.
Here's to the people who will tell management that something is dumb once and then when they're told to do it regardless will do it /exactly/ as they are told to do. May they always smile wryly when their prophecy of dumbness is fulfilled.
The rapid pivot the TERFs are attempting to recast the SC ruling from 'you can exclude trans people' to 'you must exclude trans people' is the first thing that must be challenged. It is not now illegal to allow trans women into a women's space.
I learned recently that it always happens at night because then the room temperature goes down and therefore the battery voltage too, bringing it below the "low battery" level. #makessense
@mwl I actually read up on why smoke detectors go off in the middle of the night. I can't recall the details, but it was temperature related. So at 3am, when the house is at 68 degrees, the "low battery" detection fires off. Cali requires one in every room, and my bedroom had a vaulted ceiling. 3am, it goes off, 20-feet in the air...
Kirk Johnson’s documentary short follows two young men, one of whom is driven to distraction by a nearby dying smoke alarm, on their quest to make things right.
Not pressing the test button. Not pressing the test button !
Afraid it does not stop beeping after a test. It did happen in previous home.
And the smoke detectors the installed in this home does not have repalceable battery. But io think the go silent when you pull them off the socket and activate a switch.
Maybe there is someone out there watching us back, we can't be alone here. But somehow, looking up makes things feel a little lighter.
A portrait of Koda , the wah, done during TFF's Artists Alley.
It was my first acrylic painting done at an artists alley during a convention ever. It took me some hours more than when I work on these on my studio, there are so many (good) distractions, people saying hi, cute fursuits that I can't hug because I have my hands full of painting, and even questions about the acrylics I was doing and about art in general. It was a very good experience, and something way different than when I'm just sketching.
This time I didn't record any time-lapse, hard to do that at a convention while doing many things at the same time. It would be possible, but annoying.
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I had shared this piece 15 days ago on Patreon and Ko-Fi, as same I'm already sharing pictures that it will take some weeks to share on my galleries and social media. If you want to see them before I post them, and also get them on their full resolution, and at the same time supporting me to keep doing what I do: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
So let me get this straight. Irish rap group Kneecap has to apologise for saying 'The only good Tory is a dead Tory' but the actual Tories are allowed to say trans women are not women, trans men are not men, to sell off the tax payer's property to drive up prices, to allow rax evasion, to ration the NHS, to make the grinding poverty of the UK even worse, to insight hatred and violence and, you know, murder people by forcing through policies that shorten lives, using rhe security services and failing to rein in those same security services and they get to bring the full power of the state against anyone pointing that out.
Cancel culture is alive and kicking and being enforced by the right, and always was.
A dusty wind blows through the corral. Squid narrows his eyes, scanning the horizon. But for now, it’s just him, the open land... and deputy BunBun watching his back.
Drawing for Squid. Done during TFF's Artists Alley
I hate to say it, but I am one of those people who is going to constantly ask 'And where is the specification for this software?' and 'Can you show me how you met the coding standard, and which standard you used?'. I will want to see requirements, designs, specifications, test cases, test results, test reports, all linked and back-linked. I will want you to have done risk assessments, and show how you obtained your results. I will not be happy with 'well it works doesn't it?' as answer.
I want you know, I hate it as much as you do. Some nights it keeps me awake. I spend a good many of my days feeling positively rotten about how I am making your life, your project manager's life, you director's life, you build controller's life, everyone's life hard. I hate that will be the reason that you miss your deadline. I am not happy to have to metaphorically stand over you and make you write down and file what you did, when you did it, how you did it, who was with you, where you were, what sources you used. It is not fun for me to have to sit in yet another meeting and tell you that you really have not done enough to meet the British Standard, or the ISO standard or the CENELEC standard or the ISO standard. I don't commit those things to memory, I spend hours, days, going through everything you have done and checking it against the standards. It is not fun, it is not enjoyable, it does not make me a happy wolf.
You know what I hate even more? When I put on the barrister's style wig (though I am hardly qualified to wear one) and put holes in the proofs you have been working on for months, as well as all the code. It does not thrill me when I ask pedantic questions about response time and colour combinations, about human information processing abilities, about flash rates, about information density and this specific case as opposed to the general case in a web page you found.
So why am I doing it? More than I'm paid to do it, by your employer, I am doing it because nobody else should die or be injured by a software fault.
…if either smoke exits via window or eaves that means one of the bishops smuggled in a Sawsall in under their robes and stolen the papal catalytic converter…
Loved it!!! Haha! "Black smoke means they're burning oil, which could be a sign of piston ring or valve stem seal wear. White smoke means they're burning coolant and the papal head gasket has blown." Also, on papal ships, tugs, and push boats - white smoke comes out of a cold engine and black smoke comes out when you give too much throttle, especially at fairly low prm when the turbo has not fully kicked in.
Grey, whispy, pungent smoke means someone broke out the ecumenical bong. (It's made from all the statue penises Pope Pius IX had removed in the 19th century, some extremely bored cardinal glued them all together during a particularly arduous conclave in 1903, and, several conclaves later, a different one carved the penile conglomeration into its current form)
@chloeraccoon Nope. Though there's also the possibility that the church is so outdated that His Holiness still has a carburettor and the mixture needs adjusting 🙂
I've seen your post on three of the four Discord servers I'm a regular on. Given they're in different countries to each other and have different interests, I'm going to say this one's gone viral.
If it’s just as the start of the conclave it’s likely valve stems seals. Constant blue or black smoke would lean more toward rings. But black can also mean just running too rich on… come on what’s an alegory for running rich on Catholicism?
The actual first painting of the series of portraits on this format I did, before heading to TFF. This is for Dahan, the cat.
Traditional. Acrylics.
This was also the first traditional painting I tried to record a time-lapse with a desk phone stand instead of a tripod as I was using for long time. It works very well, but this first time I didn't adjust it very tight as it should have been, and during the time-lapse it was falling slowly, which it looked pretty comical on the final video.
If you want to watch it, it is on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
And the same reminder of every of my posts, if you want to check more content, like full time-lapse videos, WIPs, full resolution files, exclusive merch and seeing pictures before I post them on my galleries, consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi. That helps me to keep making more and more art. Thank you!! Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco
I did not realise there were elections going on today until I took a look here. (I haven't looked at my feed for several days, been a bit distracted!) Apparently our area didn't have elections (so I didn't fail to vote where I could, so that's okay) because they've been postponed for some reason, not because (like our old area, which was in a London borough) we're not having any at all.
Dusk, the raccoon, on one side; Liang, the silver fox on the other. Meeting somewhere in the space between frames.
Traditional. Acrylics. Done during Texas Furry Fiesta's Artists Alley
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If you like my work and would like to support me with few a month, and getting to see full resolution files, drawings before I post them online, WIPs and more.. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you very much!!
Probably the best #anagram I will ever personally discover.
I've been waiting for a good moment this year to post it. I thought in 2025 someone would be bound to use this phrase in public discourse. But I haven't seen a case of it yet, so I'll just post this anyway.
My email signature randomisation script picked an appropriate quotation for the weekend's #debian Bug Squashing Party:
[W]e found...that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs. - Maurice Wilkes, 1949
Pace is slowing, but we need this past 100k. We all know any debate they have will be poor quality, but we need to force them to have it. Don't let them sit back and think the Supreme Court decision is some kind of 'last word'.
Listening to this, reading about what it means on Wikipedia. Does anyone really talk to each other, and I mean *really* connect, really know what someone else feels, truly understand them? I don't know. The nearest I feel I've ever come is watching films and reading stories. A good author or director can actually communicate that. I want to be able to do that - I've been trying to write stories, but ultimately I don't know what to write, or how to write it. How can I get the state of my head into someone else's, so they can really understand me? I have no idea. Is that level of understanding "love"? Because I'm not sure I've ever had that.
New album Divisive out now: https://Disturbed.lnk.to/Divisive🔔 Subscribe to the channel: https://youtube.com/c/DisturbedTV/?sub_confirmation=1See Disturbed ...
Les Fo’plafonds, reprennent la musique du célèbre titre Misirlou entendu dans le film très connu Pulp Fiction.Clip toujours aussi original, réalisé sans inst...
All of those messages went up at the same time and the answer to why is because that's when they collectively decided to intentionally understaff. The start of the pandemic was just a really convenient way of hiding that. They've never restored the numbers because that costs money and people are used to it enough to just deal with it now.
