I wonder if Americans realise just how protracted their election cycles appear from outside. The date of the UK's latest general election was only announced on 22 May, but the newly elected government rolled into office just 44 days later on 5 July. With the months (years) of politicking going on over in America before every 4-yearly presidential election it's surprising they manage to get anything else done in between.
I'm very well aware and hate it. It seems most of the time that it's all about the next election and getting re-elected and all that rather than actually doing anything about anything. It's really quite frustrating and exhausting...
how's that meme go? "That's the thing. They don't!"
Like Obscura says, it feels like first term presidents do almost nothing but set up their re-election campaign four years later. Instead of really meaningfully undoing the damages of the previous president, or trying to do anything really notable or memorable to make things better for anyone. And it is SO frustrating to live through again and again.
CrowdStrike recently caused a widespread Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue on Windows PCs, disrupting various sectors. However, this was not an isolated incident, CrowdStrike affected Linux PCs also.
Tech bros including Musk think they can pick their guy for President on the cheap. But every headline saying they are dropping a ‘big’ wad here and there towards Trump and Vance, ensures another million women put their hands in their pocket for Harris. And each of those women will vote. This election won’t be won on X, it’s already been determined by the decisions of a Republican packed Supreme Court and the criminal and misogynistic behaviour of Trump.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned with Crowdstrike is that, although this isn't malicious, a company has just shown off that it has kernel level access to a bunch of critical systems around the world and is willing to just run code with that access on everyone's computers without even giving it a once-over glance.
So if you wanted to get a bunch of backdoors into things because you're a nation state cybersecurity team/hacker group/bored troublemaker who wants to see the world burn/etc they've just shown themselves to be a great firm to do so with.
What's more orange than orange? Hyperbolic orange! To see this weird color, stare at the blue-green dot for about a minute and then look at the the orange square. You'll see a dot that's even more orange.
How does it work? The complementary color of orange is blue-green, or more precisely 'cyan'. Staring at a cyan dot for a long time tires out your cone cells: it wears out their response to cyan light. When you look at something white, you then see an orange afterimage. But if you look at something orange, you see an orange color stronger than ordinarily possible.
Like Stygian blue, which I showed you yesterday, hyperbolic orange is a 'chimerical color': a color that's not possible in the usual simplified theory of color vision, which only becomes possible when some of your cones are fatigued. These were discussed here:
• Paul Churchland, Chimerical colors: some phenomenological predictions from cognitive neuroscience, Philosophical Psychology 18 (2005), 527-560.
There are as many ways to adapting a book as there are books to be adapted. But something about the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy makes it stand ou...
Content warning: Nonbinary coming of age, and all that baggage TW
I’m going to tell a very personal #nonbinary story for the young people. TW dysphoria, etc. Because it’s nonbinary people’s day and as a person in my forties I wish there had been someone there when I was a teen or preteen to tell me.
Being a preteen is tough for everyone. It’s tough changing roles in the world and growing up suddenly. Peers are cruel. I was definitely no exception.
There weren’t terms in suburbia for the LGBTQIA spectrum when I was a kid. There was like one out gay guy in my high school class. He ran a theater troupe. I dated a closeted one. Anyway.
When I hit puberty it was a freight train I did not want to happen. I was living my best life playing with legos and had zero interest in anyone romantically, even in a silly kid way. I had no concept that the adventure fairy tales I read actually said only boys could have the adventures. The distinction didn’t exist in my head.
It was rough. I loved music and dance, and all of a sudden I started looking different and the uniforms got more revealing and form fitting. I was 90 pounds and couldn’t look at my own body. I quit every hobby, one after another because I wasn’t allowed to wear the boys uniform.
Puberty blockers would have been the world.🌎
When my period started I shut down. It was my worst nightmare. Guys on the street were already catcalling me and making comments - but I had no romantic attraction to anyone and didn’t even think of myself as a girl. So for three years I hid it to not talk to my family or teachers. I’d stitch rags into pads. They wouldn’t stay in place so I’d have to adjust them and be yelled at for unladylike gestures. Because I was using unsanitary cloth to try to go to school, without any knowledge of what to do. Eventually I had to give it up when my mom dragged me to the doctor.
I started binding my chest at 14. I didn’t have any direction or help about how to do it. I ended up warping my chest by doing it wrong and not always removing it at night.
Just having one queer person to talk to would have changed everything.
This is the world conservatives want back. They want queer people silent and invisible, without the resources we need for understand there are lots of people like us and we can have happy, successful, fulfilling lives. I have three degrees, a military retirement certificate, a house, a car, lots of great friends, three black belts, and albums full of places traveled. In the end, I was fine, but so much time was wasted second guessing who I was because other people hate.
I haven’t “gotten over it”, it wasn’t a phase. I’m a nonbinary, asexual human being and having the words and community is huge.
There is a weirdly racist trend where people blame hypothetical minorities when systems fail because management cuts corners. We saw it with the Boeing door collapse and now with the Crowdstrike crash.
There is no mythical "DEI engineer" doing sloppy work at these companies.
It's down to leadership cutting corners to make a buck. A software update causing a crash that takes down all of your customers is due to inadequate testing. It's not because some anonymous minority wrote the code.
@Neybulot Many furries live deep in the Geek Fallacies; it's part of the openness and optimism that makes them so lovable, but it's also a thing that can cause real problems if not tempered.
I remember having run-ins with raiders before, and them trying to teach young furs how to commit tax fraud. When I said something I got reported to admins. Then I got anonymous threats to me and presumably my hypothetical employer (except they didn't seem to know who I actually worked for).
That was 10+ years ago though and I haven't seen them around as much, but I also don't live near them either.
It's alarming to me just how many of my relatives are voting for Trump without even thinking about it.
They know I'm gay, but they're also single issue voters. They believe Trump is anti-abortion. They instantly believe that there's a war at the border, and our safety is at risk. They're Catholic, and they believe that Vance being Catholic is a "good thing" even though they don't really read what he says, just what Faux News tells them.
The right and their media extensions have done a great job convincing swaths of middle America that we're under attack at our borders, and only the Republicans can save them, and the message has been so clear without much to counter that spin, that it is simply accepted fact in a lot of middle and rural America. Relatives on @VictorKoopa 's side have even asked us if Texas's border is being overrun. (No, it's not. Except by plenty of gun worshipers pretending to be enforcing laws with dreams of 'justified' murder of 'illegals'.)
On top of that, a lot of the older generation is very much used to a "Do this or else" institution with Christianity and now-draconian laws from their youth. I feel there's a lot of, "I had to, so you have to" going on, in addition to a need/desire for artificial constructs imposed by some authority necessary for these people to function.
My fear is that their need for these constructs, and the pervasive nature of the misinformation they're being fed so regularly is going to just lead to a fascist state that they're all too happy about.
We're at the point where the right will blame violence against them from people who support them and leverage laws they've put in place, against their opponents, and their followers eat up the messages unflinching because it is consistent with the lies-as-truth they've been fed.
There are people I know who are law-abiding folks, who sincerely think that all of the criminal cases against Trump were politically-motivated, and that he isn't a rapist, contrary to all fact.
1) Votes in population centers count just as much as rural votes. We so need to fucking fix this. It's unjust that a county of 3,000 people can have equal stature to a county of 4M people when it comes to voting, and that's just what the Texas leadership is doing. They need to, because if you just go by pure majority, Texas is a blue state. (Don't give me BS about 'leave Texas' - This is happening in every state to a greater or lesser degree)
2) Find ways to counter the idiotic narratives in rural and middle America. I was in Ohio and only heard about how Biden is giving hotel rooms and money to "illegals" and hurting Ohioans by raising the cost of their food and gas. It didn't provide a link to these seemingly unrelated things, but it didn't need to. To quote Idiocracy, "Brawndo: It's got what plants crave!" - It's so burned into their heads that Biden is the source of all of their grief, that it's virtually boilerplate. The message is received loudly and clearly, "Biden and the left care about other countries and people than they do us. That, and all of these weird trans and gay people annoy me, and they seem to hate them as well. It's a win-win for me and my own biases and hate." - There is zero counter-message I've seen in rural areas. None.
Just crap I had in my head that I wanted to get out there. It's such a fucking chore to have to explain to relatives how they're voting my happiness and rights away, and even more difficult when I'll have to tell them I'm severing ties because their mythology and biases are more important than my real well-being. "I remember back when you would've never voted for a serial liar, rapist and convicted criminal, but somehow you've been taken for a ride that aligns with your own biases." Hrrf.
So apparently, Stripe closed my express account through Artistree because I had one of my commission types as NSFW. And even AFTER removing said NSFW commission type, they still would not reopen my account even though they said to do so and confirm after. I'm literally selling SFW commissions on there like EVERYONE ELSE?!! The worst part is I barely even got to use the damn thing to get paid with.
I'm not sure if I have any more options (continued in replies)
I gave up on PayPal, Stripe hates me, and I DO NOT wanna take commissions through Discord as I'd rather not take customers from outside of Discord to friend request me to do it. It's just too much. So please, if anyone who's an NSFW artist or mature artist, PLEASE PLEASE give me some suggestions on what I can use to get paid with or other platforms friendly for NSFW art.
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.
Content warning: re: CW: US and UK elections