@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

chaucerburnt

@chaucerburnt@aus.social

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chaucerburnt, to random
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/breaking-news/gina-furiously-demands-national-gallery-stops-showing-the-public-this-portrait-of-her-have-a-look/

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Heard on the radio this morning: “M*sk is a free speech absolutionist.” [sic] I guess that entails an absolute right to be absolutely forgiven for saying absolutely anything.

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@Steveg58 @gregeganSF Isn't that basically what the blue checkmark is now?

chaucerburnt, to random
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

Bless the person who came up with the pillowcase trick for dusting ceiling fans without getting a face full of grot.

(Deets in alt text)

A pillowcase has been pulled over the fan blade. I do this after I've changed the bedding so I have a pillowcase that already needs a wash.
Thumb and forefinger pinch the mouth of the pillowcase around the fan blade, so that it's touching the blade all around the opening.
The pillowcase is slid off the fan blade, taking the dust with it and containing it within the pillowcase. The blade is clean, at least by my standards.

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

You can’t listen to the part of you that tells you how much you suck.

You know it’s there, I know it’s there — but if you let it dictate your life, you’ll lose.

https://medium.com/the-habit-lab/how-to-ignore-the-asshole-in-your-own-mind-b5763aba2f6f

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@Daojoan Unless you're Elon, in which case you should definitely listen to that part a lot more.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

#WordWeavers 21st Feb: Is your setting a stratified society or something experimental?

It doesn't get much more stratified than the UK in a nightmarish alt-2015 where the Tory party has been taken over by an Elder God out of Lovecraft!

Although the PM's weekly meetings with the Queen have become slightly fraught of late—it's no longer clear who reports to who!

(Fade to strident ullulations of BREXIT MEANS BREXIT! STRONG AND STABLE! ALL GLORY TO THE BLACK PHARAOH! IÄ! IÄ! ...)

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@aethylred @flippac @kemayo @cstross I recall hearing that within GW it was more or less canon that "Cliff Richard" was the 20th-century cover for the future Emperor.

hanakogames, to random
@hanakogames@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

I strongly doubt that your lovecraftian RTS is yuri. #CurationWoes

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@hanakogames do they get a +2 bonus to Charisma so the devs can claim "separate but equal" or did they not even make the token effort?

Remembering one game where human males were baseline, women were something like +2 Sta / -2 Str, supposedly balanced. But stats capped at 20 before those adjustments, and reaching 20 post-adjustment earned major keystone bonuses. So males could still unlock any keystone they wanted but women could never get the Str keystone. But "equal".

QasimRashid, to random
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

[knocking doors]

Voter: If this guy is so great for Congress, why isn't he here instead of you?🤔

Me: Uhh...I'm me. I'm the guy with the face in the picture! 🙃

Voter: [looks closer] Wow...it is you...you look like hell.😅

Me: It's been a long day😅

Voter: Well you got my vote👍🏽

Me:🥹❤️

Donate $1 or $11 or $100 -- we need you. Help us win with 100% people funding: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/newleadershipforil11

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@QasimRashid IDK if you can help with this, but thought I'd ask. I'm a US citizen living overseas. I know a R victory would be catastrophic, for people I care about in the USA and for the whole world.

Donating money seems like the main thing I can do from here, and I can afford it. But any time I donate to a D candidate or fund, it seems to sign me up for a never-ending stream of fundraising emails that try to motivate me through playing on anxiety. No matter how many times I unsubscribe there always seems to be another campaign sending me the same thing.

I already have enough anxiety about election season, more than is helpful or healthy, and other things in my life. For the sake of my own mental health I need to manage my exposure to that stuff.

I want to help via donating - I'd be happy to support any D candidate/s with a realistic chance of winning - but I need a way to do it that doesn't get me spammed with anxiety-inducing manipulative fund-raising emails from every campaign going.

How can I do that?

chaucerburnt, to random
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

A single cat can hunt as many as eight socks in one night.

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

Private jets should be banned.

Nope, your exception sucks.

Ban ‘em.

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@bgrinter @Daojoan @lisamelton RFDS is a non-profit that gets most of its funding from state and federal governments for providing services that those governments would otherwise be expected to provide. Bit of a stretch to call that a "private jet".

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@bgrinter @Daojoan @lisamelton Which is a rather different statement than "private jet saving lives", with a lot of dependencies and assumptions built in.

garius, to Cats
@garius@mastodon.me.uk avatar

I am the greatest escapologist of all time #cats

Black cat, unmoved and still asleep, with me having moved my arm

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@garius more like "greatest monster of all time" IMHO.

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@garius It's not me you'll need to justify yourself to.

(Mine will cuddle in my armpit for up to about half an hour, then suddenly go MY PLANET NEEDS ME BYE)

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

15: Should writers be honest about their politics or keep quiet?

You have politics—I have informed opinions!

(Insofar as fiction is the examination of the human condition by means of discourse with imaginary friends, and insofar as the personal is political, it's impossible to keep personal politics out of fiction. But there's a huge difference between letting it inform the world-view presented by a story, and battering the reader with ideological talking points.)

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@cstross @quoidian I think one of the traps of SF in particular is that it's such a great medium for demonstrating a political theory ("lemme sketch out my vision of fully automated space communism") and such a terrible medium for proving those ideas ("we should do $thing IRL, because I wrote a fictional world where that worked out great").

RAH strikes me as one of many who drifted from the former into the latter without noticing it.

hanakogames, to random
@hanakogames@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

"The average necklace weighs between 0.5 and 1 kilogram. To put that into perspective, a half-kilo necklace would weigh about the same as a large apple, while a 1-kilogram necklace would be comparable in weight to a small bag of flour."

now, I don't know that this is an AI response, but I'm pretty dubious about the idea of 'small bag of flour' being in the range of a normal necklace weight

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@hanakogames 1 kg is getting towards "cleaned human skull" weight, which would be a pretty hefty pendant.

hanakogames, to random
@hanakogames@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

for all that people love to say "they/them is never confusing!", a single chapter featuring this character is CONSTANTLY throwing me out of whack every time 'their' is used because the sentences change meaning drastically if it's a plural their or a singular one.

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@hanakogames I don't remember the specifics, but I think one of Sarah Gailey's American Hippo books used that ambiguity for what seemed like deliberate effect.

I think it may have been a statement that would normally have been taking as referring to a generic "they" but acquired some extra implications when taken as referring to the NB character.

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@hanakogames yeah, this one felt like in-universe character deliberately using ambiguity, that just sounds like poor authorial communication.

Private
chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@chrisamaphone @edutooters @RuthFlaherty the principle of "policing by consent" suggests that police powers derive from the collective consent of the public being policed, so in a jurisdiction where that principle was given more than lip service... arguably?

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@RuthFlaherty @chrisamaphone @edutooters there would still be a question of whether the community consent implied by the warrant is adequate, or if it has to be the individual's.

OTOH, where I grew up, land is under leasehold not freehold, which I think would strengthen the argument for community consent being enough: https://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/curious-canberra/2016-07-04/can-people-own-land-in-the-act/7550166

Hmm how would it work for vampires in a socialist state? Or for renters?

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

Me at 11:45 this morning: “I won't call the customer help line and get stuck on the phone for ages. I’ll just use that super-efficient messaging window on their web page!”

68 minutes later ....

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@gregeganSF Condolences - my wife used to work tech support for Optus and she still can't get adequate customer service from them. Even when she calls them with an exact explanation of what is wrong with their mail system and how to fix it, she keeps on getting the "you must be using it wrong" run-around.

(One of their outgoing mail servers is flagged as spammy by several major ISPs, so every so often mail she sends either bounces with a "rejected as spam" type message or just vanishes silently. They keep trying to tell her this must be because she's exceeded her storage quota. Which she hasn't.)

gutenberg_org, to books
@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social avatar

Francis Younghusband died #OTD in 1942.

He is remembered for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia; especially the 1904 British expedition to Tibet, led by himself, and for his writings on Asia and foreign policy. Younghusband held positions including British commissioner to Tibet and president of the Royal Geographical Society. via @wikipedia

Books by Francis Younghusband at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/32545

#books #literature #travels

Title cover of India and Tibet by Sir Francis Edward Younghusband which is available at PG: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48996

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@gutenberg_org @wikipedia "expedition" here is a very soft word for what he did in Tibet.

chaucerburnt, to random
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

Still processing the fact that (a) apparently nobody in the FBI's cybercrimes division has heard of Starcraft, and (b) they thought somebody who'd been publicly using the same nick for 20 years, associated with his RL everything, would then use the same nick to run a ransomware business.

Like, back when they were trying to catch the Unabomber, did they just look through the phone book for people named "Unabomber"?

I mean, I already knew at one level that this is how policing in the USA is, that this kind of shit happens all the time when there are no consequences for getting it wrong. But it hits differently when it's a friend whose life got trashed, who might have been killed if things had gone just a little differently.

gregeganSF, to random
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

If you spray your whole field with wheat germ oil, mice will find it much harder to sniff out the wheat seeds you’ve planted.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01127-3

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@johncarlosbaez @gregeganSF "Damage reduction is likely to be achieved with much less odour application than we used; delivering ca. 50 times the oil in the seeds estimated to be on a plot every 2–3 d. Past work protecting patchy prey with olfactory misinformation has been successful with <10 times as many odour points as prey locations."

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

1/2 Open Letter from Stack Exchange moderators: They’re going on moderation strike due to being forbidden from stemming the flow of LLM spam: https://openletter.mousetail.nl

chaucerburnt,
@chaucerburnt@aus.social avatar

@williamgunn @timbray it's Brandolini's principle of bullshit asymmetry, but with an extra order of magnitude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law and the idea that one should assess every AI submission on its merits is just a new spin on the accompanying "debate meee".

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