Kat S

GenX, autistic, agender transfem dyke. Goth and aspiring musician/artist. At least as feline as the profile pic implies.

"I'm trying to figure out which scifi novel you stepped out of"
~ screwlisp

"Adorably dense"
~ The Witch of Crow Briar

I miss crows. Crows are nice.

Follow requests are subject to a vibe-check to weed out bots, trolls, troublemakers and wet blankets. An empty bio and no/minimal posting history makes you look like a bot or a sockpuppet.

Profile picture: a charcoal sketch of a cat sitting on a tree-stump, looking away from the viewer.
The cat's head is tilted in a way that makes it look contemplative but, honestly, she probably just slipped a mental cog and now her brain is in some kind of phantom neutral.

Pronouns: She/her
Location: Madrid, Spain (UTC+1)
Languages: EN, ES

Public Key

npub1fm6ky5dz8aalklk2g7y2yh4g79usv78ka9exql48hga07nxknssq9wp5es

NIP-05 Address

kats_at_chaosfem.tw@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyaatz2x3r77lm0m9y0z9zt650z7gx0rmwjunq06nm5whlfntfcgqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsraqg49

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1fm6ky5dz8aalklk2g7y2yh4g79usv78ka9exql48hga07nxknssq9wp5es

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Last Notes

2026-06-04 15:16:06 UTC

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Ironic, no?

2026-05-19 12:46:02 UTC

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I've just had a vision of somebody blending Lovecraft's xenophobic anxiety with the hand-wringing and wittering at the beginning of Moby Dick*, and that is truly the stuff of nightmares.
*I say "the beginning" because a chapter and a half was all I could stand.

2026-04-29 08:25:51 UTC

After a week or so on gel, I've noticed my skin temporarily develops a mottled appearance where I've smeared the stuff.
I genuinely can't tell whether it's a adverse reaction, or whether my body is responding so enthusiastically that I should expect to start hearing a quiet "schlorp schlorp schlorp" from that area.

2026-04-03 14:32:46 UTC

Riffling through the 45s collection, putting it back in order, and realising I need to bequeath this to someone, like my FiL left his jazz records to me.
Anybody here remember Knightshade? What about the Screaming Meemees?
And how did I wind up with two copies of Keep Your Hands To Yourself?

2026-03-31 19:21:45 UTC

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Almost secondhand contamination, then. Not great, but ould be worse.

2026-03-31 19:13:47 UTC

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A breakdown would be good; yes, please.

2026-03-21 18:48:14 UTC

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People in cars and buses have mismatch, and some of them get travel-sick. That's before we get onto boats on choppy water. It seems rarer in trains, and my bet would be the comparatively steadier motion: your inner ear doesn't get jostled as much, so there's less of a problem with the fluid sloshing wrongly.
There's more to understand, for sure, and this is the kind of research that could give us deeper insights into the mechanisms that are involved.
I'm still confused that nobody's thought to look at the fact that it's replacing your stereoscopic input, because it's *right there*, and I've seen references to that fact since the first systems that even tried to implement VR. For me, we're going back to the '90s.
AR vs VR might be a fruitful line of comparison, too.

2026-03-21 17:55:54 UTC

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Oh. Could be that I glossed over something that seemed obvious.
An external monitor is an object within your field of view, as observed via (in the default, assumed case) stereoscopic vision.
A headset *replaces your entire field of vision* with its own stereoscopic set of input. It's no longer something you're looking at, but something that mediates your vision. Very different experience, even if my own experience with it is ancient.

2026-03-21 17:32:27 UTC

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I looked for that before writing that reply. What reference did I miss?

2026-03-21 08:58:07 UTC

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I thought it was well established.
It's the discrepancy between input from your eyes and the balance organs in your ears. This is characteristic of some types of poisoning, so the body's response is to purge the stomach in case it was something you swallowed.
Seasickness has a similar mechanism, IIRC.
Solution: responsiveness to your head movements has to be prioritised over absolutely everything else, including polygon count, when representing a world you're navigating. It has to be immediate and precise, in terms of direction, speed and distance.
If it's just showing a spreadsheet straight in front of you regardless of the direction you're looking in, this issue is irrelevant. Your reaction to the spreadsheet itself would be the same if it were on an external monitor :)

2026-02-26 19:39:21 UTC

My partner just lamented that they hit "like" on one single werewolf romance audiobook, and suddenly it's all they're being recommended.
My response: so, lycan-subscribe, then?
Dear reader, tonight I may be sleeping on the couch. Seems I'm in the dog-house.

2026-02-22 18:53:15 UTC

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That's one of the hard parts, for sure.<li>What problem are we solving?</li><li>Are you <em>sure</em> that's actually the problem?</li><li>Is this the best framing for it that we can think of?</li>
All these are far harder than the actual encoding, IME.

2026-02-22 18:47:48 UTC

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Not only that, but I remember MS Access being sold as making databases so easy, your CEO can use them - and having to clean up the aftermath.
It used a query language similar to, but not quite the same as, SQL :headdesk:

2026-02-14 18:22:03 UTC

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As you mentioned, "there are certainly languages that have provided some mechanisms for dealing with boilerplate". Where the languages don't provide them, workarounds have been available, from the snippets you mentioned in Textmate, to increasingly sophisticated code-generation features in IDEs.
The lack of such mechanisms seems to me to be a failure in language design. I'm confused by the way so many people seem to accept it as a fact of life and just look for the latest workaround, rather than demanding better language design.
Or am I just being a lisp weenie about it?

2026-02-14 17:55:19 UTC

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This is where I get stuck, through this line of reasoning: why is boilerplate not widely regarded as a symptom of bad language design?

2026-02-06 09:52:20 UTC

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Excellent bit of advice, that.

2026-02-06 08:54:58 UTC

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Same: a preface/foreword would enable you to call out the racism and factual errors in the original work.
You could also flag it on the front cover, by prominently displaying "edited and updated by Dilman Dila" under the original author's name.
I'm not a copyright lawyer (or any other kind of lawyer) but I *expect* you could claim copyright on anything you add.
Then again, if Dover can take out-of-copyright works, and claim copyright on their reprints, maybe you *can* claim it on the whole thing.

2026-01-30 10:07:53 UTC

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He was using ChatGPT as a storage environment for entire finished articles?
That's a horrifying example of the way people have been sucked into depending on these things, and feeding them with material in the process.

2026-01-27 07:31:11 UTC

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Maybe it likes you, and it's checking in on you.
A crow used to do that at the window of my workroom, in Amsterdam. It would stick around long enough to be sure I was moving and OK, then fly off.
Admittedly, it didn't wake me up to do that :)

2026-01-16 12:26:37 UTC

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I love the way the multimeter's just sitting there with capacitor innards all over the side of its casing, like it's about to let out a resigned sigh, then wander outside for a cigarette.

2026-01-13 12:45:43 UTC

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Gentle reminder: the abyss is for staring into, while the void is for screaming.
We appreciate your attention to this distinction.

2026-01-07 16:53:59 UTC

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Never mind moral compass; at this point, it's just self-interest.

2026-01-03 14:17:01 UTC

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With what criteria, or to what purpose?

2025-12-20 16:28:12 UTC

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John Carpenter.
He also directed The Fog, the Halloween movies in the late '70s, Escape from New York, and the "what am I even watching?!" classic Ghosts Of Mars.
I recommend all of them :)

2025-11-25 10:06:46 UTC

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That's gorgeous!

2025-11-23 17:53:11 UTC

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Isn't that a water tower?

2025-11-19 17:53:37 UTC

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The same is true for political power.
There just shouldn't be that much power in the hands of a relatively small group of people.

2025-11-10 20:31:34 UTC

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It's a law of nature, as far as I can tell.

2025-10-28 11:58:43 UTC

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Because they really, *really* want that training material for facial recognition and image-generation systems.

2025-10-28 11:19:23 UTC

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OK, I'm never going to remember the name for these, but those carvings over doorways in the British Isles, of women doubling over and holding their vulva open?
I think I just figured out that it's a warning sign.

2025-10-16 07:00:40 UTC

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Yup. In the early '80s we had BBC micros in my intermediate school, and we were taught Logo on Apple ][e machines in high school.
We also figured out how to make single-sided 5.25" floppies double-sided, using the blade from a pencil sharpener, because the school was charging extra for doubles :)

2025-10-16 06:11:32 UTC

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Yay! Can't wait to see the whole thing.

2025-09-29 19:07:26 UTC

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Not even vaguely.
That rhetoric about foreigners "coming here to rape our women"? That's the sound of predators defending their territory against competition.
The "our" in that sentence comes from a sense of ownership, not protectiveness.

2025-08-31 08:50:01 UTC

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The dot-com bubble was a gold-rush, driven by the greed of founders and investors.
It wasn't met with the same kind of opposition, partly because fewer people understood the implications (the internet had really only just reached widespread public awareness) but also partly because it was basically a rush to set up new shops in new places.
One high-profile problem was companies that threw together the catalogue and payments functionality in a hurry, and left fulfilment as an afterthought. One retailer pre-sold an awful lot of stuff in the Christmas rush, knowing that it would be March before some customers saw their purchases. The CEO basically said in an interview that he didn't care because he already had the money.
It's also important to remember that the internet has been around since the 1960s - it had already been organically growing, evolving and proving its usefulness.
*Technically* it's true that the quest for AI has been around for just as long, and has also produced some useful artifacts, so maybe a comparison on that level isn't out of line, but they're still not the same kind of thing.
This AI bubble is partly that gold-rush, and partly the latest silver bullet for productivity, but with multiple layers of evil on top.
It's likely that some of these newer technologies can be applied in genuinely useful ways. However, there's a lot of distance between "you *can* use it for that" and "it's the *best* tool for the job."
It's also important to remember that when referring to the software and related artifacts, "AI" is an umbrella term, not a specific technology. They're artifacts that have been discovered while pursuing the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence - and I use that term deliberately.
And this is where many people are unaware of history, or carefully not mentioning it. "AI" is not a new field that's only just started bearing fruit. This isn't the first harvest. The way has already been paved.
We've already had two AI Winters, one of which killed Lisp's prospects as a mainstream language, and I believe the term itself is derived from "nuclear winter" - it'll pass eventually, but a whole lot of things will die from radiation poisoning and cold along the way.
So that's what I think we're looking at for LLMs, diffusion models, and possibly even for tech like ML which has already proven its usefulness.
And that's the long version of "no, I don't think they're the same kind of thing" :)

2025-08-07 23:26:25 UTC

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Common Lisp.
The spec was formalised in 1994, and all the evolution since then has happened in add-on libraries.

2025-08-07 22:58:00 UTC

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CL's pretty stable. Somewhat retro, too.
I think there's something to be said for articulating the spirit of an approach in a specification, taking it to maturity, making sure its interfaces allow for plenty of extensibility, then calling time on the bikeshedding.
I wouldn't be surprised to see something of the kind emerge from RISC-V, on the hardware side.

2025-08-03 08:54:13 UTC

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Alternative question: what is the *actual* intended purpose for all this computing power?
Automated population-scale surveillance seems to be the only plausible answer.

2025-07-30 08:38:48 UTC

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For the record, I'm in the other camp.
If what you want is a feed of links, we have RSS for that.

2025-07-15 05:05:32 UTC

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Technically, tho...
:grins:

2025-07-06 07:40:52 UTC

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Ah yes, the world of visual and tactile art has always been a bastion of political neutrality, reserving its focus strictly for the aesthetic.
White european men, in particular, would never create large anti-war protests, let alone question the nature of "art" itself.
They'd be more sensible, and stick to politics-free subjects, such as prominent white men in whose hands large amounts of wealth has been concentrated, and their displays of said wealth and its associated power.

2025-06-23 13:42:44 UTC

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Having lived in both Amsterdam and London: yes, that would also hurt pretty badly.

2025-06-23 13:31:10 UTC

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If I thought I could cope with the cold, I'd seriously consider it.

2025-06-01 17:20:00 UTC

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That it was. Sorry about derailing it.
And that is indeed interesting; I had no idea they'd made that series.

2025-06-01 08:59:56 UTC

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True, I guess.
I did make it all the way through Mongolian Death Worms, for example. I think I actually watched it a second time, just to confirm that it really was that bad. It's a thing I do sometimes, and yes: it really was. If you want a bad movie, Two-Headed Shark Attack is a better choice.
Or the one that was overtly about a killer crocodile, but turned out to be a rumination on government corruption in sub-Saharan Africa.
Those I've actually watched (and hated).
There are others that my partner and I have bailed out on because we realised neither of us was still paying attention. Or because it was annoying both of us too much to still be interesting, like Happy Death Day.
Time. The difference is time invested/engaged.

2025-06-01 08:50:51 UTC

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Sysadmin! Of course I look for the failure modes.
Blandness occurred to me, too. Now I'm trying to figure out whether there's a meaningful difference to the viewer, between stopping the movie because it's so strikingly bad, or stopping it because you only just realised how much of it you missed because you tuned out and your mind went elsewhere.

2025-06-01 08:37:26 UTC

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Or they'll always be bad, but almost certainly one or the other.

2025-05-31 12:39:13 UTC

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That was excellent, too.
Again: please don't fuck it up by making a sequel.
I'd actually like to see the story behind the flintlock pistol at the end of Predator 2. You never know; the odd-numbered ones might turn out good :)

2025-05-31 11:53:48 UTC

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Predator 2, in the yautja ship at the end.
First instance of the curse of Predator sequels, where the second is doomed to be terrible. At least this was *fun* terrible, unlike AvP:Requiem.
I'm holding out hope that they never make a Predators 2.

2025-05-18 20:15:46 UTC

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This does not sound good.

2025-05-17 08:05:59 UTC

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Thankyou!
I'd been wondering where that comes from.

2025-05-10 14:39:56 UTC

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I can't tell whether this photo belongs in a textbook, or a fine-art auction catalogue.
But definitely one of those.

2025-04-15 09:20:46 UTC

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I believe not.
Mice have been recorded laughing, though you have to record at very high speed and slow it down a lot.
I *think* dolphins do, and I'm reasonably sure I've caught cats expressing amusement in their own way now and then, though I wouldn't call it laughter as such.
But cats definitely know when you're laughing *at* them.

2025-03-28 15:38:57 UTC

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It's when she laid out the twin effects of glacier-melt that the lightbulb went on for me.

2025-03-28 15:32:39 UTC

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That makes an unpleasant kind of sense. Damn.

2025-03-22 13:47:37 UTC

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I loved dancing zombies in the Thriller video clip, so why not? :)

2025-02-25 14:31:16 UTC

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Nah, one to block.

2025-02-15 13:17:09 UTC

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"I think it's just another kind of rain, one with a lot of fine hailstones."
That happens, too. We call it "sleet."
The kind of patchy snow-cover you've photographed here, though, that's just plain annoying.

2025-02-09 20:10:11 UTC

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Sorry I don't live up to your exalted standards.

2025-01-30 08:08:54 UTC

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I think some fear is justified, in the face of a ruler and administration prone to lashing out at anybody standing up to them.
However, even the most conservative have to recognise that it's past time to disengage from any kind of dependence on the USA. Tactfully, by all means, but as quickly as we feasibly can without prejudicing our future prospects.
I see this potentially dovetailing with [this post](https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/is-europe-just-not-good-at-innovating/ ) by [@bert_hubert](https://fosstodon.org/@bert_hubert ) - do it at least partially by leaning into the more cooperative and less predatory aspects of European culture.

2025-01-23 14:01:26 UTC

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I think AI's main value is in being a holy grail: we'll never actually attain the goal itself, but it's led us to some interesting things along the way.
The current wave of investor hype, though? That's the latest iteration of the automated weaving and lacemaking looms that the Luddites were literally up in arms over. It's about churning out barely-good-enough at a rate and price that displaces actual craftsmanship.
It's price-dumping; a bleeding contest that the deep-pocketed industrial investors expect to put them back in control of the labour market.
Oh, and it's also being used to pollute the knowledge-sphere so thoroughly that people give up on any expectation of finding the actual truth of something.
It's the poison in our well.

2024-12-22 10:32:13 UTC

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TCP over MIDI CC

2024-11-23 16:47:15 UTC

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The founder is also aggressively transphobic, FYI.
That was a real Milkshake Duck moment.

2024-11-23 15:20:14 UTC

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True.
And yet again, this "smashing others down" reduces to "taking things away from others."
Rights, liberties, financial wealth, career prospects, and ultimately life itself.
It always comes down to that one thing.
However, it doesn't raise them up, and they *know* it. I think that's one reason they're never actually happy - I'm discounting transient moments of joy from "victory" over others, or from looking down at those beneath them.
The only time it even gains them anything is when it's material wealth that they're taking.

2024-11-23 09:35:38 UTC

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This is exactly my take: an awful lot of fascism boils down to taking things away from other people.
That and a means by which mediochre people can feel powerful.... through gaining the power to take things away from other people. Or enrich themselves by...
It all comes back to that one thing.

2024-11-17 21:04:28 UTC

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An older (pakeha) relative in Rotorua just emailed me photos, calling it "a marvellous thing."
I don't remember a PM pissing the country off this badly since Helen Clark's god-I'm-so-clever "I'm only limiting *paid* speech."

2024-11-08 16:26:46 UTC

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Funny. That doesn't look like indifference to me; that looks like systematically ensuring there aren't any new Palestinians.

2024-10-31 09:11:11 UTC

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Are there many in your circles who aren't white cisgender men?
And why is it so important to join all of these together? What's so bad about having multiple islands?
Even here in the fediverse, I gather it's not unusual for there to be isolated islands of instances, because so many don't want to communicate with them. Why not respect people's choices, and accept it when they don't want the same things you do?

2024-10-27 13:09:41 UTC

Adventures with Google's creepiness on Android continue: I found an entire new section of settings, where I have to tell it not to "learn from this app" - individually, per app.
I'm at the point of shopping for a physical metronome, and seriously considering buying a physical navigation device, just to keep even that data out of Google's (easy) reach.
On that note, is anybody working on an OSM-based equivalent to Garmin/TomTom?

2024-10-19 14:08:33 UTC

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Demonstrating that there's plenty of magic in science.

2024-10-16 20:28:45 UTC

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Is he not already pretty much out of the picture?
Or do I just hang out in the right/wrong circles?

2024-09-26 15:02:46 UTC

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Often. I feel like I've scrambled my way to a good place in life, only to look around and discover there's an entire network of people setting fire to the future.
I'm basically running on defiance, at this point.

2024-09-25 17:43:26 UTC

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I've heard rumours that it's called emacs :)

2024-09-20 09:49:34 UTC

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And that's why I make a point of referring to myself as an immigrant, in that context.

2024-09-15 17:26:45 UTC

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I like it.
In fact, I was just thinking this morning how much I'd like to be able to include POST-style content with a GET request, just to make more complicated queries feasible.

2024-09-14 11:44:16 UTC

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I love the way you've used it here.

2024-08-23 20:49:38 UTC

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What recorder?

2024-08-18 16:02:35 UTC

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The part about German being the other language. I was informed in very clear terms that it was a blend of Latin and Frisian. TBF, Frisian is pretty English-like, and there's been a lot of exchange between (normal) Dutch and English.
Then again, I'm not a linguistic historian, I'm well aware of the provincial pride involved, and I personally side with the German theory.
...unless there's a Frisian in the room and I don't have a professional linguist for backup :)

2024-08-18 08:27:41 UTC

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Say that around a Frisian, and you'll be corrected sharply about the "German" part.
That's one mistake I'll try not to repeat.

2024-08-15 11:56:32 UTC

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The dagger-footed angrysaurus does not want to be your friend.

2024-08-13 19:39:01 UTC

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I'm one of the people who talk smack about them.
If your flight is direct, you'll probably be fine.
This time last year, they delayed our luggage on the second flight of a 2-hop outbound trip.
They were quite communicative about it... in the most useless way. They strung us along for two days before we gave up and just bought replacement stuff for the trip.
I genuinely don't know whether they were lying or just totally disorganised, but it took over a month to get my luggage back. As far as I can tell, it had been sitting at Madrid Barajas for 3-4 weeks, before I finally asked the right questions of the right person at the right moment. Several hours after I went in and picked it up in person, I was notified that they'd authorised its delivery to my home address.
There's more from that trip, but you get the idea. I'm never flying Lufthansa again. I'd rather drive to Hannover and back.

2024-08-04 18:48:07 UTC

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I'm hearing a rhyme with "I'm too intelligent to be racist/sexist/*ist" here.
Same pattern.

2024-08-04 14:59:03 UTC

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Weren't they more of a Boomer thing?
No shade here; I just always saw them as something from the previous generation. Or is this a late-GenX vs early-GenX thing?

2024-08-04 14:32:29 UTC

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"Guess I'm gonna have to buy the White Album again..."

2024-08-02 17:09:02 UTC

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:Alan Rickman voice: *Miners*, not minors!

2024-07-31 19:11:59 UTC

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I'm guessing he'd just look at you for a moment, then ask "*that* is what you have questions about?!"

2023-09-18 19:23:33 UTC

I'm just going to start blocking people who say "bullying (people I don't like) is good."
To restate: if you're punching *up*, it's not bullying. Pick a different word.
"Bullying" is punching *down* against people who can't fight back. If that's what you're proud of, I'm here to throw you under the next available bus.