Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • So there’s this funny thing about colour. I’m not talking about race here. Actual colours. Wherein certain languages always seem to have the same colours when they only have a certain number of base words for colours. When the language has words for only two colours, these usually correspond to light and dark. Black and white.

    I’m still not talking about race.

    And when there’s three, the third is always red.

    Then if there’s another it’s yellow or green.

    Then if there’s five, they’re generally the other one from above and then blue.

    Then you get an old and heavily moulded language like English with hundreds of colour names.

    But there are languages which only discern only two colours.

    Has the penny dropped yet?

    Decrying gender ideology is like saying that there’s only light and dark. “What’s all this ‘red’ business? And don’t get me started on green.”

    Now I’m certainly not going to tell people whose languages lack words for primary colours that they’re backward, because they have other ways of describing those things, or can learn names from other languages.

    But if someone from one of those cultures was to insist that there’s only two and can’t accept that other languages break things up into separate categories, that’s denying a fact, and that’s a problem.

    And if they get violent and start painting things black and white because “that’s all there is”, that’s an even bigger problem.

    Do you understand yet?

    “But black can’t change to white and white can’t change to black!!1!”

    Not all things are the same colour all the way through. What’s on the outside is not necessarily representative of what’s going on on the inside. This here red apple, sorry, dark apple, is light on the inside.

    And now it’s illegal to peel an apple.


  • It’s kind of easy to forget about or ignore any experience they might have if they’re asking questions like that. Sure, maybe it was a brain fart from a panicked intern who’s having orders barked at them from a powerful individual that they want to impress, but that doesn’t make it any better, does it?




  • There’s not much closure here because I do not know where any of these people are now, and I don’t care to look.

    At school, if you don’t count the bullies, probably the kid who thought it was amusing to take rabbits apart after hunting them. I have another story in my head about something awful that happened to a cat which may also have been him, now that I think about it. He had an odd monotone to his voice and a dead look in his eyes, like he was elsewhere or sleeping and something else was running the show. He didn’t seem all that terrifying either, which is probably worse.

    There was at least one teacher who I’m pretty sure had far-right leanings, with a couple of glaring red flags, but I didn’t notice until I was much older.

    Then, in an echo of that, there was the smug CEO of the company that bought the one I was working for, who came up with the magical slogan “One company, one workforce, one leader”. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in a “Work sets you free” along with it. (This was in the early '00s, and is almost certainly not known to anyone reading this.)

    But as far as shitty behaviour goes, I can’t count myself as completely innocent. There are many things I’ve done, that I won’t go into, where my conscience has since reasserted itself (or ignorance lost, or both) and I cringe pretty much every day. I can only hope the people on the receiving end are doing great and aren’t too badly affected by it.

    It’s for this reason I’d hope that each of the above, and a lot more people besides, would have their consciences do the same thing.



  • “Quick example” might be the key here. I was making some notes on something earlier today and my brain was putting out letters faster than my hand could keep up and I got letterforms not entirely unlike yours. Far too used to typing where each letter takes almost exactly the same amount of time to “write”.

    I had to remind myself to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n. Letter by letter. Make them neat. If you have attention span issues like me, it’s painful, but when the letters take shape it almost soothes that beast. But not quite in my case and so back to rushing again.

    But it’s plain as day on the page where I slowed down. The letters look almost machine-printed by comparison. Next to an actual machine print, they’re still pretty bad, but you know. Better than the middle of that wide gap between perfect machine and rushed squiggles.

    The other thing with typing in the computer age is that there’s this wonderful invention called the backspace key. When you’re hurriedly writing with pen or pencil, backspace isn’t a thing, so a writer is more likely to think “eh, close enough” and plough on. There are definitely a few full words crossed out and rewritten in my notes where it really bothered me though.







  • not sure what they’re trying to do here

    Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

    They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

    It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

    “Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

    Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.


  • My house has a smell like that. I noticed it on the viewing when the previous occupants were still in, and I assumed that it was “their” smell and that it would go with them. Nope. Part and parcel of the house.

    It’s probably coming from under the ground floor floorboards because I’ve never been down there. It would require tearing far too much up in order to get down there.

    My other theory is that something has soaked into the floorboards and has mostly but not quite been cleaned out.

    Anyway, it hasn’t killed me. I have rampant ADHD, but I’m pretty sure the two things are unrelated.