salith @salith@computerfairi.es

Urg... cross-contamination of mushrooms is doing a number on my guts :(

Transition feels like Bilbo felt when he left his house to fight the dragon.

You've got no idea what you're doing, you're clearly the wrong person to do it, and you're surrounded by all these weird new friends who make your old friends and family very uncomfortable. And yet, you do it anyway. You're a bit uncomfortable too, about these new companions, but something draws you to them. You walk out the front door and go on the adventure of a lifetime. When you finally do come back and see some of those old friends and family again, they hardly recognize you.

As you begin to settle back into cisiety as your new self, you realize that your life will never be the same. You have an experience now that, while it piques others curiosity, few around you share. You can tell the odd story over drinks and a few will listen, some may even want an adventure if their own, but most will never understand or even care.

On the odd occasion when one of your old traveling buddies shows up for a visit, you stay up all night talking and have the time of your life. Drinks are shared and stories aplenty. There's a bond there that's stronger than blood. You really don't care that your friends and neighbors look at them funny as they enter and leave your house. None of them get it anyway.

That is transition.

Fortify.

I dig it.

Watch a video earlier where a Chicago PD officer screws up, mainly runs away shooting, jams their gun, fails and mishandles it while clearing it.

YTuber: “This is what happens when you defund the police”.

Me: let me fact check that…

Oh Chicago PD actually had their funding increased. In fact their budget is in surplus right now. Clearly none of that went on training, big hikes on salaries and new toys though.

@MeiLin @cstross

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[Kung Fu Monkey -- Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009]
John Rogers

Source code for Infocom’s original interpreters released: with little fanfare, Andrew Plotkin uploaded a trove of newly-discovered source code for various 1980s computers to GitHub https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/11/infocoms-ingenious-code-porting-tools-for-zork-and-other-games-have-been-found/

Just remembered this amazing quote from Sir Terry Pratchett, about Tolkien and fantasy:

"J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”

It's not much, but I'll take it.

Wanna know what being #disabled is like? Companies making wheelchairs that don't meet minimum durability standards, getting away with it, and charging for constant repairs in a planned obsolescence model while we suffer.

“Independent testing has shown that manual wheelchairs and power wheelchairs commonly do not pass minimum durability standards outlined by ANSI/RESNA (RESNA is the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America, which creates minimum standards for mobility devices for ANSI, or the American National Standards Institute). One of the big takeaways that was neutral to manufacturers is that, for the 10 most frequently prescribed wheelchair models in the sample, repairs exceeded 50 percent across all of them.”

https://sci-bc.ca/breakdown-blues-wheelchair-repairs/

I see a lot of talk about the benefits of uBlock Origin, but I feel a piece of advice gets overlooked. It's definitely worth enabling the Javascript blocking feature too - it defeats the majority of paywall nagging and other popups. Looks like this in the settings:

I have to tell him that, because he refused to give his CC info to the "subscription cancellation" phone number he called (fake tech support scammers) *after* he let them into his PC, they nuked his files and programs on top of locking out his account with the password hint "call".

Please stress to them that if they let someone they don't know and you haven't vetted connect to their PC, it's already game over.

Folks, if you have any computer-illiterate friends and relatives you're on good terms with, please educate them about fake invoice emails.

The owner of one of my tech support patients tried to reverse a (nonexistent) $400 support subscription charge by calling the 1-800 number on a (fake) Geek Squad invoice.