jack

Can't wait until we have self-driving taxis in the UK!

[Current: There will always be bootlickers, unfortunately. And a lot of poop you all have to clean at the depots, apparently. Anything else you’d like to add?

Robotaxi Handler: If there’s some anti-Waymo movement, the best thing to do is to get everybody to poop in one at the same time. That would be the best.

Current: Thank you.](https://bayareacurrent.com/theres-a-lot-of-cleaning-up-poop-a-depot-worker-on-the-human-labor-behind-waymos-autonomous-vehicles/)

These companies are desperate to cripwash themselves, "blind people love our service!" Meanwhile the blind people I know have all imagined how much we do not want to discover barf or drugs left in the cars by the previous passengers (or chocolate that might hurt their guide dogs!), but I wasn't even aware that we had to think about how we'd avoid the poop in the cars!

I can't help but think of the hidden labor. Never mind "drive it like you rented it," now we can also have "leave it like a hotel room someone else has to clean." What kind of wages is that cleaner going to get? What kind of job security? What colors is their skin likely to be, do we think?

andrewducker

1. Mathematics in the age of AI: (tags:mathematics ai )
2. I am fascinated by this way of laying out recipes: (tags:recipe cooking design )

conuly

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don't look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits -
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You'll never know
who's down there, frying those eggs,
if you don't get up and see.

**************

Link

conuly

Me: What do you think the word apocalypse means, exactly? No, nevermind, I get it, you think it means zombies.

******************

( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

This afternoon, D and I watched Mean Girls. Last week when we watched Clueless, and he realized that he had seen that one before after all, I wondered if it was Mean Girls he'd been thinking of as the one he hadn't seen.

I'd only seen it once, I think just after I left high school; definitely a long time ago. (I mostly remembered the "Don't have sex. If you do, you will get chlamydia. And die" line because that's how I've described my own sex ed -- entirely fear/disgust based.)

And apart from all the racism and homophobia and fatphobia I have to expect from a 90s movie (just as I'd been about to go to bed last night, D put Stripes on so I unwisely stayed up to watch the "aaarmy training, sir!" scene because my dad loves it but my god is the rest of that movie sexist racist trash now in a way I didn't appreciate when I was a teeanger any more than I appreciated how odd the "We're America, we're 10-1 in wars!" line is! (Which is the one??? Which are the ten for that matter?!)

...Anyway. Except for all the stuff I expected, all I could think was See why I thought NO ONE could like being a girl??? It's exaggerated for dramatic effect and sometimes the Plastics have to say out loud things that are usually learned by years of osmosis like "You can't buy a skirt without consulting your peers first" but it's not that exaggerated.

When I was newly out as agender, I wrote about why it took me so long to discern my dislike of being understood to be a woman vs. being understood to be a woman under these conditions.

Sharing this on fedi today, my excellent friend Stel replied:

soooo much to respond to regarding that blog post and how I was nodding along the entire time, but all I have the energy to say right now is that I giggled because when I read "I hate all the ways my assigned gender had been poisoned and booby-trapped and used against me," my brain decided that "being booby-trapped" is a great description of someone who hasn't yet been able to have top surgery. Trapped by boobies!

I giggled too. That's me, I'm booby trapped!

(But only for like two more months, heh.)

rmc28 posting in

c25k

I didn't run Friday in the end, and the weekend has been very busy. But this evening was my next opportunity to run, so I took it. Next runs this week should be Wed, Fri, Sun. I am planning week by week, and trying to keep one complete rest day each week, which is usually Thursday.

This time I tracked from the beginning so unsurprisingly my pace is a little slower than day 2, but I have another lovely heart rate trace with all 8 running intervals clearly visible. A friend who saw it pointed out the nice recovery this shows.

Overall, week 1 was fine, not especially challenging. I breathed hard, I got sweaty, I definitely needed to stretch afterward, but at no point was I worried about not being able to complete a running interval or the overall workout. I don't love it, I don't hate it, it feels pleasant to have finished.

Next week is 6x 90s running, with 120s in between. So the total run time goes up to 9 minutes from 8 and the overall time to 29 minutes from 28.5.

silveradept

We begin with something moderately urgent - opt-out of having your Twitch streams and content used to train a model. Because even when confronted with the truth, and admitting they know the truth, that nobody would opt-in to such a feature, they turned it on anyway and made it opt-out instead. (And they can get away with it because walled gardens, network effects, being the only large player in the sphere, etc. The kind of thing that should trigger trustbusters to come by and say hello and suggest that monopolism is bad.)

Also, patch your Macs, some vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited to install crypto miners on affected machines.

Laws have consequences, and legislators in Idaho and everywhere else that's trying to stuff trans people, and especially trans kids, back in the closet have decided that the death of children is an acceptable consequence. And every legislator who votes for such legislation and says it is for protecting children is a liar and a murderer. The article is a description of how laws and their effects drove a child to taking her own life, and how a lawsuit challenging that law then had to dismiss itself because the plaintiffs were all either graduated, and therefore no longer subject to the policies, or dead, and thus also no subject to the policies any more.

The people who wish to work this great evil are sufficiently convinced of the rightness of their cause and the approval of whatever power they appeal to that they are entirely open about the reasons for their persecution and discrimination, and they expect the people around them will not care, because it's not them, or secretly approve and will let them be the executors of the evil they have in their own hearts.

They don't always let their evil just sit there in the daylight, though, and dare us not to look. Sometimes they decide to manufacture a controversy or stage publicity stunts so that they can keep their views in circulation, and do so despite a complete lack of involvement by anyone at all they're making the controversy supposedly about. A cis woman expressed her opinion about trans women playing in her sports league, and that managed to metastasize, thanks to outrage machines and those looking to use that opportunity to express their own opinions, all the way into a stunt where two men who played in the men's basketball league decided they could maliciously declare themselves women and play in the women's league, trying to force the league into some form of action…despite there not being any trans woman wanting to play in the league at all, and no trans women complaining they are barred from the league, either. Everybody watches women's sports, yeah, but this seems like the purest form of baiting, to try and make a sports league either agree with them, which they can use, or disagree with them, which they can also use. I suspect the W was waiting until someone wanted to play who might have an eligibility question before they were going to put down their definitions of eligibility, which is fairly smart, given how so many other systems in place turn out to be inadequate, flawed, or otherwise produce the problem of classifying someone as ineligible that absolutely is eligible. Because it's damn near impossible to define what a man or a woman is using any kind of physical characteristic or trait that won't exclude people who should be in that category, based on that trait. Not that it's stopped some of those same outrage manufacturers from insinuating-to-saying that women athletes with athletic builds are actually men, and isn't it convenient how so much of that is directed at women of color or women whose builds are not the kind of feminine they expect to define womanliness?

Laws have consequences, and legislators in Arkansas and everywhere who pass bans on medical care for women because they want to champion themselves as advocates for life have decided that the death of pregnant women from preventable causes is an acceptable consequence. And every legislator who votes for such legislation and says it is for protecting children is a liar and a murderer. This article is one of many descriptions of women who are having miscarriages, but who cannot receive life-saving treatment, the standard of care, for managing the situation, because they live in states that have passed total abortion bans in the wake of the federal standard being shredded by the conservatives on the Supreme Court of the United States. The hospital administrators in question are too cowardly to provide care, because they feel the risk that they will be prosecuted and bankrupted from the fines and the lawyer fees. The doctors are more than ready to provide the necessary care, but they cannot go forward.

( I had to put a cut somewhere, okay? )

Last out for tonight, Kool Herc was DJ for a house party 53 years ago, and from that house party came what we now know of as hip-hop. Admittedly, a lot of my exposure is through the music side, with a little bit of the breaking side. And my fondness for pithy statements means I'll keep in mind "Guns, bitches, and bling were never part of the Four Elements, and never will be." as a good measuring stick for how well things might be going for any particular person who wants to be part of hip-hop.

On attempting a more formal definition of spite, to show how it is very much alive in art, if rarely ever acknowledged.

Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man turns out to be a winning idea for New Yorkers (and the rest of the country) specifically because of his human-ness and his New York-ness.

Coming back from at least six months spent in microgravity requires more than just physical readjustments to the Earth, but also a reintegration process that brings an astronaut back into life on the outside. I wonder if the astronaut cohort, the prison cohort, the inpatient psychiatric services cohort, and the military cohort should be trading notes about reintegration processes and the physical and psychological things they observe about those who spend significant portions of time away from the society around them and then have to come back to it, with some expectation that they find their footing and reintegrate both smoothly and quickly.

And sometimes you can understand yourself and your feelings better if you think of yourself as a character that you're trying to keep in a good mood and give tasks to.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Scroobius Pip vs. dan le sac - Thou Shalt Always Kill (De La Soul Edit)

kaberett

Celebrating. RAIN. MULTIPLE PROPER DAYS OF IT.

Reading. I have given up on Weathering (Ruth Allen), in that I had struggled through only a little of the first post-introduction chapter when it autoreturned to the library a second time, and by this point I'd taken several screenshots to send to people for yelling purposes. ("To put therapy in a replicable, familiar, closed box of a closed room, in a clinical environment, is to say an individual thing got broken and now must be shut away to get fixed ... Therapy has no echo in nature when you see it behind closed walls, sealed in to medicalised or clinical environments, disconnected from the messy edges of the encroaching world"!!! THE COCOON METAPHOR IS STARING YOU IN THE FACE.) It has had its second chance; I think alas it is not for me.

HOWEVER. I am back on my EatYourBooks indexing bullshit! And have thus read Jams with a Twist (Kylee Newton, National Trust), which I will be keeping, at least for now; and I am most of the way through Notes from the Jam Cupboard (Mary Tregellas), which I will ALSO be keeping, because in addition to the fine Brythonic surname she............. has a Mitteleuropäische family history of the form "her mother moved to Devon from Czechslovakia, For Love", followed by spending a fair bit of time in Austria as an adult, and I am finding her very soothing company. Not quite finished this one (I have yet to actually read the final chapter on breads), but aaaaalmost! Almost. I swear the next book will be one I am going to actually give back to the charity shop--

And meanwhile, in another part of the forest, I have also made a start (thank you the library) on Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Laura Spinney). I have thus far greatly enjoyed the introduction and a good chunk of the first chapter (on Proto-Indo-European's own parent language); there are many excellent Language Facts and also many excellent facts that are not directly about language; I am Having A Good Time and Do Recommend.

Listening. We've wrangled a whole pile of potions for the upcoming last event of the year! We have therefore also listened to a bunch more Hidden Almanac! We're just edging into summer 2017. Georgina is being Threatened but has not yet Arrived...

Playing. More Color Bus Trip, and also Tukoni: Forest Keepers!!! Or at least our first run through; there are 9 Steam Achievements we have not yet Achieved so we will be doing at least one more in the relatively near future, and it is just as soothing and delightful as the prologue and does a really good job of incorporating but largely not repeating the material from the prologue. V v v happy about this.

Cooking. The veg box brought us multicoloured beetroot, so, a variant on the caramelised onion and butternut squash tart, with rings of sliced beetroot in Colours Various and also rosemary in the custard. Since I was making pastry I made a double batch and turned the other half into approximately apricot-pistachio squares, with some figs in addition to apricots; this time I did double the frangipane, or rather all of its ingredients except the sugar, and this was very satisfactory. Will attempt to remember to do again in future. (Hi, future Alex who is looking for notes on this topic!)

I have also made Fig Soup, by which I mean Approximately Fig Jam But I'm Working Myself Up To Boiling It Up Some More. Alas I do not think half sugar to the weight of fig is sufficient for my textural purposes so plausibly I will just... empty everything back into the pan and add... another kilo of sugar. (And then I desperately need to repeat the process with the rest of the figs...)

Eating. FIGS. Strawberries. More of my mother's beans. A has been making akuri. Generally it is a season of abundance and feasting that I am greatly enjoying.

Making & mending. Iiiiii need to actually tie off the ends for patch #1 and move on to patch #2.

Growing. DID I MENTION THE RAIN.

I have furthermore sown some kohlrabi and some fennel. We Shall See.

cosmolinguist

In my soon-to-become-a-zine piece on being too fat to get top surgery in the UK, I said

It came up at the local queer meetup; someone is just back from their top surgery. They joked about having had [small number of] kilos removed, and I slapped the table in front of me in...strength of feeling. A non-binary friend whose barely-used binders I’ve inherited and wear all the time now once made what I thought was a joke about how the BMI calculation for top surgery should not include the weight of the tissue to be removed...but now I don’t even know if it was meant to be a joke. It seems unfair now that this isn’t how it’s done.

I slapped the table in anger and frustration if I could subtract the weight I want them to take away I'd probably hit their BMI limit.

More than one person was like "who do I need to set on fire for this" and "we'll sort you out." But I hate that I still flip out, that my brain immediately goes staticky about this.

The person who just had top surgery showed me the clinc’s instagram photos of bodies of so many shapes and sizes, showed me the part where they said that they don’t use BMI like this; there are health criteria that need to be met, but they’re not a number. It’s in another country. It’s private, which means expensive. But I don’t feel like I have a choice about either of those things at this point. I am numb to any slings and arrows.

They sent me the link, and I thanked them sincerely.

I hadn't seen that person since, as it happens, so I was delighted when they turned up to march with us in the parade yesterday.

Before I could say anything, they said "Did you ever get in touch with that clinic?"

I was able to excitedly share my news, and they could not have been happier. They assured me they can help with questions if I have them, and told me stuff like "the public transport app is good" and "there's a really good aquarium, and you can use their wheelchairs if you need to post-top-surgery."

Their excitement rubbed off on me a bit, and the details helped me imagine this as a thing that's going to happen. They were wearing a semi-transparent top with a brocade-ish design on it; not showy at all for Pride but also not something someone could wear if they weren't happy with the landscape of their chest, so it was a delight to see in that sense too. They said they're becoming such an ambassador for this place, they've just recommended it to someone else too.

I'm glad I could tell them how much their recommendation has meant for me.

D and I stayed home from Pride today -- good thing too! there was a thunderstorm this afternoon; the park where we were enjoying the drag king show on Friday night had to be evacuated due to both lightning in the area and torrential rain -- and D kindly sorted out flights and a place to stay. Having that much sorted is a real weight off my mind.

I've finally told fedi my top surgery news, useful as I have a weirdly huge number of mufos in Germany. I have learned this way that Düsseldorf has good Japanese food, and while no one seems to be in Düsseldorf, there are a few nearby who are willing to travel to say hi to me so that sounds like fun.

andrewducker

Anyone care to guess how old Gideon is?
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

andrewducker

Today we had a kids birthday party in our house for the first time since Covid. 10 of them, mostly 5-6 year-olds. Every previous time we held it somewhere else - a soft play, a climbing centre, a kids gym - somewhere where we could turn up and let the kids run riot for an hour, then give them food for 45 minutes before the staff ushered us out and hosed the place down for the next party.

But Gideon decided, about 6 months ago, that he really wanted a movie-watching party. In pyjamas. This was because a friend of Sophia's had dome that at a nearby multiplex, and he thought it was the coolest idea ever.

I stressed about this for a bit, looked up the exorbitant cost, stressed about that for a bit (particularly because you're booking a whole screen, so it's quite expensive when your child only has about 8 people they want to invite), and then happened to mention to Gideon that we'd have to watch whatever the cinema was able to find for us. And he said "Oh, I only want to watch the Mario Galaxy movie." - which made things very simple, because we have a living room with a 65" TV and space for 10 kids at home.

Frustratingly, I reminded him of all of this about three weeks ago, and got a response along the lines of "Why would I want that? I never said anything of the kind. You must have been imagining things father, what an imagination you have."

So I let everyone else know that some people could watch the movie in pyjamas, but it wasn't mandatory. And then we prepped for the party yesterday - including not having a big cake (because Gideon doesn't like cake) - substituting with a bright pink doughnut for him to have his candle in and Minecraft cup cakes for all of the other kids.

Everyone turned up just fine today, and they seem to have had a lovely time - there was half an hour of frenzied running and screaming around the house to start with, followed by 80% of them watching the first 50 minutes of the movie, and then they split up around the house in small groups, some of them watching the movie, some of them playing with toys, and some of them sharing the three Minecraft-capable tablets/accounts that we have to have 5 minutes each playing together. The adults switched rooms depending on which room the children were occupying, and I actually got to have conversations with some of them - a first for most of them, as I haven't really met Gideon's friends' parents much before.

Gideon noped out around the two-hour mark, retreating to his own tablet. Everyone else lasted another half an hour, and then parents spirited their kids home, Gideon and Sophia enjoyed opening all the presents up, and the family have dispersed to recover individually around the house.

Overall, it was less stressful than I worried, I haven't had to clear any cake off the ceiling, and the most damage was from one of the kids working out how to change the Minecraft world to Creative, and then the others taking the opportunity to totally overbuild the starting area with various high-level nonsense. So, overall, a pretty successful small-child birthday.

cosmolinguist

After

the wettest Manchester Pride parade D has marched in (and that's a lot of them!)
also being the one where we held up big cardboard shapes (on dowels) that were a couple years old now so already a little janky despite a few interventions of strategic duct tape
a too-brief rest after we got home and I'd stripped off all my wet clothes
eating some long-overdue lunch at like 3pm
going back into town even though I'd made us too late for the drag king show we'd talked about seeing
having to walk halfway into town because the bus was on some weird detour thanks to Pride
leading us to stopping for a drink at a favorite place of ours before we got to the crowded noisy village
where D immediately got recognized (it's useful being so distinctive!)
so we sat down with our drinks (I had my first Delirium Red since we went to Brussels! I wanna go back to Brussels) with her and her girlfriend and had a fun conversation
them we actually did go into Pride, to the main stage and everything (somewhere I haven't been since 2008 or so, when my them-boyfriend wanted to see The Human League and I thought I was just being dragged along but then went "oh this is a good song..." about every new song they played and I could sing along with knew most of the words too!)
this time, after hearing the end of some band I've never heard of that D said were big in the 90s or 00s, we were there to hear Esther Ghey, the mother of a trans teenager murdered by other teenagers three years ago, talk about how parents don't get to decide who their children are going to become and that this shouldn't affect the love and support they get. I held it together for some of this bit was crying a lot by the end
then we went to get some food, thinking we should eat before the last thing on our agenda for this evening, a friend's birthday party
one the joys of sitting outside is that you might see your friends walk by and flag them down. It was extra good to see them because they spend the parade and associated bits of Pride with a group that was formative to my integration and mental health in a new country but but has since deleted me and D from its circles of concern (and I guess the five or so years since that happened still isn't enough to stop me hurting over it! ah well...) so it was extra nice to have them join us for food

After all that, we got the bus to our friend's place for his birthday only to find that he had to cancel the party. "I'm not feeling well, I think I've been too busy," he told us, which sounds extremely plausible. He said this was the first time he'd ever canceled a party. Welcome to being 47, my friend!

conuly

We are less than halfway through book 10, and there are two more books to go, and to be honest I am not sure how he's gonna get out of this without authorial assistance and a few blatant ass-pulls. But I digress.

He's caught by the big bad, who is terrifying on a deep personal level due to longstanding trauma, and the man gives him a speech: "Work with me, or I'll use mind control to force you to do my bidding anyway".

And obviously he could never have gotten away with it, first because the villain is smarter than your average bowl of tapioca but also because the author really wants for him to be in deep shit right about now - but why does he have to go out defiantly? Why can't he just say "Wow, you really got me backed into a corner here?" and then, I don't know, lie? It's not like he's so committed to honesty, either. He lies all the time! Lies, misleads people, makes plans that involve betraying multiple at the same time so they all kill each other instead of him... he is not an honest or trustworthy person. But now, now he's gonna stand on his principles and admit to it?

Geez.

******************************

( Read more... )

mtbc

In Spain, our hotel rooms' television tended to offer Spanish news about how the country was variously on fire, which is rather important, and one rather local channel did show footage from where and when R. and I had walked very recently. A notable exception was a hotel room whose television offered an excellent selection of channels.

When I checked the BBC News channel, the first story was about Harry and Meghan. Harry and Meghan… is right up there with Trump says… as a clear introduction to an entirely inconsequential story. I don't know why they qualify as headlines at all, though for different reasons: Harry and Meghan simply don't matter much whereas what Trump says today has nothing to do with what is true, what he will do, or what he will say tomorrow.

Update: No sooner do I post this than I come across a headline starting Sarah Ferguson … I'm not conceited enough to take that as the universe mocking me.

kaberett

Lightly adapted from mygreekdish.com ( 1 | 2 ).

( Read more... )

conuly

which introduced me to Roost, in which your messages are carried at the speed of bird.

And today I discover that there's another one!

****************

( Read more... )

kaberett

( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

This afternoon I did a work thing that was just hanging out with other disabled people to be filmed for boring staff training purposes.

"Where are you from, young man?"

A question that took me by surprise at the end: I never got to be a young man! But this gentleman is maybe a decade or two older than me.

The first part of the question I have a ready answer for: Minnesota, in the midwest of the USA.

His next question stunned me. "What's the nearest baseball team?"

He's definitely English (he has a very Black Country accent and he's already told me he's come from Wolverhampton today).

I've never been asked this before!!!

I'm so delight to talk about baseball.

Turns out he's a Red Sox and Braves and Tigers fan.

He looked up something on his phone then and said "They lost!" with a theatrical gasp.

I hadn't even checked this morning, I just assume they lose every day and I'm right lately.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

1. What chores did you have to do, growing up?

2. Which chore do you hate doing the most?

3. Which chore do you actually enjoy doing?

4. Did you receive an allowance when you were growing up?

5. What was (or is) your favorite subject in school?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

Reading

thanks I hate it!

Interesting Links for 01-09-2026

Dawn Revisited by Rita Dove

"it was like an apocalypse except there’s no zombies but a government organization taking over"

booby-trapped (...for now!)

week 1, day 3

Interesting Links for 31-08-2026

This one feels bigger than other ones, for some reason. - Late August 02026

vital functions

Closing the loop

Photo cross-post

Gideon had a 6th birthday party

Pride

The protagonist is caught by the big bad

News headlines of no interest

[food] lentil moussaka

Yesterday or the day before I read a DW entry

[poetry] Fields

Nearest baseball team

The Friday Five for 28 August 2026