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transmisia but it ends up mostly + 

the other day i got into one of those arguments with someone who "supports trans people" and says "obviously people who misgender you on purpose are assholes", but also "they should be allowed to be assholes because it's their opinion"

this was in the fantasy strike discord, and i've seen some Bad Shit come out of the fighting game community and competitive gaming in general. so when a developer of the game, who famously also wrote a whole book called Playing to Win that opens with a formal definition of a "scrub", started typing i was kinda worried

his exact words: "I'm reeling at the thought that trans people facing discrimination, bigotry and so forth is 'not a big deal'"

eat shit bigots fantasy strike says trans rights

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🐦🔗: twitter.com/here_zine/status/1

Having gotten that frankly embarrassing belly-aching out of the way.... 

My head's trying very hard to turn on itself in a number of ways. Talking out my frustrations was supposed to help with this, but now I just feel like some kind of spoiled brat who shouldn't be trusted to work any form of computing more modern than a pocket calculator.

I think it's time for a break from the keyboard and a mental reset, so maybe I can do the design work I actually wanted to do today.

Why isn't Keet happy about getting a new smartphone? (CW'd for length, frustration, despair, Android OS.) 

I feel like I should be happier.

My first smartphone – not PDA or mobile phone, but the amalgamation of the two – was the very first Android phone on the market, the HTC Dream (branded as the T-Mobile G1). It was easily pocketable. The screen opened up (on a clever and very sturdy hinge) to a surprisingly good physical keyboard. It was a phone and a GPS unit and a web browser and unlike my Handspring Visor (which did none of those things) I could actually type on it. And it had decent battery life, at least at the start! And at the time, Google seemed like they were genuinely not going to be evil; a functional but open ecosystem was too good to pass up.

But after a while (read: once out of warranty) a couple of the keys weren't working so well and it was just a bit underpowered, so I went ahead and upgraded to an HTC Desire Z (the T-Mobile G2). The keyboard was a little less convenient, the hinge a little less sturdy, and there were numerous little software inconveniences that I had to overcome by rooting it and applying tweaks... but the screen and processor were definitely a step up, even if the battery life was a little lacking.

I don't remember what it was that stopped working, but the time came to replace it... and it had already been discontinued. The only handset-with-physical-keyboard available through T-Mo was the LG Optimus F3Q... and the keyboard was far less comfortable, but at least it had one! Rooting it was a pain in the butt, but had to be done just to get rid of the crapware. Its shiny-slippery shell made a case a requirement, and I think the added heat is at least part of why the battery needed replacing surprisingly soon. All the changes made to Android meant searching for new workarounds just to accomplish what I easily had on previous devices. Somehow, despite doing more, I ended up liking it less.

When it stopped working, there were no comparable devices. Everything available was weirdly large and mimicked the iPhone-style featureless black slab look. I finally gave up on the physical keyboard... but went with HTC's new "flagship", the HTC 10. By now I was afraid to upgrade to another version of Android because of how weirdly locked-down and customization-unfriendly it had become. It was positively harrowing to root, but its built-in firmware was so saddled with privacy-destroying junk that it was worth the risk of permanently bricking it – and that was indeed the risk. I never really got the hang of tiny little touchscreen keyboards, thus I did a lot less journalling and text-based communication because I spent most of my time having to correct typoes. The only case available for it even slipperier than it was. Rooting it was just as finicky as the previous device. Its fancy super-high-res screen gained distinct discoloration within the first couple months. Its battery needed replacing after a couple years... but being sealed within the unit, there was no replacing it myself, and nobody I contacted locally could work on the thing. The only thing for it was... a new phone.

By this point I positively resented feeling locked into a treadmill of ever-mounting bullshit that kept getting less and less accomodating and flexible. It felt every handset out there existed less to act as a useful smartphone and more to siphon away any remaining sense of data privacy. It got bad enough that I seriously considered trashing everything I knew and jumping ship to the freakin' iPhone... but no, here I am instead having a go at a Planet Gemini PDA ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_( ) because it actually has a physical keyboard but now it feels like a huge mistake because very little Android software is adapted to work well on a screen that's wider than it is tall and it doesn't even have external volume buttons and I feel even more trapped and alienated and wondering how the hell to adapt.

I don't even know what I want anymore.

I miss my G1.

Give a person software, and infuriate them for a day.
Teach a person to create their own software, and infuriate them for the rest of their life.

If you're not in favour of universal and unconditional:

🍍 Housing
🍍 Drinkable water
🍍 Food
🍍 Medical care
🍍 Income

If it's your considered belief that some people literally deserve to die of starvation or exposure or something because they aren't good enough at *making money*:

You're a monster, please un-follow me

A silly short song I wrote in response to a joke in our D&D game today :3 (cw: ponies, death in humorous light) 

(Sung to the tune of your favorite bar song)

🎼 Oh you'll all love the story of Splatty,
The horn-mage who thought she could fly,
she studied all her spells a plenty
then lobbed herself into the sky!

But once she was there she grew frightened,
as she watched all the ground whizzing by...

well you know we all call the foal Splatty...

And now you can say you know why!

Meritocracy is Never Leftist - here is why 

@PentagramPip I'd go even deeper - the core concept of "people who perform better deserve more stuff" is unjust. There is no reason not to guarantee fulfillment and comfort to everyone when we have such abundance, and there is no one in the world going through their life like "gee I can't wait to underperform today, I love not contributing to things" - no hypothetical person *deserving* of punishment for the things they don't do

Laziness doesn't exist. People don't have control over their abilities. And even if they did, depriving people of their basic rights when they don't contribute as much still wouldn't be just

joke, compsci 

"Lemme see what you have!"

[Microsoft Sam Voice] (baby running past) "ARBITRARY CODE EXECUTION IN CHROME EXTENSIONS"

"NO!"

50 years ago Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing

Being Kubrick he insisted on shooting it on location

Every DnD class has the Catch Arrow feat.

Monks just know how to do it gracefully.

Chthonic joke seeking punchline: 

"How many elder gods does it take to tie a knot in a dodecahedron?"

uspol: unpopular opinions re: USDA move 

so, USDA headquarters is moving to Kansas City (they're not sure which Kansas City yet, just one of them) and firing 2/3 of their researchers along the way. I think this is a good idea and genuinely necessary; the loss of research careers is an unfortunate but unavoidable cost because that happens whenever an HQ moves.

Washington DC is a terrible spot for the center of agricultural policy in the United States. It is not geographically or culturally near where agriculture mostly happens in the United States, and it has completely unrelated weather patterns.

I want the USDA right in the fucking middle of climate change. I want them right where crops are being ruined by year after year of extreme weather - droughts followed by mass flooding, mostly down the Mississippi river. Well, this gives the USDA a front row seat to the chronic flooding of the Mississippi River to levels thought of as something that would happen "once every 500 years", three times in the last decade. This gives the USDA a front row seat to droughts destroying the wheat crop. This gives the USDA a front row seat to seasons of rain that turn fields into swamps and make planting impossible. These are things they should have a front row seat to.

This puts the USDA somewhere geographically closer to the majority of agricultural work in the United States. It puts them closer to the best agricultural colleges and universities in the United States - real STEM degrees that are just too blue collar to take seriously on the coasts.

Mostly I'm pissed off at seeing an attempt to put some part of the Federal government in the region I grew up in taken to be unavoidably part of an evil plot to destroy science. No, that's not plausible; it is going to create science careers in an impoverished part of the nation where no such careers can easily be had, but there's an awful lot of on-the-ground experience and people trained for those careers. The "Brain drain" people are afraid of from losing people already working at USDA headquarters? That's already happened, much worse than could ever happen by moving the USDA, by keeping agricultural policy away from agricultural parts of the nation. It ensures that people who know what they're doing can't create a voting bloc or strong opinion in the Midwest, taking a bunch of trained scientists out of swing states.

Let "flyover country" have its say in part of the government. Putting the USDA in Washington D.C. is a historical accident; there's never a "good time" to move it but the move seems clearly warranted to me. Make the USDA live in the middle of where their policies land and their policies will improve because they get to see the results of their policies through some lens other than media and lobbyists.

Moving the USDA out of D.C. weakens the power of agricultural lobbying because it moves the USDA closer to real agriculture and farther away from Lobbyist Central. D.C. is not a real place, it's a drug-fueled collective hallucination created primarily by lobbyists, and decentralizing our bizarrely concentrated Federal government can only help.

Minor gripe about mobile computing. 

Is there a term for this pattern of overeager specificity, or is it just one more to chuck into the bucket of UI Shit What Coders Get Wrong?

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Minor gripe about mobile computing. 

Why does my phone have to clarify that it's "charging on AC" when it's just hooked up to an external battery? Not only is it technically wrong, but why not just say "charging" and call it good?

It's like choosing to say "click the link" instead of "follow the link". Making a lot of assumptions here when the contradicting cases are pretty damn obvious by now....

🚫 convergent evolution in sci fi means everyone is a funny-looking humanoid

✅ convergent evolution in sci-fi means every sufficiently-complex society eventually achieves communism through public libraries consolidating all social services

If you boil a funny bone, you make a laughing stock

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