• 8 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Your kid’s first musical instrument. It’s counterproductive and false economy to buy them a piece of shit guitar or tuba or whatever it may be, in the belief that “if they like it and want to continue with it, I’ll buy them a better one in the future”. You might well turn the kid off the instrument for life if their instrument is harder to play/maintain and worse to listen to than it ought to be.

    If you want your kid to be enriched by music and to be creative, buy them a decent mid-range instrument. Make it so that the kid can’t wait to pick it up, don’t make those crucial early days of learning the instrument feel like eating watery gruel for months with an expectation of pizza at some point down the line. A shitty instrument will be an additional barrier the kid will need to deal with every time they use it. Get out of their way, buy them something serviceable. If they lose interest regardless, well at least you know they had a fair shot at it and it wasn’t the crappiness of the instrument that caused them to abandon it. And you can always sell or donate the instrument if they really don’t give a shit about it.

    The best instrument you can reasonably afford is significantly more likely to hook your kid than a £50 piece of junk would. It doesn’t need to be fancy, it just needs to be well-made, pleasant to play, and easy to tune/maintain/clean/whatever the case may be.







  • Lose the ‘infinite growth’ promise to shareholders (in fact, lose the whole shareholder thing entirely). That’s the root of all evil right there. It’s the cause of all woes suffered by gamers, devs and even the very sociopathic CEOs who think Epic exclusivity is a sound financial strategy. We all suffer for it, and all to benefit shareholders who, in 2024, still believe the lie that next year’s profits will exceed this year’s. It’s delusional, and even if it weren’t, it would quite literally be cancerous. Cancer is just a board of shareholders in a biological system.






  • It’s depressing that bleating “free speech” has become a shibboleth, betraying the speaker’s tedious far right contrarianism and a wish to express it without consequence. Racists, Nazis, x-phobes, bigots of all stripes; these are your target audience when your primary objective for your platform is supposedly “free speech”, especially when it’s in opposition to the censorship of your users’ bigotry on other platforms. I wish it weren’t so, but it fucking is, 100% of the time.

    It’s like on reddit, when you discover a splinter sub called r/FunSubReborn or something, where they post the same content as r/FunSub, but in this “reborn” sub you can also be an unmitigated cunt in the comments and make racist or phobic remarks without getting banned.

    Tedious, tiresome, clueless wankers.


  • How long before we start hearing her spout that old canard about “well, as much as I disagree with Nazis, at least they’re willing to speak honestly about the threat of <insert libelled minority group here>”? I believe this naziwashing manner of argumentation is called the Sam Harris Code-Injection Exploit.

    Or my personal favourite: “Given how much society and the media have lied about trans people being human beings, I’ve now started to question everything else I’ve been told, such as the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and the truth about the Holocaust”.

    I think Graham Linehan has actually said that about vaccines and climate change, that he now questions them because most of society doesn’t agree with his vicious bigotry about trans people. JKR isn’t far behind him.








  • Greatly appreciate the 2FA improvement! I can finally enable it now without locking myself out, which happened every time I tried to enable it previously.

    However, in true Fediverse fashion, they’ve made it 122.6% more complicated than it needs to be. Why contain all of the relevant information in a button pointing to a highly specific protocol? I had to manually copy and paste the button’s URL into Notepad++ and cut the parts I needed from it. Why not just give the secret or a QR code like literally every other implementation of 2FA that has ever existed? I’ve never seen such a button before on any other website when I wanted to switch on 2FA, even on Mastodon they use a QR code and/or the secret key.

    And no backup codes? 🤔

    I sound like a complainy complainer, but I’m genuinely happy/grateful I could enable 2FA. I’m just a n00b who worries about people even n00bier than I am trying to figure it out.

    Cheers!