The (in my circles at least famously) non-binary creator of the recent She-Ra reboot is going by Nate now, and here's a comic where he talks about this: https://www.imfineimfine.com/p/nate
The "and this is... uh" "uh" part reminds me real hard of my own name feelings around 2014-2015.
Sometimes the Fediverse is a hive mind:
To take a serious point from a probably-not-entirely-serious-but-you-can-never-really-tell comic — https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/almost-one — there's no point trying to be something you're not, because you're *already* a shitty version of that something-you're-not. Stop trying to be a good dog and just be a rock.
More whinging about companies, this time British Gas
Our boiler developed a small leak yesterday, so we called British Gas, and they sent out an engineer who has fixed it and serviced it. Excellent!
But I've also received an email telling me that apparently I've opted into some “Rewards” bullshit. So I log into my account on the web and opt back out. They ask why, without a free text field. Tickboxes include “I'm not interested in the bright ideas” but not “I never opted into this bullshit”.
Don't trust HSBC UK bank
When you try to make an online payment from an HSBC bank account, they may ask you to type an email address. If you read the accompanying text carefully, it says they don't actually need an email address; they just want you to type something, so they can collect *biometric behavioural data* (typing cadence), which they send to a company called Callsign, based in Abu Dhabi. I'm astonished this is legal under the GDPR.
Here's a more fedi-friendly version of the delightful Weddell seal 💙
Hebden Bridge walk random nature photo thread
Took quite a few pictures on this lovely walk, here's some from the phone camera
Hebden beck and hardcastle crags here, plenty of bluebells on show in the latter
nano text editor
I've just discovered that nano has a lot of useful capabilities that are switched off by default:
* “soft” line-wrapping (for display only)
* “smart” Home key (alternating between the start of the line and the first non-whitespace character)
* auto-indent new lines
* constantly display the cursor position (line and column numbers)
* mouse support (click to move the cursor, or use the commands in the help rows)
See the bottom of the `^G` help text, or `man nanorc`
UK politics, local election day
If you're considering voting for a party in order to stop another party getting in: ask yourself:
- whether this would be necessary if the election used proportional representation
- whether the party you're considering voting for supports or opposes proportional representation
- why you think they support or oppose it
Never read Dracula before? Would you like to read it.... over RSS? Dracula is entirely made up of letters, telegrams, newspaper articles. Each has a date, between May 3rd and November 10th, Last year, and now this year, Dracula Daily has offered people the ability to read the classic novel "in real time". It just started, so if you add https://draculadaily.substack.com/feed to your newsreader, you can follow along this year. #rss
> I just learned that the Māori word for autism is takiwatanga, ‘in [their] own time and space’. It’s such an empathic and gentle way to describe the condition I’m trying to come to terms with.
- eccentrically sensible
- GNOME
- approximately Manchester, GB
- vegan
- Deep Space Nine
- YYYY-MM-DD
- typical Ophiuchus
- Go/weiqi/baduk
- XS Malarkey
- Bohnanza
- puns
- Digitalis, BAGeL Radio, Deep Space One
- the Act 1 boss music from Sonic 3
- tau