Emily @emily@sparkly.uni.horse

If you advocate violence against cis people, collectively, for being cis, *you are not helping*.

Not only are you being an asshole, *you are part of the problem*. Some subset of cis people are going to have that as their first experience with a trans person, and now all you've done is make it easier for bigots to teach their children to also be bigots.

It's really fucking hard to convince the world we're just normal people who want to live our lives when you're yelling about how they should be murdered.

You are actively hurting the community you think you're "defending". Good job. I hope it made you feel good for a moment.

Also Google *image* search finds Github issues now and... generates images for them? These images do not appear on the linked issue pages, they are literally autogenerated screenshots of the headers from issue pages.

Someone (unsure if Github or Google) sat down one day and actually wrote code to do this.

Why.

why is there an st ligature, who asked for this and why do they like watching me repeatedly try to wipe nonexistent dirt off my screen

me: "yeah, I know how to write a check, like a real adult who is smart and knows numbers and stuff"

also me: "one thousand sixteen hundred dollars"

COBRA is the most absurd thing ever. What if we make a thing to make your insurance not end when you leave a job, but it works by... letting your insurance end and then we send you a form a month later to retroactively fix it?

(also that whole thing with health insurance being tied to employment is absurd too of course)

it is I, Emily, secret owner of all the clickfarm blogs apparently

(because every time I make fun of spam and/or scams here someone shows up to helpfully inform me that it is spam and/or a scam: yes, I am aware)

So I was considering what seemed like a perfectly reasonable small household plumbing project, and it turns out one of the pipes I would need to poke at is a size that *does not exist* (PVC with outer diameter 1.5 inches, yes exactly 1.5, I took a caliper to it because what)

(half venting about the trolls who built my house, half doing that thing where the easiest way to get a question answered is to post the wrong answer)

Neat, some things do use CACHEDIR.TAG, so I hereby grant one Good Computer Person Point to the authors of cargo, qutebrowser, and fontconfig. (The latter two are in ~/.cache anyway, so it doesn't matter, but still.)

My backup config contains `--exclude /home/emily/.cache` (the standard cache directory), `--exclude-caches` (the CACHEDIR.TAG spec that nobody uses but it was a nice idea in theory I guess), and then *literally 22 more exclusions* for shit that felt like it was too good for ~/.cache.

special mention to chromium and electron, which stuff their caches deep inside ~/.config because what do words even mean

patiently waiting for the current batch of AI text things to advance far enough to add mastodon word blocks but only when the word is used in a certain context

There's a person claiming to be from Comcast who keeps calling me trying to get me to confirm my account information, and I legitimately cannot tell if it's a scammer who found a database dump, or the real Comcast being incompetent.

(I have not lived in a place where Comcast is even a thing for several years)

cat

I also bodged together a bandsaw table thing because it was easier than the way I cut out the first one.

And other side done! (and both refinished to frosted acrylic, it glows nicer)

Not assembled yet, because I decided to just order a bag of those little brass M3 standoffs instead of making another 5 tiny spacers that don't work as well.

I haven't done any machining (or, like, building stuff at all) recently. Tonight I made this base for my new keyboard.

I'll probably go back with a sander and make it frosted acrylic. I don't like the transparent kind as much as I thought I would.

Everyone else: let's mark pin 1 so people know which direction to solder things

SK6812: okay but what if the opposite of that

(hi I just soldered like 40 of these before figuring out why they were all simultaneously shorting)

hi healthcare/finance companies, please stop making Secure Message Portals that are just email but worse, thanks

There's a thing people with opinions do sometimes, where they assume that anyone who doesn't like a thing just *doesn't understand* it, and their response is invariably to just explain the thing louder:

- Lisp and Forth's syntax
- blockchains, and applications thereof
- that one guy I used to work with who proudly stated that anyone who disagreed with his overly strict git commit message standards just needed to get good at git
- some nontrivial portion of controversial political issues

I don't know what to do with this revelation, except to maybe form the Curly Braces Party and run for office on a bizarre platform that only takes positions on things of no consequence.

walking up to people and making obnoxious dumb noises at them and offering to stop for $5

(startup or performance art? why not both?)

Last night, I was playing a Shitty Mobile Puzzle Game and it offered to let me skip a puzzle for some small but nonzero amount of money.

Today, I discovered this thing where Google tried letting people subscribe to not see ads: https://web.archive.org/web/20180213021728/https://contributor.google.com/v/beta

Now I'm just reflecting on the sheer bizarreness of an industry where you pay companies to not do things.

Today's computer bullshit: browsing Aliexpress in French, because it decided to get stuck in Arabic and I couldn't convince it to switch back to English

(I can read French; I cannot read Arabic)