Born and raised in Scotland, currently living in New Hampshire. Author of several books, mostly on meditation and Buddhist practice. Fan of Scots language. Learning #dansk and #svenska. Dabbler in #Pali.
I'm just blocking "liberals" who say they can't bring themselves to vote for Biden/Harris because he's "disappointed" them on some issue or other.
The choice is between preserving and expanding democracy and letting fascists destroy democracy altogether.
This is so obvious and well-known that I have to suspect that many of these accounts are actually sleepers set up to bait and switch, aiming to put liberals off of voting.
I have a horrible feeling that a lot of people look at forest fires, floods, record heatwaves, etc., and think, "This is how it's going to be from now on."
It's not. We're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, where it's accumulating.
The future is going to be much, much worse. Unless we take drastic action now.
Remember when "let me Google that for you" was a neat, although sarcastic, way of telling people that they could easily find information on the web if they took a moment to look for it?
"Let me Google that for you" would now mean something like "let me relieve you of the burden of combing through an endless series of useless, spammy, ad-laden, malware-ridden, AI-generated websites in the vain hope of finding an answer to your question."
Hi, @trumpet! Image loading on FF is fine today, but I wanted to ask you about translation services.
I noticed we're currently on LibreTranslate. Sadly, it's awful. It often mistranslates words. It sometimes just skips over certain words or phrases. It produces word salad.
At times (including yesterday) we've had DeepL, which is really fantastic. It's actually better than Google Translate.
I wondered why we don't have DeepL all the time. Is it a money thing?
A HS student to their TX school board, which is banning books:
“I’m not going to sit here and talk about the slippery slope that book banning leads to because I learned from a book, that I checked out from my school’s library, that I don’t need to resort to logical fallacy to make a point. I’m simply going to say that no government – and public school is an extension of government – has ever banned books, and banned information from its public, and been remembered in history as the good guys.”
I had two social events in as many days — a concert on Sunday, where I met several friends, and hanging out with my best bud last night — and my happiness levels have been dialed up from 3 to 9.5.
It's a reminder of the emotional toll the pandemic has taken by derailing my social life. I'm definitely going to make sure that I take care of my need for friendship and socializing. My risk of COVID is slightly increased, but I think it's a worthy trade-off.
I just got a bill for $3,001.36, which is for one visit to the hospital. That amount is what I have to pay after insurance.
Vote the Tories out and protect your #NHS. The system in the US is the system they want for you. They want a profit-making health service because they'd own it and you'd be making them richer every time you go to the doctor.
And people in Scotland: in the long term Labour are not going to save the NHS. Vote #SNP. Make Scotland independent!
Disengaging from Gmail is going well. It's going to be a long process, but I'm a few days into it and I'm now receiving almost no messages in my Gmail account.
My approach was to look in my password manager for the accounts I most often use, and then to visit those accounts and change the associated email addresses either to my personal or work account. (That in itself is great, because work and personal stuff was previously mixed up.)
The less access Google has to my life, the better.
Hello, @dimillian. I enjoy using @IceCubesApp very much. Thank you for creating it.
Is it okay if I put in a request?
Scots (as opposed to Scottish Gaelic) is available as a language on Mastodon, but not in Ice Cubes. When I want to have a post recognized as being in Scots I have to switch to another app. Can you add Scots to the list of available languages, please?
I took a "love languages" quiz that someone shared here the other day, and the whole concept seemed ... lacking ... incomplete ... verging on the shallow.
So I wrote a little article, with my own take on what ways of communicating love I find the most important.
This law is horrifying. It doesn't just affect people under 18, although that’s bad enough. All "sexually oriented" material is now banned from libraries, for all persons. This covers any book that contains "representations or descriptions" of sexual intercourse, homosexuality, lesbianism, and even buttocks or breasts. If your book describes a breast or a bum, it's banned from libraries in Mississippi.
That was a little alarming. I wanted to put gas in my car because we have a snowstorm coming tonight and tomorrow, and my tank was nearly empty. The four gas stations nearest to my house were all empty! One of them ran out of gas just as I arrived there.
Fortunately I was able to fuel up in the next town over.
It felt a bit post-apocalyptic, or pre-apocalyptic, technically. Let's say apocalyse-adjacent.
Coming of age in Britain in the 1970's, we saw Belfast just as a place where people got shot and bombed.
It wasn't until I watched The Fall — a show about a brutal serial killer — that I got any sense at all of what the city centre looked like, what the suburbs were like, the botanic gardens, and so on.
I found myself wondering what other TV shows had been set in contemporary Belfast, and they mostly seem to be cop shows. This seems weird to me, like the city's been type-cast.
It used to be a respectable publication, and now their "lifestyle" section is full of what seem to be AI-generated spam "articles" about viagra and cbd oil for dogs.
I thought for a moment that they might have been hacked, but according to the Wayback Machine it's been like this for years now.
I’m wondering if anyone in Scotland still carves turnips. We did when we were kids, which is a lot later than the “19th and early 20th century” dates this article gives.
