@mrdalesmith@toot.community
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

mrdalesmith

@mrdalesmith@toot.community

Writer of things mostly about #DrWho #DoctorWho and infrequent conversationalist. Also works with #Drupal / #PHP

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jynersolives, to StarTrek
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

I haven’t seen a lot of discussions on my home feed, despite the fact that I follow a good many hashtags and Trekkies. Is nobody watching the final season?

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@jynersolives I had to stop when it left Netflix in the UK.

jynersolives, to DoctorWho
@jynersolives@mastodon.social avatar

So I'm a bit behind the new and just watched . What do y'all think of it?

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@jynersolives @otfrom It is very RTD to make the first episode of Who to be streamable in the US to be the one that explicitly says banning abortion without taking care of unwanted babies is a terrible thing to do.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@jynersolives @otfrom That’s interesting: I’m a big Moff fan and worried the RTD would just be hitting the same old beats again, and I didn’t pick up on either of those: got time to elaborate?

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@jynersolives I didn’t feel that: it’s the same backstory (although we have Chibnall to thank for that) but Eccleston and Tennant were broken by that past and kept themselves withdrawn from real connection because of it. Gatwa explicitly defines himself as a survivor of a genocide who is going out and making connections because they know how bad it can get. Running to people, not from trauma. I felt like RTD had really tried to bring something new with him for Ncuti.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@jynersolives I don’t entirely trust him to to go back to the old way - trauma is drama, and after Ncuti told Tennant he was done with all that because 14 had lived and processed it, he had Ncuti telling Ruby he was alone (as opposed to “I’ve got a found family of millions”) - but I didn’t feel he had yet. YMMV obs. Is it the Ruby backstory that’s giving you Moff vibes, out of curiosity?

Edent, (edited ) to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

From an artist's point of view, is there any difference between you buying a donated CD from a charity shop and downloading pirated music from a torrent site?

Neither gives the artists, songwriters, producers, publishers, or distributors any money.

Neither reports to a charts authority to show popularity.

Both have the same impact on secondary revenue like gig tickets & merchandise.

Vote now - and please show your workings.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@Edent Probably all of the above. There’s no simple answer to it, except that generally the copyright owner should get to make the decision: I’ve written books knowing the physical copies will end up (pretty quickly) in second hand shops before I started, but it’s never been my decision to put the files up for torrent. My website content is all on an open source licence, so I understand the benefits of giving away. I just like to be the one to decide :)

mrdalesmith, to UKpolitics
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

To be fair, Boris Johnson has previous for apparently not understanding laws he introduced.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@mindfog My mrs responded immediately with “I bet it was a publicity stunt” and I’m now obsessed with working out the angle he would have if that we true.

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

If you're interested in understanding what's wrong with corporations right now, what's driving our global capitalist omnishambles? This is an amazingly insightful (if long, and entertainment-industry focussed) deep dive into the madness of modern management theories:

https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-team-whether-youre-a-game-developer-or-a-tech-founder-or-a-ceo-is-8cd1ad359508

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@cstross <Reads article. Looks at how UK politics keeps trying to pull power away from experts and back to central Government. Rereads article>
Ooooohhhh. Let’s ban teaching MBAs.

Edent, to CSS
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Please can someone cleverer than me explain how I have fucked up this ?

I have a <blockquote> at the top of the page. But the :before and :after content appears at the bottom of the page.

WTF???

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/11/movie-review-the-craft-legacy/

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@Edent Seems to be the float: left - remove it and it pops back where you want it.

mekkaokereke, (edited ) to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

🙋🏿‍♂️It me. I'm one of the vote.org donors that stopped donating after Debra Cleaver was ousted. My help was tiny compared to some.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13250525/Taylor-Swift-backed-Vote-org-crisis-staff-fired-funding.html

Yes, vote.org looked like a glamorous non-profit once Obama and Taylor Swift started promoting it. But that's not what it was. It was an important piece of American democracy. But it was ruined, because someone wanted to have it.

Anyway, Debra Cleaver is an unstoppable force, so she set up Vote America instead.

https://www.voteamerica.com

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@mekkaokereke Apologies if you've been told this before and disagree, but the Daily Mail is a UK newspaper that is very much against pretty much everything you post in support of here and doesn't feel (to me) like the kind of organisation you'd want to be boosting the ad revenue of.

cstross, (edited ) to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

LOLWUT—

Police called to Willy Wonka event after refunds demanded

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrlr3dw2x3o

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@cstross Would that be https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czrlr3dw2x3o by any chance?

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Can I own my identity on the Internet?

It's good that Signal is (slowly) moving away from phone numbers as an identifier. But even things like email addresses and domain names rely on the whims of 3rd parties.

Is there a way to have a stable, self-owned identifier, which doesn't rely on fragile and complex cryptography?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2017/02/can-i-own-my-identity-on-the-internet/

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@Edent This is a good post, and my first thought was to agree with you: it’d be great to have my own owned identity and to have full control over how much information it shares about me on a site by site basis. My second was how such a unique, lifelong online identity would be different from Government mandated ID IRL, and how many people might be hurt if it became a requirement of web use. Sometimes its an advantage to have an ephemeral identity online.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@sarajw @Edent I think I’d heard of that. Am I reading that right that it would still essentially be owned by the organisation running the server, but the data managed by the individual users?

miss_s_b, to random
@miss_s_b@witches.live avatar

Genuinely loving that is getting lots of attention the last few days, but my GOD Fast Car is a persistent earworm. Can I interest you all in Talkin Bout A Revolution for a while, which is also an awesome song, and relevant to our times, and would be a nice change to have constantly rattling round my head?

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@miss_s_b That whole album is full of amazing songs. Fast Car always pulled focus away from how brilliant the rest of her stuff was, and now it's doing it again for a whole new generation.

mrdalesmith, to random
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

My anecdotal evidence is that BlueSky has won the fight for who's going to be the successor to Twitter. Everyone I came here to chat with who has since decamped has gone there. I think that’s just the result of a category error - Mastodon is something different to Twitter so won’t satisfy anyone trying to find a like-for-like substitution - but is still, I think, a thing.

hauntedhideaway, to DoctorWho
@hauntedhideaway@babka.social avatar

Attack of the Cybermen: part 1 is 46 minutes long? An experiment? @doctorwho

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@hauntedhideaway @katyswain @doctorwho Who was an oddity in terms of program length: 25m episodes were almost exclusively for children’s TV or sitcoms, and it was seen as another way Who had lost pace with modern television by hanging around too long. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there already were plans to change it; It wasn’t that it failed that made them put it back, but JNT looking for a way to hide that S23 had fewer episodes than previous seasons.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@hauntedhideaway @doctorwho @katyswain McCoy was one of my favourites, but yeah in the eyes of the BBC it’d been fatally wounded and was just being left to die. It’s weird that “it’s been on TV for 25 years” was seen as a bad thing back then, but was one of the first things to make Cardiff think it could be resurrected.

mrdalesmith, to TheGoodPlace
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

Over the last week, I've binge re-watched every episode of . Watching “live”, I’d thought it dipped for a lot of season 3, but in truth that turned out to be two episodes in a row that didn’t connect with me. It’s not perfect, but it’s ambitious, funny, moving and better than a lot of things being hyped at the moment. It’s biggest strength is that it’s willing to change, often before an idea has had every drop squeezed out of it. Watch it if you haven’t and can.

timelordiroh, to DoctorWho
@timelordiroh@mstdn.iroh.tv avatar

Watching s01e02, it's quite impressive just how much rests on the Daleks having some mercury. Like, the Doctor gets rid of all of his mercury and makes the TARDIS non-functioning. If the daleks didn't have mercury, there'd be no way for them to ever leave Skaro.

@doctorwho

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@timelordiroh @doctorwho the Doctor does address that in a later episode.

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@timelordiroh @doctorwho Actually ignore me: checking on which episode it is led me to discover the Doctor admitting that they have actually run out of mercury in episode 5. This story is too long to hold in your head in one go :D

cstross, to random
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

NHS across UK spends a ‘staggering’ £10bn on temporary staff | The Guardian

Reminder that this money does not go to the temps (mostly nurses and doctors) who only get a tiny fraction of it: it's money paid to commercial employment agencies, ie. Tory donors. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/16/nhs-across-uk-spends-a-staggering-10bn-on-temporary-staff

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@cstross When I worked in the NHS (in HR, sorry) the Trust I worked for operated its own temporary staffing bank that it was required to use before going to an external agency for any temporary shifts. I’ve been out of that game for a long time, but all that money isn’t necessarily going to private companies.

sysop408, to drupal
@sysop408@sfba.social avatar

What's a good use case for creating a custom entity in ?

It seems to me that in terms of creating regular content, there are exceedingly few cases where you wouldn't be better served just by creating a new node bundle and then making your own custom field types, widgets, and formatters to extend the good ol' Node entity.

I thought that a custom entity might be warranted for performance reasons if you need to squeeze every bit of speed you can, but I read a couple of blog posts from someone who said he found the difference to be minimal.

In his estimation if you need squeeze as much speed as you can and have a highly structured data schema that's not likely to need changes, you should just create custom DB tables and write direct queries to retrieve the data.

https://www.rapiddg.com/article/when-should-i-use-custom-entities-part-2

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@sysop408 My checklist is:

  1. Do I need an entity type with separate bundles that doesn’t get mixed up with unrelated node bundles?
  2. Do I need an entity type that doesn’t need something node does out of the box? Maybe I don’t need this entity to ever be viewed, so I don’t need the default routing set up for it.
  3. Do I need a lot of custom code for this entity that I can put into methods so everything’s neat and maintainable and doesn’t need to check which node bundle it is?
mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@sysop408 @joachim So far I’ve been able to do everything basefield I need to do with alters to the specific entity type, but it’s usually only nodes and users I need it with so I don’t know if there are issues outside of them?

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Unauthorized shots

mrdalesmith,
@mrdalesmith@toot.community avatar

@pluralistic Calls themselves the alibi bar; does not provide alibis for people claiming to work there.

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