tunguska

tunguska, 2 months ago

@trendless

Cultural norms that don't yield to safety/well-being needs are oppression -- institutions of violence.

tunguska, 2 months ago

@trendless

I'll never understand why it's not just one tab, with independent toggles in the header for "include boosts" and "include replies".

tunguska, 2 months ago

@Impossible_PhD

I don't know that this'll help any, but... when you enforce a boundary with someone and they turn abusive, they have given you immediate and unequivocal feedback that you were right, that your boundary is verifiably both necessary and appropriately calibrated.

tunguska, 2 months ago

@GeorgiaOnMyMind

If you can't beat 'em, hunker down and outlast 'em.

tunguska, 3 months ago

@PacificNic

The fact that The Plague Of Which We Do Not Speak directly, physically causes anxiety and depression via neurological damage is, uh, probably not helping.

tunguska, 3 months ago

@susankayequinn @PacificNic

Yeah, one of my pet doomsday scenarios is if bird flu with its, what, 50-ish, 60-ish percent fatality rate, makes the jump to human-to-human transmission. In a broadly immune-compromised global population.

Even if "the powers that be" wanted to fight it… they've just devoted half a decade to demolishing, undermining, and sabotaging all the tools that would enable any sort of defense.

I can't see the outcome there being anything less than apocalyptic, and not in a slow cumulative way.

tunguska, 3 months ago

@susankayequinn

I almost entirely agree with your point here.

I think it's important to keep in mind also that people were very, very much told what to want. AFAICT, the glimpses of real solidarity, of doubt in the whole edifice of capitalism, etc, scared the shit out of the tiny billionaire class who own all the governments, media, social media, employers, real estate, and everything else. Thus, since somewhere around a year and a half in, there's been this massive anti-public-health blitz on every front: propaganda, lobbying/legislation, funding, regulatory capture, the whole nine yards.

AKA "manufacturing consent".

All accompanied by a dramatic acceleration of the push toward open fascism -- which is a coordinated project driven (and lavishly funded) by the absurdly rich, no matter how many times all the Very Important Journalists say "populist".

It'll be very interesting to see how the energy of ordinary people ends up directed as the collapse gets less slow and cumulative, and more into abrupt and un-ignorable system failures.

Well, however much energy people's ongoing regimen of 2/yr-ish COVID infections leaves them with, that is...

@holyramenempire @Aviva_Gary @PacificNic @dalias

tunguska, 3 months ago

@susankayequinn

All true. I think I'm inclined to assign somewhat more of the blame to the effectiveness of propaganda (including subtle astroturfing and algorithmic manipulation, and yes, starting way before the full-frontal assault I referred to) than any inherent inability to sustain solidarity or community in the long term than it sounds like you are.

Overall, though, yes. Very much agreed. We're absolutely going to need all the resilience we can get, mostly local and small-scale (as big brittle hierarchical systems fail hard). And I'm right there with you on the need for better stories: how do you work toward building something if you don't even have the language to imagine it?

As far as I can tell from a lay reading of some climate papers, this is the big one. If for-profit fascism sabotages a rapid global abandonment of fossil fuels (over the objections of a brainwashed and disease-weakened populace worldwide), well...

I really wonder how widely people are aware that the stakes may very plausibly be literal extinction, decided by this fight, between capital and humanity, over the next decade or two.

What a time to be alive.

@holyramenempire @Aviva_Gary @PacificNic @dalias

tunguska, 3 months ago

@clarablackink

All true, and an important perspective.

Really, I think it's all part and parcel of a system in which human value is reduced to how much you contribute to fattening the bank account of some (fascist by definition) billionaire who owns the hedge fund that owns the bank that owns the conglomerate that owns your boss. And if that value falls below a certain threshold, you're literally kicked out into the street to die, by an unaccountable armed gang (with badges!).

People's imaginations are deeply poisoned by total immersion in a system in which you really kinda do have to be willing to knife the poor fucker next to you just to stay an inch farther from disposal yourself. Is this truly a separate thing from propaganda, or are we describing facets of the same thing, viewed from different angles?

Being of service, taking care of people, these things are indeed deeply rewarding. That's a point of paramount importance — honestly, if there's hope for humanity's future, I think this fact is right there in the heart of it.

Your existence being defined as a resource to be consumed by the profit-extracting machine of some morbidly wealthy resource-hoarder whose name you don't even know? That is an atrocity.

@susankayequinn @holyramenempire @Aviva_Gary @PacificNic @dalias

tunguska, 3 months ago

@clarablackink

Oh, absolutely! Fascism (AFAICT) has little in the way of consistent/coherent ideology, but its essence is fundamentally antithetical to the creative impulse, and thus (being unable to produce anything itself except violence and hate to justify the violence) it's always totally reliant on the scapegoated "other" who can be ruthlessly cannibalized to keep the machine fed.

As it consumes and annihilates conveniently distant (or otherwise distinct) "others", it must always redefine more and more of those who were in the "in group" as "other" to keep the cannibalistic extraction going, until eventually it self-destructs as the last fragments of the core kill each other squabbling over the ashes.

(In this sense, I don't know that capitalism-without-fascism is… even a coherent concept, let alone possible in practice.)

And there's a massive irony in the fact that it's only thanks to eons spent successfully practicing a sort of loose, horizontally federated anarcho-communism that humanity survived long enough to invent the authoritarian extractivist state that has since devoted itself to violently imposing the idea that its paradigm of vicious individualism is the only possible — imaginable, even — model for human society. Mind-bending, really.

@susankayequinn @holyramenempire @Aviva_Gary @PacificNic @dalias

tunguska, 3 months ago

@Lorrrraaaaine

How about this:

"Immunocompromising reinfections will continue until herd immunity is attained."

@trendless

tunguska, 5 months ago

@IPEdmonton

All of them.

tunguska, 5 months ago

@slyflourish

I feel like an open virtual tabletop platform/protocol/whatever for remote ttrpg playing would be pretty valuable. Nothing against Roll20, but we all know how the enshittification cycle goes.

tunguska, 5 months ago

@PacificNic

I've wondered -- in a purely hypothetical sense, of course -- about building a pepper-spray canister into the hard plastic lower-face part of the big full-face respirator with, like, a solenoid plunger and a remote trigger. So if someone was to get aggressive-aggressive, I could pull an acid-spitting-dinosaur defense on them. With p100 + organic vapour combo cartridges, I'd be immune to the stuff.

Pretty sure a bitrex nebulizer would be... less illegal. 😇

tunguska, 5 months ago

@trendless @PacificNic

Ooh, that's a fun idea! The sound of an angry cat hiss-spitting could work too.

Oh!

Or!

Or you could have it make a wet hacking cough noise! 😈😷😈

tunguska, 6 months ago

@elana @Traiken

Getting them in the upper part of the room might be advantageous too: breath is generally warmer than room air, so tends to rise.

That's probably more relevant if you're using far-UVC in an occupied space, for risk reduction, than for Elana's use-case of running it between occupants. In an occupied space, focusing on bombarding the space between people might be a strategy to consider too.

Technically, I think effectiveness is based on exposure time times power, not one or the other. Emitter power ÷ (distance from emitter)² x exposure time, IIRC, for total UV energy delivered to the target.

But I, also, am an amateur working on an "educated guess" basis. The fact that my DIY positive-pressure isolation tent I built over my bench at work (powered by a pair of Levoit Core 300s) has kept me from catching anything (two years and counting) does bolster my confidence that my intuition for airflow dynamics is decent, but still. 🤔

tunguska, 6 months ago

@elana

Well, fuck.

tunguska, 6 months ago

@elliot @siderea

This explanation sounds like it implies that if you were to make the changes with cPanel in the first place, then unsubscribe from it when things are running how you like, and re-subscribe for a month any time you want to make changes… that should work fine?

Do you know if that's the case?

tunguska, 6 months ago

@trendless

Heh! I have dual-boot on my daily driver machine, and I so rarely have a reason to boot into Windows that when I do, it spends about half an hour installing non-postponeable Windows updates, rebooting, rolling back broken updates, rebooting, updating, rebooting...

Generally, by the time I'm logged in and looking at the Windows desktop, I've long since forgotten what prompted me to boot into Windows in the first place, so I stare blankly for a bit, shrug, and boot back into Debian. 🤷

tunguska, 6 months ago

@trendless @PacificNic

I mean...

Is there anything stopping us from becoming a co-op as it is?

😇

tunguska, 6 months ago

@PacificNic @GeorgiaOnMyMind

Oh, yeah, they aren't Health Canada approved (so far?)…

I ordered mine from outside Canada and I'm hoping customs doesn't confiscate 'em. It's not like they're illegal illegal, just not approved for this use case (direct UVGI of occupied spaces).

tunguska, 6 months ago

@CmdrTaco

Oh! I accidentally discovered a couple of weeks ago that Band-Aid's (expensive) "Hydro-Seal" hydrocolloid bandages are touch-screen friendly.

I assume it's a side-effect, not a design goal, but it made things much less annoying last time I had a nasty little cut on the thumb.

tunguska, 6 months ago

@StillIRise1963

I had a momentary reaction of "wait, which nation are we talki--
...Oh."

Universally relevant.

tunguska, 6 months ago

@josh

Yes!

And, like, if the people in question are event organizers in the first place, expecting them to make their event a reasonably safe place to be? Is literally just asking them to do their damn job.