Welp, in just three days Edinburgh's weather has done a screeching handbrake turn from spring into summer. As in, I'm no longer tweaking the central heating—it's off for the next few months—and the windows are open and it's nearly time to dust off the office air conditioner.
@cstross Meaning „temperatures are nearing 20°C“? (I always assume that the point where air conditioners sound appealing is 10 to 15° lower in Scotland.)
@cstross Yep, as I thought. Looking forward to Glasgow in August. When people tell me it‘s T-shirt weather, I‘ll assume that means I should still bring a fleece jacket.
"On trial alongside T, will be Melanie Ritter, 57, a doctor specialising in the method of predicting the future through eggs and a Covid vaccine sceptic who had expected to become health minister following the coup."
Wow, the Reichsburger coup plotters going on trial sure sound sane and stable to me!
"The prince, the plotters and the would-be putsch: Germany to try far-right coup gang"
@cstross The Reichsbürger movement is fascinating, in that it consists of people who have completely rejected modernity, and embraced authoritarianism and magical thinking. They also tend to be complete losers.
I used to pity them, but then they started collecting weapons and shooting cops…
#WordWeavers 28: How often do you back up your work?
AHAHAHAHA!!!
I work on a Mac with three time machine backup drives—two directly connected, one networked—and keep my live work on Dropbox, and manually rsync a snapshot of my live work to a pair of SSDs (alternating, only one plugged in at a time). Also, retired TM drives get mothballed intact.
Yes, I've lost work from time to time over the past 40 years. How did you guess?
It hasn't really been making international news, and even our German media have been lazy about reporting this - but I wanted to let you know that hundreds of thousands of Germans are out in the streets and towns, protesting against the right-wing extremists here in Germany.
I was out myself today, along with 15,000 others in my town, for Holocaust Memorial Day. 100,000 in Düsseldorf alone, plenty more across the entire country. More protests are planned for tomorrow.
@Firlefanz I was at two of those protests so far, and what really gave me hope was the mix of people there. Yesterday the age range went from babies in the stroller to octogenarians with walkers, and every age in between. This is not just a bunch of people protesting, this is a society saying „Never again.“
@Garwboy I would‘ve thrown in a few quid, just to be the first, but they want my phone number so I can give them money, which is where I stopped. Nobody‘s gonna contact me anyway, since all my phone numbers are German, and I am more attached to my private information than my money.
@davidallengreen Can that actually be legal? Discriminate (as in: Give different rights to) against adults based on their date of birth, without them ever having a chance to gain rights others enjoy?
There was a poll that stated—Rowling’s opening line in the HP series is one of best in the world. Someone posted about how there are a bunch of other opening statements that are better.
Here’s one of my personal favorites, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in English):
“It is inevitable — the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
Hear me out! A buddy comedy, like Lethal Weapon, but instead of two guys it‘s a prim older lady and a young hippie, who constantly fight, but they‘re not cops, instead they commit crimes and sleep a lot! Oh, and they‘re #cats.
If you are a follower, could you kindly "like" this post when you see it so I can gauge how many are seeing/reading my Mastodon posts?
Nominally I have 41k followers on here, but I think that figure is artificially inflated because of how many came over last November and then went away again.
@davidallengreen Yes, I saw the replies. Also, in my case in only saw a small fraction of the likes (3), but many more replies. I guess that‘s an artefact of the federated system.
