I got rained on a lot again! Saw a friend play a gig, made a new “Observers” episode, sadly went to a funeral, rants on climate crisis, google, and Twitter’s continuing self-immolation.

Me

Life

Gig

Went to see a friend play in one of her bands at the Dublin Castle which is confusingly in Camden in London.

Supported by “The Mulholland Drivers” a David Lynch inspired band.

He had a clipping microphone that sounded like a telephone and she had a 40s looking mic. They were pretty and entertaining.

My friend’s band was “In Sect”, and they were also very entertaining.

The lead singer guy has torches strapped to his wrist that shine on his face when he double-grips the microphone. Particularly handy when he strays from the stage to sing their metal tunes right in people’s faces, taking his hand-held torch too. I like that.

Pretty similar to the way I used to record the selfie-videos as I stalked the audience for those up for games and double selfie-shots.

He got me right in the eye with that torch at one point though.

The bar has these weird upside down beer-taps.

You order a drink, and they put the glass on top of the tap and press a button, then the glass fills up from the bottom-up.

Turns out this is a glass (well, plastic) with a hole in the bottom and a magnetic disc/stopper that prevents the drink from slooshing through the hole in the base.

I did enjoy tentatively fingering the bottom of my glass, letting it get a little wet, risking the full splosh.

Those bar-taps/glasses are well weird.

There was a final band, and they were also good and metal but I dunno what they were called and I left after a couple of songs.

Metcheck reckoned maybe a 70% chance of 0.2mm of rain on the way home so I risked the no-umbrella thing.

The weathermen have been flat out LYING this summer. I have been rained on more than any other summer before. It’s been torrential. Weather like Americans expect England to be. The skys opened, and I was drenched.

Drive to BBQ

Drove out to a friend’s and sat in their garden eating in the sun, short walks in the woods that they apparently own now.

Driving home into the sunset was very beautiful at times, but also massively dangerously blinding quite a lot of the time.

Didn’t crash though.

Well.

Not during the sunset driving, only during the parking 🙄

Dinged door.

The hire-car’s drop-off is in the middle of a street recently turned into a couple of cul-de-sac’s with a block in the middle to stop through-traffic.

There’s a lot of that going on. It works quite well for slowing cars down and preventing accidents and making streets more livable.

But Waze doesn’t seem to know that yet, so it pushed me into the wrong end and refused to direct me how to get around to the other, correct end.

It’s like “just drive down there two meters” and I’m like “There’s bollards now man!”

Google Maps doesn’t seem to even acknowledge that the street exists. Had to park nearby and walk the route to figure out how to drop it off.

Good day though.

Expensive, and frustrating but good.

Stupid Internet Laws

The law-makers are trying to fix the internet.

It isn’t going well.

One of the hilarious things going on is that the big capital-owned news companies in Canada decided that they wanted some of Facebook’s money.

So they bribed the Canadian politicians into writing a copyright law which requires that anyone who links to the big capital-owned news companies pay those big capital-owned media conglomerates money for every link.

😆 🤣

Obviously Facebook then just stopped allowing their users to do that, because they don’t even want their users to leave Facebook and go to news company websites anyway. It’s the users that wanted to be able to link like that.

😆 🤣

And now.. And now..

🤣 😆

For reasons not unrelated to the corporate/capital capture of law and sovereignty, all of Canada is on fire.

People are trying to tell their friends on Facebook about how they have to immediately leave the town because it’s going to burn down and they are all going to die.

But they are trying to do so by linking to the local capital-owned news media conglomerate’s web-pages.

But doing that isn’t allowed any more because, the news media conglomerates demand payment for that sort of thing, backed up by genuinely paid-for “democratic” bribery to the Canadian political parties.

😆 🤣

And now.. And now..

🤣 😆

The Canadian government is today demanding that Facebook allow the linking even though it’s the Canadian government’s laws that tax and so forbid it.😆

This timeline is so cursed. I really hate it when Facebook is right.

Though I do hate it more when people are all burning.

- 120 boosts on that, though the threading and most of the replies are dropped from my server due to user (IE me) error.

- More of that conversation is still around on my project server though.

Twitter

Twitter talks about removing the block button.

It makes sense though.

Having a block-button on a troll website ruins the whole point of having the trolls there.

A troll website with a block button is like a motorway with speed-bumps.

More rambles about blocking on the thread.

I Haven’t logged in since they blocked my twitter-to-rss robots ages ago, but fully deleted my Twitter accounts now.

Not gonna be giving ’em biometrics or attaching my bank accounts or helping them train the AI thanks.

They can’t even be trusted with shitposts any more.

Bloomberg Story on Twitter plans.

Google Search

Right, fuck Google also.

I’ve had enough of pointing out traffic lights to their moronic machines just to prove I’m human.

“g” is no longer linked to google as a short-cut search

If only there could exist an actually not-shit search engine which will quickly return a list to me (or my robots) of links to articles written by humans that contain the words I type, and only articles containing the words I type, and not try to guess what other words it thinks I might mean or forward me to scammers and spammers.

If there were something like that, it’d get the “g” in my finger-memory and I wouldn’t even mind if it had clearly marked sponsors, based on my search-terms, without creeping and stalking me around the web like a fucking vampire.

Is there anything like that?

Fucking nuts that there isn’t anything like that any more.

The rant continues

Now I’m using mostly Qwant for search and Perplexity AI for new-ai-style question-answering and example-creating.

Releases

Starship

A new Observers episode: Memetic Warfare.

" The aliens discover a planet where the people fight among each other even though the planet is in flames. "

Watch it at https://starshipsd.com/observers/memeticwarfare/

You may also enjoy a clip-thread with some stories about the production and a few comments made during development.

Wordcloud Tarot

This week’s tarot show came out the way I like em: Ranty and opinionated and anti-capitalist:

" a debauched croney government are deliberately defunding the public services, and that the love of their workers can’t save them - the capitalist dominion continues showing no sign of respite. "

Watch it at https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2023-09-04-crumblingschools/

Reading

The Big Picture by Sean Carrol.

Amazing book. It’s subtitle is On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

I’ve sometimes pondered compiling like a secular bible, which covers all creation and why things exist and why they are as they are, and a sound basis for ethics and understanding and wisdom.

But there’s no need now coz this one is here.

A tour of the how and why and what for of all of the universe.

I guess I’m a “poetic naturalist” now. Brilliant. Always was but now I have a phrase for it.

Watching

Doctor Who - Jodie Whittaker Seasons

I’m not like a Doctor Who obsessive or anything. I only watch every episode twice.

Once as the drip-feed happens, week by painstaking week, huge year-long gap by year-long gap, then once all at once in the run-up to a new doctor. So it was time for Jodie’s speed-run before new Who presumably in November?

The first season of Jodie was pretty brilliant actually. I barely seem to remember most of the episodes, so they feel fresh even.

And it isn’t as cutesy focused on team-work family-bonds as I recalled.

The Sheffield-steel reconstructed screwdriver and Sheffield-steel reconstructed Dalek were both beautiful and steampunk.

I preferred the second run speed-watch, as usual. I can get more invested if I don’t forget everything that happened between weeks and months of broadcast delay.

The doctor is just simply a woman now with it not mattering at all and barely being mentioned because it was never important, no more than the gender of the daleks.

Around the Fediverse

We’re restoring what was once promised ending the enshitification of the network. Routing around the damage.

Veilid

Veilid Launch - @thegibson@hackers.towm

The Gibson and the Cult Of The Dead Cow present a new encryption and distribution network that has proper privacy built in. Maybe one day it’ll run a new stronger fediverse!

It’s a pretty big deal, The Register took note and podcast at classic hacker site 2600.

Early days though. A tool exists now.

We will wait to find out what is done with it.