New blog entry: Summer webcomics: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/08/summer-webcomics.html

New blog entry: Summer webcomics: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/08/summer-webcomics.html

nostr:npub1tcwn9tl3ya4g3qh6he4dle4037a6hvzxfvkvnxkws39sm7w2659qmpkkca nostr:npub1fnywz84gqs8xqsuwzguxuekm767k2cxa9dsy2fxugz0huuzc0srsnhzngp Not "Stabitha"?

nostr:npub1tcwn9tl3ya4g3qh6he4dle4037a6hvzxfvkvnxkws39sm7w2659qmpkkca Lifelogging is a thing. In their case, it's a religious devotion—they believe the instrumented life can be resurrected at the end of time by the All-Receiver (assuming you don't end up at the tender mercies of the Basilisk, instead).

They're wrong, of course, but that doesn't stop the holy wars (any more than being provably wrong about the explanatory power of a creed stops any religion IRL).

nostr:npub1tcwn9tl3ya4g3qh6he4dle4037a6hvzxfvkvnxkws39sm7w2659qmpkkca nostr:npub1dm9t5skkxuclwlnd4she9080cvu74xjtf2emk6l4dzkgryjthz6sdxmey2 When the visuals aren't smeared into a muddly blur by my retinas, the audio is inaudible (American accents don't help, either) … then Author-Brain is predicting the plot twists one to ten minutes in advance, critiquing the editing, and yelling angrily at the scriptwriters for bottling it on the world-building. And that's before we get to the infuriating tear-jerker prompts embedded in the music. It's just exhausting.

nostr:npub1tcwn9tl3ya4g3qh6he4dle4037a6hvzxfvkvnxkws39sm7w2659qmpkkca nostr:npub1dm9t5skkxuclwlnd4she9080cvu74xjtf2emk6l4dzkgryjthz6sdxmey2 I don't have the attention span to watch series TV. (Although cartoon visuals are less inimical to my damaged retinas than movies made this century with muddly colours and jerkycam).

Via the Grauniad:

nostr:npub1vcecvhk6rwj9ww9334ar22w9fm288nsagtdylzn2w2qcypzf8slqe6qdj2

“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”

The only argument against removing prices from public transport I can see is, it encourages travel—at short range this is unobjectionable, but what about, say, intercity trains? Or international ones? Should longer—notionally, mostly discretionary—journeys also be free?

nostr:npub10krky5a5jy5c4vvx0p3cltkvmjv26vl6ed2xa9vusyhkg9nzwghsw3n9vn Welcome to the fediverse! Please note that most instances have policies against transphobia (which BBC News has a bad history of) and trends politically left/anarchist (The Guardian, editorially, would be on the hard right and angling for a block by the standards of most Mastodon instances).

nostr:npub1fnywz84gqs8xqsuwzguxuekm767k2cxa9dsy2fxugz0huuzc0srsnhzngp Alternative title: "Why Charlie can't write right now"

#writingWonders 5/8 does your MC have any pics of themselves with friends/family? Why (not)

They'd find this question incomprehensible: everybody records their entire life, birth to death. If you ever met someone, you can recall the visual and audio stream and location and other metadata more or less at will. And they can easily find related (group) images because the environment is monitored too. It's as ancient a techné as clothing, cooking, and spaceflight.

#writing #WIP #spaceopera

nostr:npub14evh9mm6wkzjx6ksm0ek58kv6t9vuxgp52r8ka8zvxxffgkq2efsqpm2c5 At which point you run into the cellco carriers who really *don't* want users tinkering with anything that can get at the baseband processor …

nostr:npub14evh9mm6wkzjx6ksm0ek58kv6t9vuxgp52r8ka8zvxxffgkq2efsqpm2c5 That's a bit more problematic. (I use an iPhone precisely because I *DON'T* want my phone which is also my password repository and my high street bank to be open to random tweakers. If I want to tinker freely, that's what my non-banking laptop is for.)

nostr:npub1dm9t5skkxuclwlnd4she9080cvu74xjtf2emk6l4dzkgryjthz6sdxmey2 nostr:npub1tcwn9tl3ya4g3qh6he4dle4037a6hvzxfvkvnxkws39sm7w2659qmpkkca never heard of it. This is a TV thing, isn't it. Yawn.

nostr:npub1zu7r9pe3hxxvvq2c0v6psj6uq69ljkf9kx6ud695p6985klptqnqd4c2ee Targeted advertising is a scam aimed at advertisers: they'd usually do better buying cheaper generic/untargeted ads and ignoring keywords (does "covid vaccine" signify an anti-vaxxer or a realist? Who knows? FB certainly don't!)

nostr:npub1g9h0v9u7v404h8m598zrfdg3hd5nzh2p25xxwj4h4ychg6ce7pwqd063j0 nostr:npub1fgrrkcptz5hwg7s0na9at92h5rk64q2lcmsafue76l8vla2uttsq3auxh0 And Apple don't tend to consign hardware to "vintage" or "obsolete" status until it's a minimum of four years since it was discontinued from sale, i.e. well beyond duration of AppleCare+ extended cover, assuming you bought it the day before the supply chain for refurbs ran out. Which is STILL not good enough in my view, but it's better than this garbage approach to customer service.

nostr:npub13clde8qu93d7z3negghkz3wq0a7uq5ulxmc3sm4rkslrtua2vezqdcxlw8 nostr:npub1fgrrkcptz5hwg7s0na9at92h5rk64q2lcmsafue76l8vla2uttsq3auxh0 Well then, that's Google's fault for bad product architecture! It should still be penalized when it's sold for a profit. (ChromeOS is based on a Linux kernel and can have a full Linux userland installed, so there's ZERO excuse for this inflexibility.)

nostr:npub1fgrrkcptz5hwg7s0na9at92h5rk64q2lcmsafue76l8vla2uttsq3auxh0 Yup. This is worse than Apple when they're trying to drive a migration to a whole new architecture (eg. PPC->Intel, Intel->ARM), which at least has a faint justification (during the transition they have to maintain full stack portability across two CPU families).

Computers that stop working less than 5 years after they first go on sale should be illegal—not fit for purpose under consumer protection law. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/no-discounts-or-warnings-for-people-shopping-eol-chromebooks-on-amazon-walmart/

nostr:npub1pc27tkltk9hl84ru7528x05xge763dallklnf6zkpg8walmgcgqskmeqwt Apple can't shut down Siri without rendering an entire product range unusable (Homepods) and damaging the utility of iPhone.

Remember, Microsoft doesn't make phones.