Self-hosted Free Software federated Torment Nexus

Huge yikes.

Kagi is now partnering with Brave to power its search results — and they seem to be dismissing their users’ concerns regarding this partnership with a company that’s notorious for being led by a proud anti gay rights supporter.

Just as I’ve consistently advised against using Brave’s products, I now advise against using Kagi as long as it contributes to a homophobic business.

There can be no neutral politics when it comes to people’s rights and lives.

https://kagifeedback.org/d/2808-reconsider-your-partnership-with-brave

A lot of people don't know that the reason there's not a "rating system" for books like there is for movies, video games, music, etc. is an intentional and explicit stance of librarians. Librarian associations have long, and correctly, insisted that categorizing books into specific ratings or age categories is censorship. The decision of an outside group of people about whether a book is or is not appropriate for someone of a certain age is censoring content to them.

As we've seen with the right's attacks on libraries for LGBT content in books, they would LOVE if some outside party had already done the work of classifying books into a particular category, and they could simply lobby that one central body into insisting that any mention of gay people means it's Adults Only. Then in one fell swoop they could brand the entire debate as "we just want to make sure that our libraries only carry age appropriate books" without having to have the debate on a case by case basis on each individual book across each individual library and across each individual library patron.

After all, does it even make sense that literally the diary of a tween/teenage girl is not appropriate for a tween/teenage kid to read? If you ask conservatives, the uncensored Diary of Anne Frank should be Adults Only. Despite it being written by a teenage girl and having real historical value in humanizing the victims of the Holocaust. But if they could do that fight once, centrally, at a ratings board, they could get it banned from all libraries in one fell swoop.

I am seeking transgender people from Finland to speak about their experiences with transition in that country.

I know that Masto has a lot of Euro users, so please boost for visibility.

About me: I'm a transgender US journalist interested in exposing barriers to treatment experienced by trans people in Finland bc some Finnish researchers are making a big splash in anti-trans activism internationally.

It would be particularly valuable to find someone who attempted to access care as a minor.

If at first you don't succeed, don't sweat it, your parents are rich.

Wait. Your parents aren't rich?

Oh, man. This is embarrassing. Sorry, all of these success aphorisms are meant for people with privilege and resources.

You're on your own. Good luck.



#success #SelfHelp #advice

transphobes: you can't take part in sports team because you went through puberty

trans people: please can i take blockers to stop puberty

transphobes: no

Quote of the day: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"

Who called it “intellectual property problems around the acquisition of training data for Large Language Models” and not Grand Theft ̶A̶u̶t̶o̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶ Autocomplete?

Don’t fuck with moon dust. No seriously, do not fuck with moon dust.

Absent any moisture or atmosphere, millennia of asteroid impacts have turned lunar regolith (soil) into a fine powder of razor sharp, glass-like particles. What’s more, the solar wind imparts an electric charge on the dust, causing it to cling to any and every surface it touches through static electricity. On earth, sand tends to get smoother over time as wind and water tumble the grains about, eroding their sharpness. Not so on the moon – lunar dust is sharp and deadly. This is Not A Good Time if you’re an explorer looking to visit our celestial neighbor.

During Apollo, the astronauts faced a plethora of unexpected issues caused by dust. It clung to spacesuits and darkened them enough that exposure to sunlight overheated the life support systems. Dust got in suit joints and on suit visors, damaging them. It ate away layers of boot lining. It covered cameras. Upon returning to the cabin, astronauts attempting to brush it off damaged their suit fabric and sent the dust airborne, where it remained suspended in the air due to low gravity.

Inhaling moon dust causes mucus membranes to swell; every Apollo astronaut who stepped foot on the moon reported symptoms of “Lunar Hay Fever.” Sneezing, congestion, and a “smell of burnt gunpowder” took days to subside. Later Apollo missions even sent a special dust brush with the team to help clean each other and equipment. We don’t know exactly how dangerous the stuff is, but lunar regolith simulants suggest it might destroy lung and brain cells with long-term exposure. 1

In fact the dust is so nasty that it destroyed the vacuum seals of sample return containers. We no longer have any accurate samples of lunar dust, “Every sample brought back from the moon has been contaminated by Earth’s air and humidity […] The chemical and electrostatic properties of the soil no longer match what future astronauts will encounter on the moon.” 2

Whats worse, the solar-charged dust gets thrown up off the moon’s surface via electrostatic forces. The moon doesn’t technically have an atmosphere, but it does have a thin cloud of sharp dust itching to cling to anything it can find.

And it probably isn’t just the moon. “A 2005 NASA study listed 20 risks that required further study before humans should commit to a human Mars expedition, and ranked "dust" as the number one challenge.” 3

The coolest solution I’ve heard about in next-gen spacesuit design is a mesh of woven wires layered into the suit. When activated, the wire mesh would form an anti-static electric field that repels dust. Quite literally a force field. 4
#astronomy #apollo #moon #lunardust

W4 Games have just launched W4 Cloud.

It's a complete, free & open source networking solution for #GodotEngine. Host your own servers, it costs you nothing to use.
https://gamefromscratch.com/w4-games-launch-w4-cloud-complete-godot-multiplayer-solution/

#gamedev #indiedev

Stolen from Reddit, who stole it from Tumblr.

After god knows how many years of work, the people behind the #StarWars 4K project have released the final installment. For those who don't know: a group of dedicated restorers, unhappy with the reworked Special Editions, hunted down, scanned and restored the original 35mm theatrical prints of the first Star Wars trilogy in Ultra High Definition. They're better than the official blurays. Incredible work, not only in terms of authentic content but even the picture quality is superior.

Happy "Captain Cook got stabbed in the chest in Hawaii" day to all who celebrate.

The more you know, the cooler you sound.

People don't talk about game architecture enough so!

💫 How do I ID things? 💫

Let's retrace how I reinvented the wheel!

Latest when adding your first 💾 Save Game 💾 system, you will find you need to ID your object types, cuz you can't store a reference to a Prefab

🧵

I spend the morning documenting more issues with CharacterBody3D and providing really specific MPR's and use cases.

Character creation and movement is one of the issues that has been bothering Godot users for long time. If you want to help fixing this, whatever it is sharing the bug report, your experiences, testing or fixing the issues, please take a look at the Bug report:

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/87946

#godotengine #Godot #gamedev #indiedev

Ready for a new heist? Transplant your Blades in the Dark game into a whole new setting with The City of Red Waters by Ash McAllan. New heritages, backgrounds, crew types, and more await you in Inverrouge, where ambition and decadence meet.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/462722/City-of-Red-Waters?affiliate_id=24139