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😢

This was last year. This year is on track for becoming much worse.

From the BBC:
"Climate change: Thousands of penguins die in Antarctic ice breakup"
bbc.com/news/science-environme…



Happy Ukrainian Independence Day and hopefully we will soon have a new date for a Ukrainian Victory Day.


In the US they seem to have a bail-what-you-want system, like pay-what-you-want, where you negotiate your bail before you make an appointment to arrest yourself. Though this seems available only to a certain type of people.


I'm about the rectify an omission: I haven't seen Dollhouse yet, even though it stars Eliza Dushku. I'm going to watch it now. And yes, I'm going to put the disc in the player, I'm not just watching the pictures on the cover as on the photo.
#ElizaDushku #Dollhouse
in reply to Gidi Kroon

I like that Eliza Dushku is one of the producers of this show. It should be the norm for the lead actress to have more power on a show.


I only know popular science / scifi, but I like the tube idea. If you throw away one end of the tube really fast, like the speed of light, the tube will automatically get longer, probably allowing you to hold on to the other end comfortably. The examples in popular science usually involve ladders instead of tubes, but it may be transferable. Then, if you throw it even faster like over the speed of light (there are some people that say this is impossible, the trick is to ignore them), it will break the limit of causality and any messages you shout into one end should be encountered by you before you shouted them. Maybe with some weird Dopler effect. And maybe I'm wrong...


Hey Science, I need a tube in my kitchen so I can shout "butter, you dickhead" into it and I'll hear that two days ago when I'm standing in the middle of the supermarket thinking "what was I out of again?"



If someone says something like 'I thought it was normal but due to the commotion afterwards I now have to apologise', then that's not an apology.


Amazing! Things are so funny when they're true, as in this is exactly how fossil fuel enthusiasts think (as well as other addictions like smoking)



I was hoping that all the water delivered by the storm over Mexico and California and heading north, would help putting out the fires in Canada. But apparently with the storm disintegrated by then, expected to just miss the right areas and the ferocity of the fires going on, the expectation is that it's not going to help...
in reply to Gidi Kroon

So for those who believe in divine intervention, that's a miss and not a strike.


PeerTube tries to keep a view count on the videos, but the monitoring on the cdn shows that there are definitely more times the video files are accessed. Mostly by me, and maybe all the other requests are just bots, but PeerTube doesn't count them.
#PeerTube


Checking my rss feeds to see whether the unread counts are still the same. If they increase, I have more to add to the 'read later' list.



Now rewatching AnnaSophia Robb in the film Bridge to Terabithia.

I really like this film. I keep changing what I would mention as my favourite film (I have a list) but a long time ago the subject of favourite film came up at work and a colleague of mine and me at the same time said Bridge to Terabithia. Which is such an odd thing to happen, as it's not even that that many people have even heard of this film...

I'd say this film isn't that much underrated, as just not rated because it is quite unknown.

Anyway, AnnaSophia Robb is brilliant.

#AnnaSophiaRobb #BridgeToTerabithia #NowWatching

in reply to Gidi Kroon

You'd expect Zooey to be credited in the music section of the film, and she is. She plays the music teacher after all. But AnnaSophia is too! The music video on the extras is even her song.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Bridge To Terabithia (2007) major spoiler
It is a really sad film in the end due to the sudden twist. But this is actually autobiographical for the writer of the book it is based on, and for her son who is the screenwriter here. It was him who when 8 years old suddenly lost his best friend, which then gave the mother the impossible task of helping him make sense of it. So she wrote a book about it. And he much later made a film of it.


I should really change my profile picture. It was meant as a ridiculous form of a bathroom mirror selfie (hence the shower curtain), but it comes across as some pretentious photographer. Pretentious, moi? And also not a photographer, not more than everybody is.


Reading a question on some forum where someone asks 'what is this insect and what do I do about it' and some expert answers what kind of insect it could be and advices her to catch one and send it to some institute for better identification. I'm not sure that's the kind of 'do about it' that she had in mind.


The film Kick-Ass with Chloë Grace Moretz will be on BBC One tonight, for those who want to catch a recording without subtitles. 23:40 BST, 00:40 CEST.
#ChloëGraceMoretz #KickAss


They're drinking coffee on tv and now I'm making one for myself. Clearly this storyline was bought by big coffee.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

An eye-opening thing was when back in university our club had a talk by someone from a gambling company. Without thinking it was in any way weird (that was the chilling thing) he was listing the characters they had bought in various tv shows. So yeah, even the smallest thing that's happening in your soap or series may only be there because someone lobby group payed for it. I think back to that each time some character has a sudden but unknown disease: awareness campaign.


I think these magic eye pictures may be some kind of conspiracy, 'The Emperor's New Clothes'-style, where a few people only pretend to 'see it'. Though if you're following WelshPixie you already know what it's going to say...

Cross your eyes they say... What if your eyes are already crossed? Instructions on such pictures say to 'start with your nose touching the image where the picture should be blurry', so I guess my nose is too long or my nearsightedness too strong...

Content warning for those without stereo vision: we can't see this so don't waste your time.


:merp:

('magic eye' image / eye strain)

((If you're having trouble seeing it, try opening the image in a new tab so that you can see it full size.))




This may be relevant to the strike as the article points out. I think if Netflix were to create a film by replacing writers and actors with AI, we would be legally allowed to copy it.


“Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: AI-Generated Art Not Copyrightable – The Hollywood Reporter”

This was exceedingly unlikely to go any other way as US law is pretty settled on this. hollywoodreporter.com/business…




Nowadays they already call it AI if a computer calculates 1+1=2. It's only proper AI if it calculates 1+1=3. And I is if it knows the difference.


Just had a very quick look at cohost and these are my very initial impressions:

+ the vibe is very tumblr, in lots of ways
- things are even more difficult to find than here, and/or it is even emptier

It looks like especially 'artists-from-tumblr' should be able to find their place there.



Of the two things I was supposed to do this morning, I've done one finally this evening (the one I was actually planning to do two weeks ago) and did another one I had decided not to do yet.


😢

Seemingly strike related, Variety reports that The Peripheral season two is not going ahead after all.
#ChloëGraceMoretz #ThePeripheral


Who cancels The Peripheral in the middle of The Jackpot?
variety.com/2023/tv/news/the-p…



Side-channels are such a fun thing of Friendica/Tumblr/PeerTube/WordPress...

(Called 'managed accounts'/'side-blog'/'channel'/'multi-site' respectively)



I like the story better than the biopic...

Also interesting how part of the biopic touches upon misusing the name of famous people by publishers, then the film has Maisie Williams in a tiny role so they can use her fame.



It's one of those things that annoy me about reading an open source project describe themselves: you can be four paragraphs in and still don't know what it does.

Of course the license and stuff are also important, but why does it need to be your opening sentence?


Things that are not «features» of an app:
- The license
- The technologies it uses
- The fact that it’s simple
- The application it’s an alternative to
Your app should be compelling on its own. What makes it worth using? How can it help people? Highlight those things instead!



Removable and replaceable portable batteries in consumer electronics by 2027

Hopefully this will force the smartphone companies to make their batteries replaceable again and reduce some e-waste this way.


🔋 From electric mobility to energy storage, we must ensure batteries are fit for our green future.

As of today, the #EU Batteries Regulation will make them safer, circular and sustainable throughout their lifecycle, including:

- A restriction on harmful substances
- Mandatory minimum levels of recycled content from 2025
- Removable and replaceable portable batteries in consumer electronics by 2027
- Recovery targets for raw materials, such as nickel and lithium

More ➡ europa.eu/!bRHxqc


Cogito Ergo Disputo reshared this.



I spent so long trying to get these photos downloaded from my camera. It insisted on first downloading the 600 earlier ones and ran out of battery twice.
#Squirrel


I didn't even know we had squirrels in the trees. This one came close by without a care in the world.


The difference between being pessimistic and optimistic about science: 'the Americans still use imperial units' vs 'at least they use seconds'.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Let's not talk about our time units actually still being Babylonian.


"I didn't have time to look. Five hundred years goes by so rapidly."
-- The Doctor

#DoctorWho



Do we have any astronomy people here that can confirm this 3D model is wrong? And maybe explain how NASA of all organisations keeps showing it on their site? Or is there really a gigantic canyon running as a band over mercury, like someone tried to separate two halves, which somehow shows up in no other pictures I can find?
#Astronomy #Mercury #NASA


This NASA site botched texture mapping Mercury pretty badly, and I was so so confused for a very brief amount of time. "Surely," I thought for a second or two, "someone would have noticed and written about this several hundred mile wide saggital canyon that completely encircles the planet. But what if.... aliens?"

solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/m…


in reply to Gidi Kroon

You're welcome!

Full disclosure though: I wasn't involved with creating that image and didn't speak to anybody who was. My answer was an educated guess. I'm pretty confident about it being a mosaic (the stepped edges are a dead giveaway), which is why I spoke to definitively, but I might be wrong on the details of WHY the individual squares look different.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)


I'm watching 'Amélie', or Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain in full, a film with Audrey Tautou. I've seen it long ago, but when I later bought it on dvd from a Belgian shop, it was with French subtitles only. Now I have the blu-ray and it has Dutch subtitles, which should help in my understanding of what they're saying.
#AudreyTautou #Amélie #LeFabuleuxDestinDAméliePoulain
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Films are full with the kind of people that answer a phone ringing in a phone box.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

It's a fun quirky film, reminded me in some parts of Gregory's Girl though it's of course completely different.

At several moments in the film I caught myself thinking 'why is she like that' but then I realised we're all like that.
#Amélie




Ever since I bought a can of chemicals against silverfish I haven't seen the insects anymore. I haven't used the can yet, but it seems to act as deterrent.


So why did I stop using Tumblr? Back when I stopped actively using it (I still have the account), there were two main problems. Firstly it was utterly broken in varying but always original ways. It gave me the impression that people working for Tumblr didn't use their own software. Secondly they introduced terms at the time (when they were under Yahoo) that forced you to accept that everything you did was communicated to all kinds of 'partners' like Facebook, with no opt-out. The latter has since relaxed.

This caused me to look into Mastodon (at first) and I've since started to appreciate the open source nature and the ability to have different servers with different moderation that all interoperate.



I have so many ideas to un-mess-ify my blog, but it's so much work that I can't bring myself to begin doing it. And I'm also somehow making things more complicated than they need to be, adding moving servers, going multi-site, new domains, caching, to just reorganising content and making a homepage.

If you want advise on how to make simple things more difficult, ask me.



in reply to Gidi Kroon

What finally broke the Tumblr software, because I suspect they weren't aware of all the places in the code it was used, was that they stopped using post types. So I want post types back on my hypothetical ideal platform. It would have post types like:

  • a note, short and only text
  • an article, longer like a mobile web page with photos and videos between sections of text
  • a photo post with one or more photos, with a short caption, shown in a layout the poster controls
  • a video post with a description
  • an audio post with a description
  • posts asking for interactions like: poll, question, form, q&a
  • a link share post with introduction text (which includes the link preview from the sender side)
  • reblog post type with optional added text
  • maybe a separate reply type post


Miranda Cosgrove has made car-selfies a very regular feature and in this latest one she's wearing what given the car seats colour is almost a camouflage dress. I mean, is she even in the picture? 😉
#MirandaCosgrove


in reply to Gidi Kroon

PeerTube is one of the few platforms that have a 'license' field on each post/video. I would prefer that any post/video with an unknown (or non-free) license would never appear publicly (to unauthenticated guests) on other servers in some 'federated'/'Recently Added' timeline. I think Mastodon/Friendica/Pleroma are wrong in appearing to host items of which it doesn't know the license, which for these platforms is all items. One of the reasons I switched off public viewing of 'global community'.

So basically: unknown license? => always unlisted




Today Emilia Clarke's new film The Pod Generation is available in cinemas, somewhere in the world, I didn't get where. Maybe UK, maybe US. Thursday 24 August it comes out in Dutch cinemas!

Trailer:
youtube.com/watch?v=rGMx_7oAeU…
#EmiliaClarke #ThePodGeneration

in reply to Gidi Kroon

I tried to look for a ticket today in my country, but it turns out to not be released after all. There's no new date other than what seems like a placeholder date of 31 December 2023. I was looking forward to seeing Emilia Clarke on the big screen. Anyway, I have set a notification alert on that film.

Why do film companies always do this? They complain that they can't make enough money from people going to see the films, then when people do want to see the films they make it impossible to see them. I can't pay for a ticket if they don't sell them.
#ThePodGeneration #EmiliaClarke #FilmIndustryGripe