Toots for pdotb@todon.eu account

Written by pdotb on 2024-07-12 at 12:07

Yesterday I saw several posts linking to the BBC article about Palestinians living abroad whose entire Microsoft accounts had been deleted because they'd used Skype to call family in Gaza.

Under each of these posts were several replies along the lines of "well they should have used FOSS" and I swear I just don't understand what goes through people's heads when they post stuff like this.

It's such a ghastly example of victim-blaming and an utter failure of empathy, that I barely know where to begin. I also struggle to see where the possible motivation can be. Like, this isn't going to win people over to the cause of foss -- quite the opposite. I've run a Linux desktop for years, and I sometimes wonder whether I should just give up because the milieu is so toxic.

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Written by pdotb on 2024-04-17 at 12:29

Beyond frustrated that the CBC's reporting on the budget uses the headline "...hikes taxes on the rich..." and repeats this claim in the body of the article. You have to read quite some way down to discover that all they're doing is increasing the taxable proportion of capital gains -- still keeping their preferential nature compared to regular income, and only for individuals making more than $250k and corporations.

I obviously haven't dared look at how the PostMedia outlets are covering this (my prediction: extremely badly), but if the CBC are just going to parrot a right-wing take on the issue, what even is the point?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/federal-budget-2024-main-1.7175052

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Written by pdotb on 2024-02-26 at 16:29

My previous love was 93MillionMilesFromTheSun. I still think their eponymous first album is great, especially the 11'30" track "The Times We Have Are Now":

https://93millionmilesfromthesunofficial.bandcamp.com/track/the-times-we-have-are-now-2

A track of theirs that never fails to make me smile, though, is their cover of Ride's "Vapour Trail". TBH, I've never really understood why Ride were regarded as shoegaze. Like, Vapour Trail is a wonderful song, but it's really just a very good incarnation of jangly indie guitar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVhNi5cU8mo

99mmfts's cover is still (just about) recognizable as the same song, but turned into a noisy dirge:

https://93millionmilesfromthesunofficial.bandcamp.com/track/vapour-trail

Lovely stuff!

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Written by pdotb on 2024-02-26 at 16:24

Was thinking a bit more about music and realized that I've got to a point at which Cattle's "somehow hear songs" is just the Platonic ideal of shoegaze:

https://jigsawrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pzl079-cattle-somehow-hear-songs-ep

To the point at which I'll see another shoegaze band be recommended, listen to it and, because it doesn't sound like Cattle, decide I can't listen to it. It does mean that I'm not really the target audience for streaming services: all that choice, and I only want to listen to one EP :)

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Written by pdotb on 2024-02-24 at 17:37

Just randomly thinking about my favourite book from when my kids were little: Toby's Doll's House, by Ragnhild Scamell and Adrian Reynolds. Unfortunately it's long been out of print; in fact, we never actually owned a copy and just used to periodically borrow it from the library and read it repeatedly during the loan period.

It's about a little boy who asks for a doll's house for his birthday, but the adults around him decide he doesn't really want that and get him a garage, a castle, and something else 'boy like'. By the end of the book they're all playing with the toys they bought, while he's made a doll's house out of the boxes they came in.

On one level it's obviously a story about gender stereotypes but at a deeper level I think it's about simply listening when kids tell you things...

https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781862330269

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Written by pdotb on 2024-02-16 at 13:13

Semi-subtoot here. A few days ago there was an excellent toot about how unsolicited advice is (almost) always actually criticism. Unfortunately I neither boosted it nor bookmarked it, so I have no hope of finding it now...

Anyway, it helped crystallise for me how I've felt about a phenomenon I've seen on here a few times and has always seemed... off.

Someone will post about an unpleasant/uncomfortable experience they had in public, and they'll get a reply that begins with "I would have..." and usually involves being very forthright with the perpetrator.

The thing is, I think the respondent actually thinks they're being helpful or supportive, but to me it always comes across as "You handled that badly, and here's how I would have handled it much better."

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Written by pdotb on 2022-12-28 at 15:03

I was going to post this as a response to a German thread, but then realized how weird that would be, so...

For context, Greta tweeted a body-shaming joke at someone, which was posted as a screenshot, which was followed by a long thread with some people praising it, some criticizing it, and then others defending it. A couple of points:

1. Other people have made this point, probably better than me, but when you criticize a public figure by reference to a physical (or, for that matter, mental) characteristic, you signal to the people around you that you find that characteristic funny/contemptible/whatever, none of which, I can guarantee you, is worth the supposed 'burn' on the public figure.

2. This isn't about Greta being a 'bad person'. We've all grown up in a society in which body-shaming is absolutely endemic, so it's not surprising that it gets used. We can, however, choose to do better, and the first step on that path is to admit that it's wrong. The next step, of course, is to try to avoid it in the future, but if we can't even admit that it's wrong...

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Written by pdotb on 2020-09-03 at 20:33

[#]Introduction

I'm an aging #vegan, #ecosocialist (though heading more towards #anarchism) dad. Happy to be here.

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