Blistering blue barnacles

[Quercus]

Another genderqueer person here, I'm not really going to respond to the conversation (except to say that arguing against anyone's experience of their own body and mind is a shitty thing to do and I'm sorry that's happening to people), because it's 3 in the morning here and I'm not coherent enough to respond sensibly (and now I'm thinking that that turn of phrase makes me sound like a malfunctioning laser, which probably proves my point)...

Original context for my rant was something I overheard on World of Warcraft chat, which was: "You can be born a woman and transition to a man but that means you're only socially a man and biologically still a woman!" Which makes me read that as some kind of tribal chant like, "We must count you as a group that you clearly don't fit into for pure numbers' sake! You're 'biologically' a woman whether you like it or not ha-ha! :P" I was like oh no that can't be a thing because I am All Woman^(TM) and regardless of my supposed biological makeup I still feel and act like a woman et cetera. So yes: People were denying my mind and bodily experiences for the sake of classifying me and others like me in the camp of being Still a Woman/Man/Otter/Duck because of supposed biology.

Urgh. That's horrible, and I'm so sorry that happens. I just want to say that, in case I didn't give that impression, of course you're a woman, and fuck anyone who says otherwise. My rant was referring exclusively to my experience, which is of being (and mostly being happy as, though with some frustrating elements of dysphoria) physiologically and anatomically male (and having that as a significant part of my ongoing experience that i want to continue to acknowledge), being mentally agender and socially feminine.

[ucim]

I'd prefer other rather then it's complicated (although I'm guessing you didn't literally mean that forms would say "it's complicated").

I picked "It's complicated" (isn't that what Facebook uses?) because I've heard some folk don't like to be "other"ed... they feel it marginalizes them. However, since each segment of the "other" category is tiny, in most cases the fine granulation isn't useful. So yes, I imagined the forms would say "it's complicated". It would be most accurate and most respectful.

As to social vs internal pressures, my point is along the lines that internal pressures may legitimately cause one to want to change gender, but that social pressures should not. And to one who is actually contemplating such a change, this distinction would (or should) be important.

Jose

[eSOANEM]

I (as someone who's gender would come under "other" and knows many other people in that situation) have only heard that objection made when the "other" choice doesn't also have a free text box. We understand that a question can't list every single gender (in part because I'm not sure such a list exists). Other (with a free text box) is more respectful because it lets people define their own gender

[somitomi]

Added another one to the collection of useless tape reels. I didn't expect too much for about $1, but I don't even understand how a tape reel ends up being this wobbly.

[Sizik]

Just spent about $20 on a non-contact voltage tester and 2 hours (including the trip to buy said tester) to determine that the circuit breaker that controls the dining room lights is the one below the breaker labelled

Bedroom 2
Recepts

and is in fact labelled

Bedroom 3
Dining room/Hallway
Recepts.

Also, I need to buy a new dimmer switch.

[Peaceful Whale]

A freind wrote several thousand lines of code (in C) , sent it to me for debugging, his explanation for its failure was "devils". It was all perfectly fine except for every 1/4 semicolon was a colon. It took me a good hour to correct them all.

Later it turns out that this was on purpose...

[Weeks]

A freind wrote several thousand lines of code (in C) , sent it to me for debugging, his explanation for its failure was "devils". It was all perfectly fine except for every 1/4 semicolon was a colon. It took me a good hour to correct them all.

Later it turns out that this was on purpose...
:evil: :evil: :evil:

like literally just to waste your time? or something else

Also why did it take you an hour to change them

[eSOANEM]

Some languages use colons for other stuff so doing a simple replace would be a pain

[Weeks]

Could use :\n or w/e for newlines in notepad++

[Magnanimous]

IT'S SO HOT

Thermally, not spicy hot.

[Giant Speck]

We're experiencing a temporary pause in the monsoonal rain, so it's been pretty hot here. It got up to about 41ºC today with hardly a cloud in the sky.

[poxic]

I would kill for a righteous amount of rain right now. We've had a thin blanket of smoke for a few weeks due to the fires a few hundred kms east, and all the sidewalks are sticky and gross from the sap-or-is-it-aphid-juice falling from assorted trees in town. (Lindens seem to be the worst offenders, according to my tree book.)

Still manages to be muggy as shit. I'm not a big fan of August in general.

(Also would be nice for the fires to go out, but my shoooooes.)

View from office window last week. Less bad today but still can't quite see the North Shore mtns

... I can't make that not upside down. Pls flip your monitor to view. >.<

[Weeks]

I would kill for a righteous amount of rain right now. We've had a thin blanket of smoke for a few weeks due to the fires a few hundred kms east, and all the sidewalks are sticky and gross from the sap-or-is-it-aphid-juice falling from assorted trees in town. (Lindens seem to be the worst offenders, according to my tree book.)

Still manages to be muggy as shit. I'm not a big fan of August in general.

(Also would be nice for the fires to go out, but my shoooooes.)

20170804_093629.jpg

the picture makes this post completely amazing and it should end here

[Quercus]

... I can't make that not upside down.

That's your problem then! How's the rain supposed to reach your city if it's upside down? The rain's all falling into the sky where it can't do a bit of good. Flip the city back round and i bet that'll fix the problem.

[Pfhorrest]

Fires and everything's upside-down... you're in Australia, aren't you?

[poxic]

That must be the problem. Someone get God to fix the region config on the BC server.

[Flumble]

Fires and everything's upside-down... you're in Australia, aren't you?

I don't see a barbie in the picture.

Nor any scorpions, alligators, snakes, spiders, kangaroos or emus for that matter.

[Weeks]

Fires and everything's upside-down... you're in Australia, aren't you?

I don't see a barbie in the picture.

but its fantastic

[somitomi]

Man, I hate the glasses my mom got for Christmas, they're such an unstable pain in my clumsy ass. They're even called "tumbler" for Bob's sake, do I even need to point out this shape isn't the pinnacle of stability?
That photo puzzles me by the way, the glass is barely visible on it. I'm not sure that's a solid marketing strategy, but I digress...
Back to me being clumsy around glassware every once in a while. I dread those moments, the helpless panic as I try to minimize damage and the inevitable feeling of utter failure that follows to linger for the rest of the day. I could say it happens, but it happened way too often since the arrival of the now dreaded glasses, in fact I spilled soda onto two different laptops within the last few weeks. Although there was no harm done, the potential destruction of said laptops doesn't exactly make me feel better about this whole debacle.
Oh yeah, and I tossed some instant pho soup my sister didn't finish into the trash and I hate myself for it. I always feel like I'm what's wrong with the world when I throw food into the trash.
So today has been pretty depressing, huh.
Well, good thing it was over eight minutes ago...

[Pfhorrest]

So sick of rightwingers trying to revisionist-history the Nazis as "leftist" just because they have "socialist" in their name.

[Liri]

Lincoln was a republican you guys

[Sableagle]

... all the sidewalks are sticky and gross from the sap-or-is-it-aphid-juice falling from assorted trees in town. (Lindens seem to be the worst offenders, according to my tree book.)

Lindens are a world of stickiness in search of a substrate. Parking under them turns cars sticky and green. Walking under them turns hair sticky and green. Having a picnic under one turns everything sticky and green. "Quickly nipping home, grabbing the branch saw, coming back and pruning those branches" off one turns hands, saw handles, saw blades, shirts, trousers, keys, doorhandles and everything else you touch one the way to the bathroom sticky and green.

I like trees. I just prefer those ones to be a little bit further away.

[poxic]

A bit of rain improved the sidewalks last week, and the visibility. Large parts of the province continue to blaze away, though.

Right now, my biggest kvetch is my neighbour's smoke detectors. They have been going for over two hours. I was first worried that there was actual fire, but the heat detectors usually pick up on even small stuff. (We've had two balcony fires over the years that triggered the full alarm and some sprinklers).

Now I'd just really, really like for the fuckers who live there to come home and fix the problem. I'd like to go to bed soon (early bed/rise times for work). I do NOT want to lie there for several more hours any amount of time just listening to that shit.

(The neighbours in question are actually pretty decent people and not normally fuckers don't know if they have kids. I'm just annoyed enough to add a "fucker" overlay for a while.)


Eta, two minutes later: complaining to the internet really works! Hallelujah.

[Sableagle]

Installing: Microsoft DirectX for Windows.

EVERY TIME!

Every damn piece of software ever just insists on installing that again and again and again. Doesn't anything ever just use the version I already have? Is that too much to ask?

[SecondTalon]

Steam?

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... -PAXN-6252

[speising]

Installing: Microsoft DirectX for Windows.

EVERY TIME!

Every damn piece of software ever just insists on installing that again and again and again. Doesn't anything ever just use the version I already have? Is that too much to ask?

Does it really install it, or just start the installer, which detects the existing version and exits?

[Sableagle]

I'm not really sure, because I got sick of looking at dots going in circles and hit the red X button. It never really tells you what it's doing, does it? It just has a progress bar.

Actually, that brings up another thing I dislike: sudden hard drive activity. I could be, for example, reading The Hobbit in German online, and suddenly "ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-bap" ... but no clue what was being read or written or why.

[Thesh]

Installing: Microsoft DirectX for Windows.

EVERY TIME!

Every damn piece of software ever just insists on installing that again and again and again. Doesn't anything ever just use the version I already have? Is that too much to ask?

Does it really install it, or just start the installer, which detects the existing version and exits?

From ST's link:

Running the DirectX installer is not a matter of making sure your overall DirectX install being up-to-date. Microsoft has a helper library with D3D called D3DX. You'll find binaries for this like d3dx9_43.dll in your Windows\system32 folder. There are over 40 different versions of the D3DX library for D3D9 alone, and many more for D3D10 and 11 as well. Each game that uses the D3DX helper library is linked to a specific version. As such the game must run the correct D3D installer version that it was specifically compiled with to ensure the binaries exist.

[Sableagle]

Yeah. Turns out I have 10 MB of those .dll files from all the different things I've installed.

[somitomi]

Actually, that brings up another thing I dislike: sudden hard drive activity. I could be, for example, reading The Hobbit in German online, and suddenly "ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-bap" ... but no clue what was being read or written or why.

Could be swap space/page files although that would mean something is using a lot of memory

[Flumble]

Or the browser itself likes to cache some stuff to disk.
Or any of the background services wants to do something, since all you're doing right now is reading The Hobbit and your operating system does want to keep itself optimized (because otherwise you might complain, or worse, switch to another OS), so this is the best time to fetch updates, do disk defragmentation, compact log files, move around data for prefetching and whatnot.

You can see which programs are using the disk and/or which files are being modified using Performance Monitor/Task Monitor or whatever your OS calls it. (Though if it's a service that's set to 'only do something if the system is idle' it may stop doing what it's doing as soon as you open up the task monitor. )

[Sableagle]

All this talk about islanders and poor people!

Auto-playing video and an article about what's REALLY important:

Hurricane Irma, the most powerful in recorded history, is forging a path towards south Florida, where a number of Donald Trump's luxury golf clubs are located.

The storm – which killed at least eight people as it tore through the Caribbean – has already hit the island of St Martin, where the President owns a lavish waterfront estate.

But Palm Beach county, where the President's so-called "winter White House", Mar-a-Lago, is located, has declared a state of emergency.

A golf course Mr Trump owns in west Palm Beach is also under threat, as are two more in the city of Doral and the coastal town of Jupiter.

I'm still waiting nervously to hear whether Kanye West and all the Kardashians are safe.

[Angua]

It really annoys me how everyone keeps talking about bloody Richard Branson >.< No one cares about your fucking private island.

[addams]

I would kill for a righteous amount of rain right now. We've had a thin blanket of smoke for a few weeks due to the fires a few hundred kms east, and all the sidewalks are sticky and gross from the sap-or-is-it-aphid-juice falling from assorted trees in town. (Lindens seem to be the worst offenders, according to my tree book.)

Still manages to be muggy as shit. I'm not a big fan of August in general.

(Also would be nice for the fires to go out, but my shoooooes.)

20170804_093629.jpg

... I can't make that not upside down. Pls flip your monitor to view. >.<

Oh. Good Grief!
You, Too!?

I'm playing a game of Ketchup around the forum.

You win the Rant.
We don't have sticky trees.

The trees we do have are burning.
We have smoke and ash, like you.

[poxic]

The smoke is gone locally after a decent rain on Saturday. We need more, but it was a good start. It's finally acting like September around here, at least.

[addams]

Yey!
Our smoke blew back down south.
We can breath the air, today.

The sound of helicopters makes it sound like a war zone.
After last winter, I refuse to complain about the heat.

[Jumble]

To be honest I’ve lost track of which thread is which. Perhaps we could cut the in jokes and set them back to something that makes sense outside mod madness week? Anyway, assuming this is the rant thread....

Here’s a warning. Many of you, I suspect, use apple products. You will shortly be offered iOS 11. For the love of God, don’t! Take it from one who regrets his life choices, it’s awful.

It’s not that the styling of every major apple release has just got uglier since Steve Jobs died, or the pointless and confusing changes to functionality that I could probably figure out if I wasn’t too cross to be bothered. It’s the fact that my iPhone 6, hardly a museum exhibit and something I don’t intend to upgrade as I have accessories (from apple stores) that won’t work since apple took it into their heads to get rid off the earphone socket, now runs like an arthritic hamster with two broken legs.

Tomorrow I will take my iPhone and iPad to the apple shop and ask them to reset them back to iOS 10.3.

Learn from my mistakes.

[Sableagle]

Much smaller OS-rant: I have a shift key. It has a spring under it. I press it with my little finger. It's not *difficult* but it is something I only do on purpose. I am aware that selecting a file and pressing the Delete key will send it to the "Recycle Bin" instead of deleting it. This is why, when I'm done with a 48 GB .avi file and want that space on my hard drive back, I don't select it and press Delete but instead select it, hold down the shift key on purpose and press Delete. I do this with the intention of actually deleting the file.

I shouldn't have to click "no" and do it again every single time to convey that I actually want to actually delete the file every single time. I hold down the shift key to indicate that I do mean to delete the file and do not want to send it to the "Recycle Bin" folder. I mean "delete" in the sense of "delete." That's why I hold down shift, to distinguish between "move" and "delete," because I want to actually delete.

If Microsoft want to send me a 16 TB external hard drive that I can designate as my Recycle Bin, that's fine. If not, I'd really prefer to be able to delete my files when I no longer want them at all and never will again.

[addams]

To be fair...
That Devil may not be pure evil.
It is darn nice of them to give idiots a second chance to save what may have been a lot of work and is irreplaceable.

[speising]

I suppose sableeagle's problem is that Windows tends to forget you pressed shift when you release it before the dialog pops up.
Which can take its sweet time, because there's lots of work to be done first!