toots

someone should make a newsletter or blog or podcast or something about stuff made by Irish trans artists and call it Trashinscneach

free idea because I am far, far too tired to do this myself




talking about AI art and weird fetishes, not serious, nothing explicit

I bet the wonderbread guy with the fetish for blonde women destroying the environment and building polluting sandwich factories etc. really loves AI slop

people keep asking “who are these AI generation tools for?” and the answer is it’s for the wonder bread guy





Hey

I tried to put a batman mask on your cat on your webpage, refreshed the page and it… did not save most of the attempt, so it looks like I just scribbled over the top of its face, im really sorry, I cant see any way to undo it.

A screenshot showing the photo of the cat with black scribbles over her face.














Reviewing stuff is fun and it’s nice to have a little log of your thoughts that you can go back to every once in a while and say “oh yeah that was what I really liked about that show.”




They give titles to the homunculi in Fullmetal Alchemist that mostly rhyme: Greed the Avaricious, Lust the Lascivious, Envy the Jealous, Gluttony the Voracious, Wrath the Furious but then the last two are Pride the Arrogant and Sloth the Indolent when they could have gone for Pride the Vainglorious and Sloth the Languorous.

What if instead of keeping the names of the homunculi in English when translating Fullmetal Alchemist they replaced them with the ecclesiastical Latin to keep it foreign? Avaritia, Luxuria, Invidia, Gula, Ira, Superbia, Acedia.


I got accused of being from Dublin yesterday for pronouncing RPG as “or pee gee” rather than “ar pee gee” 😭

I blame my parents sending me to elocution lessons as a child to get the culchie out of me



Bless the V-22 Osprey, a design that is looks si­mul­ta­neously so ridi­culous and so cool that it seems like it must have been designed by a twelve-year-old and has the safety record to match, continuing to get U.S. marines killed for two decades.

A screenshot of the Wikipedia article for “Accidents and incidents involving the V-22 Osprey” show accidents from 1991 to 2023.





Irish politics

the president doesn’t have much power or particular influence but if Miggeldy gets replaced by some Fianna Gael gombeen it is really going to drag down the vibes of the whole country a little bit










I was rambling to someone the other day about how endearing I find the names Biolizard and Finalhazard and how someone spoke English natively would probably not name something that and they suggested maybe Biolizard was meant to evoke Biohazard in the first place which I hadn’t considered and makes it make a lot more sense but in a way that still I don’t think scans very well to a native English speaker lol










if Windows is going to demand line endings be \r\n it should actually treat them as separate operations and not one thing. If it sees a \n character on its own it should put the output onto the next line without returning to the start of the line instead of just doing nothing. if it sees an \r character on its own it should start layering lines on top of each other




the thing about Ireland is it might only be 16°C but it’s also 100% humidity so walking up hill to the train station with a backpack on I am drenched in sweat and it just doesn’t evaporate because the air is made of water



IDW Sonic the Hedgehog #79

Incredible that today’s Sonic comic ends with the heroes teary-eyed celebrating a successful revenge-murder and no one suggests that this might be a bad thing.


lesbian couple going on revenge-murder mission and also their supportive friend Silver the Hedgehog is there

the vibe here really comes off as lesbian couple going on adventures and also their supportive friend Sonic the Hedgehog is there

which is, frankly, the ideal relationship dynamic


I have been struggling to get my zippo to catch consistently and I think one of the problems was that I was actually tightening the spring too much and pressing the flit too hard against the spark wheel. After putting it back in and tightening it with just my fingers instead of a tool the wick seems to be catching better now.





I accidentally stepped on my cheap theracane knockoff and snapped it. I have splinted it with a metal rod from a broken folding chair and judicious application of duct tape. Seems to be holding up so far.

Said home-repaired cane.







I got an MRI done a little while ago and I decided to download the data for it from the clinic just because I could and apparently the KDE Dolphin file browser has a thumbnail for MRI data files

A thumbnail for a computer file depicting a brain.









I am overly annoyed by the leery jokes about big boobs in the first episode of The Apothecary Diaries when it’s based in a culture with different beauty standards where breast binding was often practised


I though that in The Magnus Archives when they were starting to more openly reveal the nature of the Fears and the rituals and that the Magnus Institute was dedicated to the Eye that the big twist was going to simply be that the ritual for the Eye already happened.

My logic was that the Eye is audience. The world is already a story for us to watch (well, listen to), the main cast all work for the Institute (podcast) for our benefit and that a world shaped by constant invasive fear of being watched and catalogued and observed at all times is indistinguishable from just life now, especially if you live in London.




When I post reviews to my blog I include a star rating in the title with star characters like this: ★★★☆☆

I want this not to be a mess for screen readers so I decided to wrap them in spans with ARIA labels like this: <span aria-label="3 stars">★★★☆☆</span>

But trying to look more into accessibility I am finding people saying that aria-label should only be used on interactive elements or elements with a specific role assigned and not general text but then I am not sure what alternative to use here to make this work better. Does anyone have any specific suggestions for what to do here or good general guides on accessibility to read?

Also is there any practises over labelling things that are correct names but that screen readers are probably going to struggle with. E.g. the new Gundam show is officially called “Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX” which I understand is meant to be pronounced something like “G-Quacks” or labelling “Kevin Can F**k Himself” to be clearly pronounced without the censoring.

Another weird question I’ve thought of: Does having a span in the middle of a word (e.g. if yo were doing some decorative text on just part of a word for whatever reason) fuck up accessibility? Or even bolding or italicising parts of words? Like if I write unimportant to indicate I am emphasising that part of the word?


first episode of Kevin Can Fuck Himself

I adore how the plaster on Allison’s hand from where she cut herself is barely visible in the sitcom lighting (I went back a little bit just to make sure it was even there) but stands out very clearly in the drama lighing


instead of the great man of history theory I propose the shitty man of history theory: history is mostly shaped by systematic forces but sometimes there’s a huge cunt who fucks everything up


I have to take my blood pressure a few times a day at the moment and the cat is absolutely terrified of the velcro strap. It’s because of the noise it makes but she runs out of the room when sees me so much as get out the blood pressure monitor.


American politics

Hey yanks I am sorry about the rapid slide into fascism but the fact that the White House website just posted a rant that starts with complaining that NPR said that “the make-believe clownfish in Finding Nemo would’ve been better off as a female” is really fucking funny.






We need to normalise sex and kink in society so that it’s socially acceptable for my autistic arse to go on rambling about the ridiculous smut I’ve been reading in the pub after two pints the same way I do about The Ring or Sonic the Hedgehog.


I just got a call from a robot voice saying “hello, hello. I want to talk to you about work. Please add me on Whatsapp” from a withheld number. If you are going to try to scam me at least make it possible for me to fall for it.



In Sonic Unleashed the name Jungle Joyride doesn’t really work for the werehog version of the level, where the gameplay is much slower and combat-focused. Instead they should have called the nighttime version of the level Jungle G.B.H.


Incredible web design from my insurance company. The name field is automatically filled with my account details and is not editable but then fails validation due to the presence of a fada in my name. This is an Irish company. Editing the value of the form with my browser developer tools of course allows me to submit with no problem.

A form with an error calling my legal name invalid.












Everyone in Ireland in the eighteenth century seeing a rat for the first time: That cunt is French!

Context

Rats were introduced to Ireland around the 1720s and the word for rat and French are the same, a clipping from luch Fhrancach which literally means French mouse.


For a while whenever I saw anything about Severance or Succession I didn’t pay much attention to the names and thought that they were the same show, which started to sound increasingly strange and convoluted.


I was going through movies by year on Letterboxd for years I have not seen any films for and I spotted They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? for 1969, which I believe my dad once said was the only film he’d ever walked out of the cinema for because he was so bored so obviously I am going to watch it.


There was a man in Tesco having trouble with the self-checkout and I heard one of the staff explain that the newspaper is heavier on Saturday and the system to weigh the items you put through the scanner doesn’t take it into account and thinks you’ve put something wrong in.


I tried changing my default browser colours to a dark background and light text but it turns out that a lot of websites explicitly set a white background without specifying a text colour, which is annoying.

The New York Times mini crossword splash screens showing light yellow text on a white background.





The team tested their findings by making pozzolanic concrete from ancient and modern recipes using quicklime. They also made a control concrete without quicklime and performed crack tests. Sure enough, the cracked quicklime concrete was fully healed within two weeks, but the control concrete stayed cracked.

sciencealert.com/we-finally-kn


Arguments based in evolutionary psychology are always a bit suspect but are truly silly when you are at all familiar with the breath of kinks that people have. I have friends who are turned on by the idea of being transformed into a pool toy. I think that there are deeper and more chaotic processes involved in human desire and behaviour than a very basic model of direct evolutionary pressures leading to the actions of individual people.




Podcast were the hosts track down and watch/listen/read every single official and unofficial version of Shada, including every version of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and slowly lose their grip on reality.

Oh no I’ve convinced myself this is a good idea.

Broader just like a podcast about weird, funny or interesting adaptations would be something I would really enjoy doing I think.

There are so many weird novelisations.



I am seeing people on Tumblr talk about the murderbot show and if it is going to have the emotional depth of the original murderbot source material and be true to its handling of the muderbot’s relationship to gender and I don’t know if this is a bit or not and I refuse to look it up.


I was in Forbidden Planet and decided it would be nice to have physical copies of some of the prettier Sonic one off stories and then I was told there was a 3 for 2 so I grabbed a random volume of reprinted Doctor Who Magazine comics as well

Sonic the Hedgehog: Scrapnik Island and Seasons of Chaos and Doctor Who: Evening’s Empire.



Donkey Kong Jr. while still a child kart raced Mario. Now his son adult son, Donkey Kong, races Mario. From this we can conclude that the lifespan of a jumpman is much longer than that of a kong.













This lettering is annoying me because I know exactly what mistake was made when typesetting it and it’s consistent through the entire volume.

A panel from Dungeon Meshi in English. The “I”s are inconsistently seriffed.

(the i should only be written with serifs when it’s a pronoun, but the font they used encodes this by having the capital i being seriffed, so they’ve ended up writing every sentence that starts with an i with a seriffed i)






I want to figure out how to get Feedbin to display my posts with an avatar as it does this for Mastodon posts.

There’s a blog post here that says “The great thing about this is that there’s nothing actually Mastodon-specific here. Any RSS feed can be styled this way.” but there doesn’t seem to be any documentation on how this is handled or how to use this.

Digging through the source code it seems like it’s based on whether the first post that’s parsed from the feed has a title or not.

Frustrating that it would be such an all or nothing thing for the entire feed about whether it should be considered microformat or not and that you can’t have avatars and post titles together. I’m also reluctant to remove post titles from my Atom feed as that seems like that could not play nicely with other readers.

My last post on this account as displayed in Feedbin.


I’ve read these before but I’m reading through Joe Wintergreen’s posts commenting on Half-Life 2’s source code and one of the comments made me smile in the coding for the fast zombie’s leap

// Take him off ground so engine doesn't instantly reset FL_ONGROUND.
//
UTIL_SetOrigin( this, GetAbsOrigin() + Vector( 0 , 0 , 1 ));

Because I did the exact same thing in Snolf RB2 when taking a shot. Teleport one unit up so that you’re not on the ground any more.

https://www.joewintergreen.com/half-life-2-source-code-a-trawl/































concept: rewrite a bunch of my website code to split out sections from each other more cleanly so I can more easily make small posts with less effort

result: oh god oh fuck everything is broken and I have way to many unstaged changes what was I in the middle of doing a week ago before I went on holiday if I want to post anything I need to stash fifty files and change branches which takes several minutes right now

Though honestly that describes the situation more a week ago than right now. I do have the podcast processing stuff finished now and I just need to do similar rewrites with the Pico-8 processing. That should🤞🏻 be easier now that I have done the podcast stuff and can base what I do on how I handled that.




people who know about photography I am thinking of getting a little polaroid-style camera for making little memento snaps. Image quality is not of paramount importance but y'know would be nice. Don't want to spend a fortune. Any particular recommendations?