Tootfinder

On a whim, I went to the Royal Festival Hall to see Bruce Liu playing Ravel. Pretty cool. He makes the fiendishly difficult appear entirely effortless.
I think last time I went there, I was a callow youth. It's bigger than I remember!
#music #classical

I should do some work with Authentik, but I keep getting sidetracked to find out where the default background for the SSO page is coming from
https://github.com/goauthentik/authentik/blob/main/web/src/assets/images/flow_background.jpg

Und wie immer schweigen die selbsternannten Free Speech Warrior …
Russia Fully Blocks WhatsApp - Slashdot https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/13/067244/russia-fully-blocks-whatsapp

In opening statements in New Mexico's suit against Meta, state prosecutors argue Meta misrepresented the safety of its platforms, as Meta's attorney pushes back (Morgan Lee/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/meta-new-mexi…

Meta accused in New Mexico trial of failing to protect children online
Meta is on trial in New Mexico to answer allegations that its social media platforms enable predators to target children for sexual exploitation. The case is one of a series of lawsuits nationwide accusing social media companies of not doing enough to protect children online. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023 alleging its platforms enable predators to target children for sexual exploitation. Meta denies the allegation and accuses prosecutors of taking a “sensationalis…

The new emojis are out - at least the ones Apple includes in the next iOS update:
Distorted Face, Fight Cloud, Hairy Creature, Ballet Dancer, Orca, Landslide, Trombone, Treasure Chest
Another emoji originally was on the list for Unicode 17, then postponed to 18, and in October 25, it was removed from the draft. Probably because a certain company in the consortium took offense to it.
U 1FADD

Google the price of oil, and you’ll most likely find two widely quoted prices for the commodity, one in the United States, the other in Europe.
These prices, which are constantly changing on electronic markets, suggest that although the war with Iran has made energy a lot more expensive, things are not nearly as bad as they were four years ago, after Russia invaded Ukraine.
But if you needed an actual tanker full of oil — and quickly — it would cost you dearly.
On Tuesday, …

Iran War Drives Deeper Oil Shock Than Prices Reveal
The war with Iran is preventing huge amounts of oil from flowing out of the Persian Gulf, but the prices that many people track don’t fully capture the scale of the disruption.

One of my VR Lighthouses died last month. These things are gyroscopically spinning 24 hours a day for, what, a decade now? Nearly.
No wonder. Mostly the industry seems to be settling on using head-mounted cameras rather than sweeping infra-red beams and receptors on the head anyway.
It is true that lighthouses give accurate positioning, but means I can't easily take the headset next door, say. Or to a party.
So inside-out, as they call it, is fine for the headset now and mostly okay for the hand-controllers.
But it offers no solution at all for the foot-trackers and hip-tracker that I need for puppetting the characters in the #vr #slimeVR #trackers

Hell yes
https://ground.news/article/progressive-candidate-launches-last-minute-challenge-to-karen-bass-for-la-mayor_2545d5

Progressive candidate launches last-minute challenge to Karen Bass for LA mayor
Progressive Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman (D) on Saturday made a last-minute bid to challenge Mayor Karen Bass (D) in the June primary election. Raman made the announcement hours before the 12 p.m. filing deadline for candidates be on the ballot. She praised Bass in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, calling the mayor “an icon” but said the city needs someone who will tackle its problems.

Nieuw Rondje met de #trike.
Door het Buitenhout, naar Stad, de Kunstwijk, de Parkwijk, de Danswijk en vooral de Filmwijk, over het Weerwater, om de Floriade heen en over het Edgar Degaspad weer terug. Slechts (oftewel wèl!) 21 kilometer zonder een centje pijn of moeite, ook mijn hart protesteerde niet en daar is het me om te doen, een betere hartconditie. Voorzichtig opbouwen.

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.