Tootfinder

My wife read some of the Discworld books years ago but lost interest, I have tried to get her hooked for a while.
This morning we collected an old edition of "Alles Sense" (Reaper Man) from the post office. She just wanted to have a quick peak inside. That was an hour ago. I silently retreated to another room.
Now I just heard her shout "I want a curry!" from the living room.

Time For 9 o'clock #HashTagGames hosted by @…
There goes a perferct Saturday. Let's play!
#SaturdayMishapsASongOrPoem

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

While I'm copying yesterday's photos to my computer, I'll just share some more photos from my recent blog post.
I tried to put the bushes at the lake as framing elements into the #photos. I think it worked out quite okay. -- And while we were on this walk I imagined all the time where and how this could look at sunset or with fog.
Maybe I should go there a again a couple o…

The US has about two dozen of its 71 nuclear-powered submarines at sea at any one time
and they are routinely moved into areas close to Russia, especially at times of heightened tension.
What is unusual is for the US to broadcast it, betraying the real point of Trump’s post,
which is: to demonstrate he is a man of action and to send a message.
The action is important to Trump as the most performative president of the modern era,
his now-familiar style being to r…

Why has Trump deployed nuclear submarines?
The US president wants to demonstrate that he is a man of action and send a message to President Putin after the Russian leader rejected his calls for a truce

Oh man, the cybersecurity news is piling up ahead of next week's Hacker Summer Camp, so check out today's Metacurity to stay on top of critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist,
--Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems,
--Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites,
--Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's Co…

The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist
Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems, Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites, Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's CoinDCX, 90 state and local gov'ts targeted in SharePoint attacks, SSNs swiped in Allianz breach, much more

Zohran Mamdani challenges President Trump to public debate: 'Let's cut out the middle man' (Hannah Fierick/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/09/04/us-news/zohran-mamdani-challenges-president-trump-to-public-debate/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250904/p117#a250904p117

This would make the bible more entertaining...
(Reply with your favorite #FloridaManBible stories and tag!)

I believe I have managed to prove my ID in order to comply with the new laws that say I have to prove my ID to own the business I own that I'm sure already asked me to prove my ID when I registered it.
First we tried the on-web version, but that apparently relies upon the corporates having managed to profile and track me, because it told me they had no questions upon which to base identification. Good I guess? My avoid-tracking systems must be working at least a bit?
Next we tried the android app, but apparently the phone I tried that with is too old and the app won't install.
So next option is turning up at a post office with a printed letter. I don't own a printer though, so had to have them post that to me.
Took the letter and a driving licence up to the post office today and "It's not going through" they said, pointing to a stalled progress bar on an android app on a tablet.
Um. Okay. So?
Just wait longer apparently. About ten minutes and it finally proceeded and the post office man took a photograph of me after asking me to disrobe of my robe, strip down to a teeshirt and jeans.
Not sure in what sense this has proven my ID any more than it was already proven to get the driving licence or company registration in the first place?
Apparently I now have government logins for "One Login" and for "government gateway" and they are not the same thing? But sort of are the same thing?
Can't say I really understand it. Expect they'll introduce a third government login when they do these Digital ID cards they're talking about.
God knows how I'm supposed to know which to use when the company tax records need updating in a few months.
#id #government #oneLogin

Remember the #Cohen brothers #film "The Mann Who Wasn't There"?
Here is such a good writeup about the #emotion

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

An #infosec drama, in two screenshots.

Updated Cowboys 53-man roster after Parsons trade, other moves post cutdown day https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/28/cowboys-updated-53-man-roster-after-parsons-trade/85874949007/

By the 2020s Simon Groot’s seeds had improved the incomes of 20m small farmers in more than 80 countries, from Asia to Latin America to Africa.
We remember the life of the man who transformed tropical vegetables
https://bsky.app/profile/economist.com/post/3lug3oly2kk2a…

"Come to mind the names of violent battles: DR-DOS, Taligent, AmigaOS, Newton OS, Windows for Pen Computing, Copland, Vino, NeXTSTEP, Novell NetWare, JavaOS, BeOS, DoJ vs Microsoft, Rhapsody, POSIX, Linux is communism, Linux is a cancer, Samizdat, Windows Vista, SCO, Symbian, Solaris, OpenSolaris, systemd, Windows Phone, MeeGo, Tizen, Firefox OS, Sailfish OS. Countless mythical man-month hours were lost. Millions of lines of code were fired."

Man who burned flag near the White House says ‘it was my right as a citizen’ - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/flag-burn-arrest-trump-order/

“Israeli Security Cabinet approves PM Netanyahu's plan to occupy Gaza City”
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-863628
Fuck these people, man. Genocidal assholes. I don’t know what else to say. Does it even matter what we say? The fuckers are going to do whatever …

> Writer J. Michael Straczynski has been warning his readers for 30 years about authoritarianism, from Babylon 5 to Spider-Man.
post text from: https://bsky.app/profile/comicbookclub.bsky.social/post/3lxa2lxzff32w
linking to:

Why do I refer to the bike as a "lamplighter"? In the old days lamp lighting was a job. A lamp lighter went around in the evening usually with a ladder and lit up each gas powered lamp post in turn.
Some of the people doing this job had specialist bikes made that were very tall. Then they could just cycle between each one, hold on (or lean) and light them without needing the ladder.
The design here is classic lamplighter bike style, albeit scaled down. A real lamplight…

Our new art handler, Doug Hollingsworth, is a real renaissance man. He's played in bands, written several novels and worked at both the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Learn more about Doug in our latest blog post: https://georgiamuseum.org/gmoa_blog/do

@… yeah man, I know that feeling. Time to write yourself an uncomfortably positive self-hype blog post about the cool things you’ve done

How was Joe Biden forced out of a presidential race for a disastrous debate and for looking frail and for confusing names,
but this man, one of the most ignorant men to ever be elected to any office, allowed to continue on as president and treated as a normal, serious leader??
https://bsky.app/pr…

My post-fest crash comes this morning as I confront the hard fact that I may never see any of thousands of photos and videos from last night as those will be unanimously and gleefully donated locked-stock and by the barrel exclusive to Palantir-Meta, and ESPECIALLY now 'cause hey Robby Starbuck is The Man, dig. W00t! 😔
#ohcanada

Vor zehn Jahren übernahm Trump erstmals die Führung bei den Vorwahlen in den USA. Am Ende erhielt er knapp die Hälfte der abgegebenen Stimmen in dieser Vorwahl - das ist ungefähr der Prozentsatz der Republikaner, die sich heute als "MAGA" identifizieren, schreibt @…, der jetzt von der Washington Post vor die Tür gesetzt wurde.
Damals hätte man der Welt no…

After 10 years, just how large is Trump’s actual base?
A decade ago this week, Trump became the choice of Republican voters. How many Americans still choose him?

The programme is live in about 15m (8pm EDT) over at UncertainFM

Usually i dislike these "do this virtual stuff to raise money for xyz", but I like this guy videos, so why not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5YF95r_Bew
> See how much money YouTube video
> can make, and turn that money into
> trees.

#ICE #ICEblock #iOS #resist #app

On Thursday evening, the night of Juneteenth, Donald Trump took to Truth Social with a classic “old man yells at cloud” complaint:
Americans get too much time off work.
“Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” he wrote.
“It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
For good measure, he also opined that workers themselves agreed with him on this.
The presi…

Trump’s Truth Social rant on Juneteenth is part of a nasty history
On Juneteenth, Donald Trump took to Truth Social with a classic “old man yells at cloud” complaint: Americans get too much time off work.

The programme returns LIVE this Monday at 8pm EDT over at UncertainFM

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who has vehemently described the New York City subway as a hellscape, has been named to oversee NASA — putting him in charge of rocket ships that are far more dangerous than public transit.
After Donald Trump pulled the nomination of tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman for the post, the president announced Duffy would be the interim NASA administrator.
Trump made the announcement on Truth Social, praising the former Real World cast member: “Sean i…

Man Afraid to Ride Subway Named Head of NASA
Trump has tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as NASA administrator.

Good Morning #Canada
Todays edition of #BigStuffInSmallTowns involves a kinda boring object with an interesting story behind its installation. The tall tale of a man trading a paperclip for a house, and that may be oversimplified, takes us to Kipling Saskatchewan, the home of the Guinness World Record "World's Largest Paper Clip." The paperclip was unveiled on July 12, 2007 and is made of 3043 lbs of solid steel. It is 15 ft. 2 inches tall and 3 ft. 3 inches wide; 45 ft. 6.75 inches long.
Thank you to @… for the article that prompted this post.
#CanadaIsAwesome #RoadTrip
https://www.ctvnews.ca/regina/article/on-video-the-tale-of-the-red-paperclip-trade-and-kipling-sask/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #LaurenLaverne
The Spencer Davis Group:
🎵 I'm A Man
#TheSpencerDavisGroup
https://open.spotify.com/track/4tTDkb24puZu7XEAi352ea
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