@timbray@cosocial.caBest wishes and sympathy to any former colleagues dealing with us-east-1 going pear-shaped. Looking at the signals, this outage is an extra-weird one, which is unsurprising because with decades of experience, all the non-extra-weird outage scenarios have been discovered and dealt with.
#aws
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.itI rode on this street (15th Ave NE) 1000s of times with no bike lane, when I used to live on 16th Ave NE. It sucked. I pointed out that drivers only really parked on one side of the street. The city had a plan to repave and add a protected bike lane, but it was delayed for years due to, of all things, "natural gas" pipe expansions. I moved to NYC before they started the project.
It looks SO GOOD, and just as I predicted, the parking is not overloaded despite being on only one…
@oligneisti@social.linux.pizzaOne weird part of Facebook is seeing people sending birthday greetings to dead people.
Some know what they are doing and you can tell by how they phrase their posts.
Then there are people who have no idea the person is dead and are just blindly following Facebook's instructions.
#Facebook
@yaya@jorts.horsealways real weird moment when one of you follows me on bsky and I realize you are a Big Account over there lmao
mastodon. the great shit posting equalizer
@jamie@boothcomputing.socialThat was a weird one. #Wordle
Wordle 1,493 5/6
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛
⬛🟩🟨⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
@chrislowles@mastodon.socialSwitched to LibreWolf and all the profile pics on @… are squares lol, some of them are straight edge on one side but not on the other too, weird.
@cdamian@rls.socialFriday Links 25-20
If you have a weird fascination with trams, you should probably check out the full World Tramdriver Championship video.
Otherwise, the podcast with the author of Code Complete is great, so is the one about a train ride through Canada.
https://christof.damian.net/2025/09/fr
@raysofred@discordian.socialThe pedophiles came out for this one
@jacobgudiol@mastodonsweden.sePrevent Illness with this One Weird Trick: Dying. https://epiellie.substack.com/p/prevent-illness-with-this-one-weird
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioMaybe weird question, but does anyone have a favorite moving blanket or tarp, ideally one with metal grommets?
I want something that can be tied down with straps when used to cover stuff like furniture on a pickup truck truckbed.
(Please only answer if you have direct experience and have a favorite product.)
@only_ohm@mas.toSuddenly had the realization that I took particle physics modules in both the final year of my bachelor's degree (1997-1998) and my master's degree (1998-1999), and no-one ever mentioned the Higgs field or its boson in either case, and that seems quite weird.
@bobmueller@mastodon.worldOK, this one is weird. She died in 1991. Her skull was found in 1992. But she was supposed to have been cremated. #ColdCase #forensics #DNA
"Skull found in Wisconsin woods belonged to Stillwater …
@siggib@infosec.exchangeThose who truly know me would agree that I am very unusual/strange/weird/etc. It's next to impossible to offend me, but calling me normal comes pretty close. There are a lot of reasons why I'm weird/unusual. One is that I don't like to receive gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Valentine's Day, etc. They feel so obligated. If you want to give me a gift, it should be for a weird reason, as a weird guy I love weird reasons, like because it's Tuesday the 13th, or because it's humpday.
If you wa…
@yaxu@post.lurk.orgFundamentally, mastodon (and twitter, bluesky, etc etc) doesn't really work for me. I'm just remembering the sense of confusion when I first joined twitter - the idea that you subscribe to a feed of everything that someone says, and not to topics or threads is just a bit bonkers. It must sort people into groups with weird niche common collections of interests. I've tried running more than one account for different interests but it doesn't really work for me.
@jake4480@c.imFinishing up Blood Glacier, as I thought I'd seen it and was making sure (I haven't, I've just seen something similar). This one's weird and maybe a little cheesy.. I only noticed partway through that unfortunately, it's badly dubbed in English- like, VERY badly. I hate dubbed stuff. Wish it was subbed, but there's no choice for that on Tubi. Just this weird dubbed version. But I'm just here for the gore anyway 😂 which this one's delivering, a little.
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgI know Star Wars is often kinda dumb. The movies are plot-holey and often kinda bad.
But seeing the first one with my almost 6 year old and playing Lego Star Wars with him is something special. Like the joy he feels seeing those characters do their weird shit, the way he really gets into thinking about the stories and why people do what and who they might have also talked to is just ... the best. I'm actually looking forward to watching even the prequels with him.
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialHow 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
@cdarwin@c.imSusan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee,
responded to Trump’s
"Pocket Recission" attempts by saying that “any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law.”
Other moderate Republicans issued similar statements, and even Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed some concern, saying he agreed with the president on policy but worried about the process.
Still, the House Republican Co…
@luana@wetdry.worldIt actually kinda surprised me that Aliexpress didn’t have stuff for this tbh, it’s like the one place for niche nerd hardware and weird stuff
@Stomata@social.linux.pizza @yaxu@post.lurk.orgFundamentally, mastodon (and twitter, bluesky, etc etc) doesn't really work for me. I'm just remembering the sense of confusion when I first joined twitter - the idea that you subscribe to a feed of everything that someone says, and not to topics or threads is just a bit bonkers. It must sort people into groups with weird niche common collections of interests. I've tried running more than one account for different interests but it doesn't really work for me.
@hex@kolektiva.socialPut another way, "be weird." In #Portland, the regieme has chosen an enemy for which they are absolutely unprepared. Because Portland has already mastered being werid, and weird is something authoritarianism doesn't know how to deal with.
Naked bike riders, Victorian tea parties, authoritarians only have one strategy and every time they're met with something they can't respond to with tear gas and battons they look incompetent and weak.
@EarthOrgUK@mastodon.energyDiarycast - Year In Review, and One Weird Trick (2022) - A look back at the thrills and spills of 2022 at EOU Towers... #podcast #yearInReview - h…
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioFar cry from the Uptown I remember from the 90s.
If I were one of the remaining small business owners, I’d be working like hell to get the weird back. Where there’s weird, there’s life.
@arXiv_csPL_bot@mastoxiv.pageOne Weird Trick to Untie Landin's Knot
Paulette Koronkevich, William J. Bowman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21317 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21317…
@tezoatlipoca@mas.toGarbage. Ppl pay for this?
My prompt was `Edward Hopper's American Gothic but with two robots` and it didn't even include a pitchfork.
#microsoft
@cyrevolt@mastodon.socialThat was a weird one, obviously scam.
I was one of many mentions in the 500 issues.
After I reported it, GitHub quickly took it down.
@hynek@mastodon.socialMy first keynote draft left me in a weird melancholic state. I’m realizing that this is exactly the ONE keynote I can give right now. Everything’s in it that I have to give—including ALL my pet peeves. 🥰
Maybe I can write another in 20 yrs; but not now.
Anyhow, tickets: https://2025.pyconuk.org/
@samvarma@fosstodon.orgI have finally accepted that I am a weird bird when it comes to guitars—I generally have one that I do everything with. Every time I've had another one, they gather dust until I move them on. I've never collected, never found a use for more than one.
My number ones:
2019-23 was a PRS 594, kept until this week
2023-24 Schecter USA Nick Johnston, which was traded for...
2024-25 PRS Studio
(1/n)
@jake4480@c.imThe other week we went to a Spirit Halloween and it had this creepy subway setup in the middle of the store where you could sit and it would make weird noises and such. The huge rat man was a nice touch.
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaI'd love to get my hands on one of these weird mid-1980s Canadian educational market x86 QNX systems
@rocksongoftheweek@mastodon.worldOur pick this week is from groove metal legends White Zombie, and it's not any of the songs you'd think we'd pick either (unless you thought we'd pick the weird one, then yeah, it's that one).
Check it out and don't forget to follow us for more curated song picks from across the epic world of #rock and
@scott@carfree.cityI have a rare condition where I'm normal in every way. Since most people have at least one thing that's weird about them, my normality makes it hard for me to relate to anyone else. It's been a lifelong challenge.
@bourgwick@heads.socialon this week’s grateful deadcast, @sg-marshall.bsky.social & i get into the weird & heady lesh suite, “king solomon’s marbles”/“stronger than dirt.” the 2nd idea seems to have been in lesh’s head since ~1962, per this image from one of hank harrison’s infamous books. https://www.
@Billybobbell@twit.social@… @…
This is so true but is also one of the weird aspects of Trump's approach, he is going to destroy the UN which is the basis of so much US influence.
I always wondered why so many countri…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.socialWeird Greco III 🇬🇷
怪异希腊 III 🇬🇷
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography
@gwire@mastodon.socialIt's pretty funny that the weird AI nostalgia videos ask people to return to 1985, when one of that year's big movies was a time-travel comedy that portrayed 1985 as a shitty wasteland compared to the 1950s.
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgI wrote about frictionlessness and "AI". The essay is admittedly a bit of a weird ride trying to connect a few very distinct thoughts. I hope it's still worth reading.
https://tante.cc/2025/07/30/friction-and-not-being-touched/
@pgcd@mastodon.onlineI had to drive alone for a while and decided to listen to my own music and, surprisingly, I found it good (in its own weird, specific way).
If you like EBM and that kinda stuff, maybe have a listen. Perhaps you'll agree with me
https://pgcd.bandcamp.com/album/infernal…
@jake4480@c.imYo, kid, I heard you like 90s death metal demos. I gots another one for you with this week's #ThursDeath. BOTULISM was from Marlborough, Massachusetts and they only released one demo in 1997, 'Feasts of Lunacy', before disbanding in 1998. It was re-released last year. It's weird, it's riffy, it has some rattly snare, it's cool as fuck.
@hex@kolektiva.socialOne of the things it stressed is that we really don't know the motivation at this point. I think we're closer to "extremely online and weird" but we can't really say "he's a Groyper." I think this is pretty likely, but we should be honest that we don't actually know.
This is where I think it's important to realize we're operating in two spaces: reality and the meme space. The right now longer has a separation between the two. The meme they want to spread to attack the left is that it was some how associated with leftists (especially trans folks), so this is the meme they believe.
It's useful, on a memetic level, to disrupt this. The Groyper meme is a pretty solid response. But, at least as far as I'm aware, we're still not sure that's true. But we don't have to collapse meme space and reality. We have absurdism.
We don't know if he's a Groyper, or even a far right troll, for sure anyway. But we do know that #JeffryEpstein killed #CharlieKirk. #TheTruthIsOutThere #ReleaseTheFiles! #FreeLuigi
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialOverly 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.
@jake4480@c.imAfter hearing so much about it and then reading about it yet again just the other day, finally taking in Zardoz. It's a weird one, man 😂
#70s
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialI finished "Dear Wendy" by Ann Zhao a few days ago. It's a lovely platonic "romance" that deals explicitly with aro/ace identity, post-coming-out identity work as opposed to the initial realization journey, and Wellesley College student culture (although if unlike me that's not relevant to you, it's not like you need to be interested in this to enjoy the book).
It felt slightly weird to be reading a book by someone who I'm pretty sure could have been in one of my classes (but as far as I am remember wasn't). Probably would not have read it were it a normal romance, because that would have made character empathy super awkward. In any case, it feels useful to get an inside perspective on almost-contemporary student culture, especially the part that's a reminder of how many students love the liberal and progressive aspects of said culture, despite its flaws.
Super enjoyable and honestly pretty cozy book.
#AmReading
@jake4480@c.imWatching through Smiling Friends season 1 again, as one does, I suppose. Surreal, sometimes disturbing, funny, odd stuff. I see it has a season 2 now too, gotta grab that. And I guess a season 3 is happening eventually. No cable for years now means that I get behind on things like adult swim shows.
#SmilingFriends #weird
@jake4480@c.imNow I'm trying out The Hoarder from 2015, it has Mischa Barton. It's like I'm watching the O.C. all over again 😂 Hadn't heard of this one. Tubi is so great, it has all this weird shit 😂🤣
#horror
@jake4480@c.imFor this week's #GrindayFriday, an intense, weird one that's been crawling (ha) under the radar, the new self titled LP from Northampton, UK's HIDEOUS CRAWLING ABOMINATION. Ten excellent tracks. A grinding, crunching, growling, brutal and riffy abomination indeed.
