✨Ben Hamill✨ @benhamill@witches.town
Austin, TX
Among the oldest of millennials.
Social justice, software, parenting, games (video, roleplaying, board), books, comics, linguistics, argyle
Said to be, "like the least lewd person I have encountered on this social network"
Member of the #WitchesTown mod team.
I'm moving my account over to @benhamill. I don't wanna get into the details, but if you're really interested, I guess DM me over there. I'll import my follows momentarily. A bit sad to go because I love a lot of people on this instance.
Uh. I like to kindpost, I guess. It's a new skill I'm learning, anyway. Also real bad joaks.
I try to learn about intersectional social justice and am trying to develop the habit of taking concrete, real world action about it more often.
I've got a linguistics degree that I don't use professionally (I'm in software), but I love to talk about words and things.
I think play and playfulness are super important. I enjoy roleplaying, board and video games.
I'm a mod on #WitchesTown. Ask me if you have questions (though I only speak English, do I'm not much help to our large population of French speakers).
My family afforded me a brief nap today. I dreamed I was playing a game a bit like Journey, but there was voice chat and more people playing together than 2. I fell in with a gang of unbearably cool French anarchist kids who all mostly knew each other IRL. We got to a part where you skate/boarded downhill in twilight and they were doing all sorts of awesome tricks while making up raps about the black block and shit in a mix of English and French. I was amazed they tolerated my presence, but they were so nice.
I'm pretty sure this was a dream about #WitchesTown.
Mornin', witches and wicks.
Welp. Third snow of the season. Of the one third we generally have per year here. Right now it's 26F, but feels like 14. Too damn cold.
Language joke (screenshot) Afficher plus
Good morning, witches and wicks.
OK. It's way too late for me, kittens. I'm going to bed. Sweet dreams or other appropriate farewell for your time zone. Take care till we bump into each other again. 💖
TIL: there were Soviets in Ireland. 1919.
's hit album 
In particular Sometimes by Be Steadwell is super amazing, though not quite representative.
Y'all know about Be Steadwell, right? She's got an album called Queer Pop Mistape, which should be enough to get at least some of y'all to check her out. "I am an activist because I am a black, queer, woman singing about love. I believe that is radical." She's great.
passed with flying colors https://icosahedron.website/media/vDFfwYI8waaszdAVXb4
wow Mastodon 2.1 looks really good 4 am content
tfw you engage in a conversation on here about a somewhat fraught topic and it's respectful and relevant and insightful. Conversations like that just basically can't happen on Birdsite unless DMs. God I love this place.
A newspaper asked Toronto's transit spokesperson to review The Commuter, starring Liam Neeson:
* If you somehow manage to climb under the train’s carriage from inside the car itself, then wow. Double wow if you’re 60, as Neeson’s character reminds us on several occasions.
* If you live through that stunt, do not attempt to roll out from between the tracks as the train passes over you. You will not survive.
* Please don’t try to decouple cars. Just go and sit down.
Hello, it's me, the fantasy-liker with opinions!
Today's opinion: it's cool to have huge hulking monsters with smaller, more or less human-shaped partners, but please just make that a cross-species romance and not some sexual dimorphism bullcrap. I don't care if you have boobs on improbable creatures so long as they can still reasonably yank a man's head clean off.
Five years of drawing gender-neutral orcs going about their lives say it can be done!
I wish I could do a good Winnie the Pooh voice. Bother.
@benhamill He also had good points about the internal dynamics of the bodies in question. Their geological processes are going to be quite similar to each other... and different from comets, asteroids, and other bodies that aren't triaxial ellipsoids.
It's a theoretical tug-of-war that's been going on for nearly 220 years, almost since Ceres was discovered in 1801.
@benhamill It's kind of interesting how polarised the astronomical community is about the definition of planet. Guests on Planetary Radio give it a lot of shade.
There's also an astrogeologist (I forget his name) who, at an upcoming IAU conference, who's proposing a new (alternative) definition that would classify about 112 known solar system bodies as planets.
"But that's too many! How will kids learn all of them?"
His answer: they don't need to. Give them the definition & let them infer what is, and isn't a planet.
He likened this to the periodic table: not many people memorise it, but if they understand the structure, they have an idea of what's what.
The 6yo brought home a worksheet they did at school today about the planets of the Solar system. Each entry has a little line work picture of the planet printed that they colored and then a couple of sentences about the planet in which they wrote the name of the planet.
But I noticed there were 9 entries. Pluto's entry had a big 🚫 on it. Like not added after the fact by the teacher or anything. Just as part of the worksheet. 😆 Take that, Pluto!
@benhamill And here's a fun fact: the way English is constructed, your first example (the progressive form of the verb, "is X-ing") is a participle too. "Kissing ladies" is a participle phrase, which functions as an adjective to describe Stacy.
When I was most of the way through writing this, I realized that I was dangerously close to being a straight guy talking about women in a sexualized situation for no particularly good reason. So, I wanted to acknowledge that and hope that the truth to the "boost if you agree" meme salvages the whole thing.