The Leewit @ghost_bird@witches.town
Newly witchy. Older. Trans. She/her.
cybersecurity experts agree: don't use the messaging thing your friends use. you should ONLY use [thing with a different name than the last things named in warnings like this]
Playing Prey and experiencing persistent mild irritation at:
(a) the combat.
(b) the idea that dimension-hopping alien clouds of smoke could have anything we'd recognise as neurones.
Just saw a Picasso exhibition and now, inevitably, I've got the Modern Lovers stuck in my head.
Anyway. PSA: block early, block often, block preemptively, block with regexps, block on a whim, block individually, block by association, block because you don't like their profile pic. You're setting boundaries, and setting boundaries is care.
(More cynically, I suspect the real difference was that blocking on Usenet was less effective and easier to circumvent so no one felt the need to use social engineering against it.)
As someone who remembers Usenet culture, I wonder where the idea that blocking someone is a big deal comes from? Facebook's manipulative design? Web forum culture shaped by entitled white dudes?
(There was no shortage of toxicity or entitled white dudes on Usenet, of course, but killfiles were ubiquitous and taken for granted. It probably helped that Usenet was slow and asynchronous.)
(And if you like a healthy dose of cynicism in your urban fantasy RPG then try Unknown Armies - but not the recent "updated" edition, which strips most of that out for some reason.)
(But if you like crime fiction, cynicism, and some of the best hardboiled dialogue ever written you should definitely try "The Friends of Eddie Coyle".)
I just thought "what if George V Higgins wrote urban fantasy" and now I've got the tagline for an Unknown Armies game that no one will understand because who still reads George V Higgins?
Business idea: voice-recognition software that will actually recognise my voice.
*thing, dammit.
Noisy green parakeet just flew over. One think I like about London is that we have wild parakeets now.
Cliché shot from outside my workplace:
I am definitely very busy at work right now and not slumped down behind my screen re-reading M R James stories.
Pickled garlic update (2) Afficher plus
Current office temperature - it's before noon and there's no direct sunlight yet.
https://witches.town/media/CdJSHFRT_zxdA83hIio
Starting to prep for tonight's' tabletop RPG. It's Traveller this time - I've got a vast reserve of old published adventures so I'm trying an open world-ish approach. Main problem is that most of the source material was written in the 1980s so I have to remember to do a lot of gender switching.
Temperature in my office just hit 30°, which I could do without.
(I seem to be stuck on this song today for no very good reason so I'm posting a link in the hope of exorcising it. Fly away, overheated lesbian relationship angst, and be free 🙂)
It Was Romance - Hooking Up With Girls
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t3rLCM9LFfE
I'm bored at work, so here's a music video from 1933 - Cab Calloway sings "St James Infirmary Blues", animated by the Fleischer brothers:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aDATXtewPrg