I know I very rarely make personal posts. But I’m getting top surgery in August. And my sister set up a gofund me to help with the cost. If you’re able to donate, any little bit will help! And if you’re not that’s OK. All I’ll ask is for you to reblog this to get it out there. I’ll include the link below:
In archeology there are artifacts, which are items made or modified by humans, but there are also manuports, which haven’t been modified but are found far from any possible origin point and there’s no explanation besides somebody carried it there. Manuports include things like stones, fossils, and seashells, and have been found in deposits as much as three million years old.
So yeah, apparently the oldest human activity for which we have evidence is Picking Up Cool Rocks.
I was on a team that found a walrus tusk on a late IR2 site in central Jordan. We all knew what it was instantly, but just kind of sat there, telling ourselves stories about how it got there. It was plain and unmodified, and probably one of the coolest things the team ever found.
Last week I asked my dad if he remembers sneaking me into the cinema to see Deep Rising in 1998. He said he thought so but didn’t remember which cinema it was. He was stunned that I not only remembered the exact cinema but also the time of day and the shirt I was wearing.
Today I forgot what someone told me over the phone even though the conversation ended 3 seconds ago.
“My memory is like a chalkboard and someone else has the eraser while another someone else writes random things in permanent marker instead of chalk.”
-Actual quote from be before I even imagined I might be ADHD.
Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.
Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:
If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.
Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that’s rolling out.
I know I’m preaching to the choir but like. You know you can wear masks for other sicknesses. Not just covid. If you have the flu or a cold or a stomach bug you can still wear a mask to help prevent the spread of it to others if you insist on going out! I just think it’s the polite thing to do
In most East Asian countries it’s considered really rude to go out in public without a mask if you have cold or flu symptoms. Really wish westerners could adopt this
have you lot heard about the tiktoker who’s taking on the actual government over a parking ticket? because she’s a hero
her name is Zoë Bread and she doesn’t show her face, and she’s a British artist whose videos are basically her fucking with people in harmless ways - like, asking retail workers if they want an “official” picture of King Charles that is in fact a cartoon and filming their bewilderment (the person is never in the video; she films the floor and her shoes while she’s doing this). she also calls up companies who have stuff like “call us to talk about [X]!” written on their products to see if they’ll really talk to her about [X] and if the person at the call centre doesn’t know (“full unedited silence” is a feature in most of her videos), she will dig and dig until she finds someone who can. or, until she gets bored, which. fair. can’t fault that.
I’m currently trying to get a member of the british peerage to give me £50 because we’re distant cousins. I appreciate her.
she travels around for these videos and one day she went to Manchester and parked on a road called Collier Street.
Collier Street has (or had, at the time) another car park at the end of it - the SIP car park. SIP is a private company that runs these. the signage on Collier Street indicated that the payment machine there was where you’re supposed to pay, so Zoë and a fuckload of other people assumed that that was where you got the tickets. Zoë put it on her car and went about fucking with whoever she decided to confuse today
she gets back to her car, has a parking ticket, and is confused
again - she paid for a ticket. she wasn’t trying to get out of paying.
because she’d bought a ticket from the machine that the SIP car park instead of the council run machine that is actually on a different road, she’d been ticketed. and, rightly so, she contests it and the person at the council says that the rules are the rules and there’s clear signage
Zoë: the signage is misleading
council: we don’t believe it is
Zoë: well, I was misled
council: we believe the signage is adequate
Zoë, being Zoë, doesn’t agree with this. she pulls up literal years’ worth of data on the history of that sign, the parking on the road, and the number of people who got ticketed. very early on, she says she’s not actually bothered about her own ticket, but she’s upset that people are being caught out and sees that it’s a money-making scheme for the council. she speaks to parking wardens, who mostly seem to agree that the signage is misleading. she has data. she calls them back. same response.
Zoë, being an artist, makes her own sign. which she puts up below the official one. and then she waits to see how long it is before it’s taken down.
[note: there was a side quest sometime during this - it went on for months - where she put cones in the parking spaces. the council moved them onto the pavement/sidewalk. this made it inaccessible for wheelchair users, people with prams, other people who can’t just move around them, which is illegal. so she called the council repeatedly to complain about the cones and monitored them until they were moved. this took ages - we are talking weeks.]
Zoë’s sign gets taken down.
the signpost it was attached to, with the misleading sign, becomes a point of pilgrimage for British people who appreciate a good bit of humour with the intent of bullying the local government. it is COVERED in stickers.
her sign is taken down. the sign is not changed. more people get tickets.
[there was a second side quest, where Zoë discovers that the SIP car park - the private one - doesn’t have planning permission. she doesn’t let this slide.]
not happy with this, Zoë calls in to the local radio station. which has a Q&A with Andy Burnham. the Mayor of Manchester. she calls in and asks him about this. Andy Burnham says he’s taking her concern into consideration and will look into it, and get back to her if she calls in next week.
she’s not put through next week.
she contacts his office.
no response.
she calls in again and brings it up.
[all this is happening while she’s repeatedly ringing the council to ask them about it]
she has gone from “harmless tiktok prankster” to “calling out government incompetence”. with a MASSIVE platform.
eventually, after her being interviewed by the BBC, Manchester City Council puts up a sign saying where the actual car park for Collier Street is (there is a running bit where a council worker misheard her and thought she said “Collyhurst Street”, which to my knowledge does not exist. Zoë now exclusively refers to it as that, including in her radio appearance and on her phone calls)
she isn’t done. she now has a petition to force the government to change vague signage. the government said no, all their signage is adequate. she’s now fighting with them. in one of her most recent videos, she was on the phone with the House of Commons enquiry department trying to figure out how to contest it. she’s brilliant.
anyway, this is why the art of Fucking About must never be lost. big up Zoë
8th July 2024
Notes: 15
Reblogged From gallusrostromegalus
