#Robust case

[passengerpigeons]

so vehicle passes to the dunes are $25 for you and all passengers but pedestrian passes are $15 per person 🤨

[papermonkeyism]

Thinking about the new DnD character. So I'm making the tabaxi fighter into a battle master, and her point is to be the team tank and protector. We're probably going to get to level 3 pretty soon, so all of us can unlock our subclasses, and I got to thinking about which maneuvers to pick at the start.

I know I want Bait and Switch for the whole protector role (I already could have used it in our first game last week), and Trip Attack is probably also good to take, for knocking enemies prone, though I'm kinda waffling about what to take as the third option. Distracting Strike would give an advantage to the next attack made by party member, which is very useful, but I could also see Disarming Strike to come in handy. I do want Maneuvering Attack at some point as well, though I might willing to wait for level 7 for that.

My character's point is to get in the face of the bad guys to be the meat shield between them and my squishier buddies when needed, and I'm willing to put all my points to make that happen. Just wondering what would be the most optimal way to do that. 🤔

[fractallogic]

The last time I dropped my phone was too much for the case, so it’s been catching on my pocket… so I’m gluing it back together to see if that helps. It’s only a little cracked, but like, on the corners

So in the meantime because I am too paranoid to have a naked phone, I have my smaller backup case…with no pop socket on it

I regret to inform everyone that in the five(?!) years I’ve had this phone, a pop socket has been a mandatory accessory because how tf am I supposed to hold it or watch videos or hold it while watching videos

This is ridiculous and my hands are already so tired

[frommybookbook]

Paul Drake: Man at work.

[zahroreadsthings]

A stroll...

Question: You'll ask about setting up tomorrow. What do you do now?

Response: Night time stroll.

Check notes for previous instalments

You sit among the stones until the sun's almost set. You don't want to reposition them just yet - tomorrow you'll ask Deema to take a look.

You don't want to sleep yet either; your mind's still buzzing with the thrill of solving a puzzle. You leave the paint on the porch table and instead of going to bed pull on your cowl, gloves, and jacket. It's getting colder and windier and you haven't used your cowl yet.

A night time stroll would be nice. The clouds will be too thick to see the stars and moon but your jacket's warm and your cowl will keep the wind out.

You keep to the fringes of town and stumble onto the road leading away from it. The night life in Wreck Reef is quiet enough to barely reach you here. The wind picks up around you, whipping the hem of your jacket around your legs and rattling the bare branches of the trees lining the twisting road. It's getting properly dark now.

The sound of a wagon reaches you before you see a light through the trees. It's two days too early to be one of the regular wagons transporting passengers around the north. You turn around and walk back to town. There's nowhere else it will be going and you'd rather get a head start if you're going to see what it is.

It rumbles closer and someone calls out. You move aside to let it pass and follow it up the road. It leaves you behind quickly.

The driver is long gone when you reach the driftwood arch marking the town entrance. There are eight people standing together underneath it. Some of them carry tools you recognise - a case similar to the ones you and Deema use, a stone with a hole bored through the centre hanging from a belt - but most are unfamiliar to you. They must be the witches Lex mentioned would be arriving.

You come closer. They're arguing amongst themselves in hushed voices and passing around a paper. You realise they must be looking for a building. The town hall's closed for the night and there's no-one else on this street.

[shinobicyrus]

Motherfuckers really got their parting shot on the last day of Pride.

[blujayonthewing]

love to buy water filters in case the local water gets poisoned and air purifiers in case the local air gets poisoned

[lovecritter]

.

[janarthanantumbl]

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[medicinemane]

Not to take an extreme stance, but I will once again point out that often fines for companies are less a punishment and more just the cost of doing business

If a fine isn't higher than the cost of doing things right, then it becomes a fee you pay to get to cut corners

I'm sorry, but I feel like at a certain point the only way to get companies to stop violating the law may be prison time for upper management (no scapegoats allowed). Obviously only for more severe violations, but still... we see that fines don't deter companies from bad behavior... maybe repeat offenders need to face more than monetary consequences

[puffdenlilledragen]

if I have to see ONE MORE POST on ANY SITE promoting collagen supplements or claiming that collagen in your diet is good for your skin/joints/hair I will combust I think

[bioswear]

I’m so congested I feel like a human La Croix 😩

[prokopetz]

A lot of folks are responding to the whole Reddit situation by calling for the return of decentralised forums, and I think it's important to remember that, contrary to certain popular narratives, the reason early 2000s forum culture has fallen by the wayside is not because people are Just Lazy. Certainly, ease of use is part of it, but a much larger part of it is how vulnerable self-hosted forums are.

Basically, the problem is that even the largest and most carefully managed self-hosted forums can be rendered unusable more or less indefinitely by a single sufficiently determined hostile actor. This can take the form of both attacks on the forum's social infrastructure (i.e., via sock-puppet accounts, botting, organised "raids", etc.) and attacks on its technical infrastructure (i.e., via hacking, DDoS, etc.). In either case, a self-hosted forum has no real defence, and the majority of decentralised forum communities survive only by virtue of their relative obscurity; once a self-hosted forum manages to attract the attention of That One Guy who's willing to devote his life to shitting the place up over some microscopic slight, it's effectively game over.

Right now, there are essentially only two mitigation strategies:

Gathering huge numbers of communities under a single, massively centralised technical infrastructure that's simply too large and robust for any one hostile actor to bring down; and

Hardening the community's social infrastructure either by going private and invite only (i.e., the Discord approach), or by making use of a vast centralised pool of volunteer labour to aggressively enforce community standards (i.e., the Reddit approach).

To be clear, these are not intractable problems; other solutions may well exist. However, any proposed plan for bringing decentralised public forums back needs to address them. If you're going in operating under the assumption that forums have become marginalised simply because corporations are evil and people are lazy, you're setting yourself up to learn the hard way why self-hosted forums no longer seem to be capable of growing beyond a certain point.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #30

August 2-9 2024

The Department of Interior announced the largest investment since 1979 in outdoor recreation and conservation projects. The $325 million will go to support State, territorial, DC, and tribal governments in buying new land for parks and outdoor recreation sites. It also supports expansion and refurbishment of existing sites.

The EPA announced that Birmingham Alabama will get $171 million to update and replace its water system. The city of Birmingham is 70% black and like many black majority cities as struggled with aging water systems and lead pipes causing dangerous drinking water conditions. This investment is part of the Biden-Harris administrations plan to replace all of the nation's lead pipes.

The Department of Energy announced $2.2 billion in investments in the national power grid to help boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather. The projects will add 13 gigawatts of capacity, support 5,000 new jobs and upgrade 1,000 miles of transmission. Major projects will cut power outages in the west, drive down energy prices in New England, add off shore wind, and enable the development of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s wind resources.

The Justice Department won its massive anti-trust case against Google. A federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. The DOJ has an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Facebook and Amazon for their monopolist practices

The US Government announced $3.9 billion in direct aid to Ukraine. The money will help the Government of Ukraine make up for massive budget short falls caused by the war with Russia. It'll help pay the salaries of teachers, emergency workers, and other public employees, as well helping displaced persons, low-income families and people with disabilities.

The Department of Energy announced $190 million to improve air quality and energy upgrades in K-12 schools. The grants to 320 schools across 25 states will impact 123,000 students, 94% of these schools service student bodies where over half the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the face of climate change more schools have been forced to close for extreme heat. These grants will help schools with everything from air filtration, to AC, to more robust energy systems, to replacing lighting.

USAID announced $424 million in additional humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict and food insecurity, 25 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian aid. This year alone the US has sent close to a billion dollars in aid to the DRC, making it the single largest donor to the crisis.

The Senate approved President Biden's appointment of Stacey Neumann of Maine, Meredith Vacca of New York, and Joseph Saporito Jr. of Pennsylvania to life time federal Judgeships. This brings the total of judges appointed by President Biden to 205. President Biden is the first President who's judicial nominations have not been majority white men, Judge Vacca is the first Asian American to serve in her district court. President Biden has also focused on former public defenders, like Judge Saporito, and former labor lawyers like Judge Neumann, as well as civil rights lawyers.

[wilwheaton]

In less than a week, Sony has given us two timely reminders of the tenuousness of digital “ownership” — and both reminders involve things on PlayStation. Last week, Sony said that, because of content licensing “arrangements,” users wouldn’t be able to watch Discovery content they’ve purchased and that the content would be removed from their libraries as of December 31st, 2023. The resulting list of shows that will suddenly disappear because of corporate agreements is very long. Shows disappearing from streaming services is commonplace, but in this case, people are losing access to shows they bought to watch on demand whenever they wanted. Then, on Monday, many users were unexpectedly banned from their PlayStation Network accounts, meaning that not only were they blocked from playing multiplayer games or using cloud streaming but they were also locked out of games they purchased digitally from Sony’s PlayStation marketplace. Affected users who may have spent years building a robust digital library were suddenly left without access to content they had bought through no fault of their own. It appears that Sony has since restored account access to people who were accidentally banned, but the company hasn’t explained what happened or said how it might prevent similar unexpected bans in the future. (Sony hasn’t replied to our multiple requests for comment.)

PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks

I got locked out of my PlayStation account yesterday, with no explanation or warning. I only play single player offline, so it didn’t affect me like it did so many others, but holy shit Sony has made the best case, EVER, for buying real, physical, media ... or just fucking stealing it from some dodgy website, because when you do things the “right” way, you can lose it all, with no refund or recourse, because not a single executive at Sony gives a fuck about you and me.

[contemplatingoutlander]

It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president

Isn’t this what a newspaper is supposed to do?

I love that The Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri took it upon herself to endorse Harris for her paper after Bezos pulled the plug on the editorial board doing so. This is a gift🎁link, so feel free to read the entire article. Below are some excerpts:

The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.) We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told! Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! [...] But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them. Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny.  [...] Well, that world [the baby will be born into] will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out. The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.” “But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on! [...] I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so. That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself! [color/ emphasis added]

How far The Washington Post has fallen into the "darkness" it used to work so hard to ward off to help keep our democracy alive.

[edited]