s0 Solders Stuff @s0@cathode.church

Me always #tinkering

“Next time you define or perceive someone as being resilient, look at how you’ve been complicit in underpinning and reinforcing their oppression.”

— Trent Wallace, queer Aboriginal (Wongaibon & Palawa) pro-bono lawyer from Darkinjung country

Partway done assembling my workbench in the new study. It’s gonna be so nice not having it crammed in the bedroom

Had a video chat with my good friend whose kitchen contains a lab spectrophotometer, electrophoresis equipment, 3D printer, microscope and other doodads, along with a tiny crammed area of actual food requisites.
And that’s just stuff he tinkers with, not for any actual procedure.
I am not yet at his level. Some of me aspires to be like him and some of me is frightened of that possibility.

Woo, big day of moving coming to a close. Bed is reconstructed. Many many boxes to unpack. Tired but relieved

It is one degree Celsius right now and I just don’t think that’s fair

It’s warm outside today

2 days til I move! Mostly packed because I deal with my anxiety over the uncertain future by getting ahead of schedule lol

Saw another awful thing TikTok’s been doing recently.
I am now of the opinion that it is impossible for a video-based free internet platform to exist without exploiting its users. The costs for storage and bandwidth are simply too high.
If my mastodon server with ~10 active users had videos instead of toots, instead of paying $20 a month I would be paying easily thousands of dollars — and that would only grow as more data had to be kept accessible and it grew in popularity.

Some new Olympic sports my brother and I have come up with:
- 1v1 steeple archery
- football with two balls
- basket-water-polo
- archery but they have to construct their own bows from natural materials in the area
- Épée but the swords are 3m long
- Taekwondo on parallel gymnastic bars

Why is Basketball But We Left Most Of The Team Behind an Olympic sport

Olympic archery is a good sport to watch because:
- teams from small countries upset the rankings often
- they’re just fighting the wind. Fairness? Eh
- they’re all just like, normal people of all sorts of ages. No ridiculously thin muscled bodies. Some have tummies.
- the camera people have to hide in little beige boxes on the range which is quite funny
- the scoring is super easy to follow
- bows look dope af. Pew pew

Ah, what a lovey day. The sun is shining, nothing like the sweet sound of the neighbours yelling homophobic slurs

DND tonight was so good. I was feeling crabby beforehand but we finally got to do the big three hour boss battle of our year-long quest and the baddies were cool and an NPC the party had met some months ago came in to help us out when things were looking grim, and four of the party had brushes with death. It was really engaging! My brother is the best DM.

Tiktok is such a horrifying app. People are constantly misspelling & enciphering necessary & neutral words like “ableism” and “death” just to attempt to bypass the omnipotent Algorithm. But it’s easy for even simple machine learning these days to get past such ciphers. So people have to make their videos less and less accessible so they don’t get put on a list of dissidents, or just sanitise what they say to please the capitalist overlords. What a dystopian vision of the internet.

It went pretty well! I spoke in it and management seemed kinda rattled by the sheer unanimity of the vote against any of their proposed cuts. Solidarity works, folks!
And they sure looked like fools when we pointed out their proposed system of reduced pay for 2 years (!) combined with their diversity hiring plan would result in… disproportionately underpaying indigenous & non-white employees.

In my union meeting before going back to bargaining against management.

Join a union if you can!