rowanthorpe

@rowanthorpe@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  they choose their business model, I choose my customer model.

  Ooh, this is very pithy. I like it. I will use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far to many people think that Jesus from the Bible was light skinned, even though he grew up in what we call the Middle East.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Due to deep frustration with cultural imperialism and pervasive US exceptionalism I am one of the first to cheer when some popular-culture artefact dares to [shock, horror] not be based in the US. When District 9 was based in Johannesburg I remember thinking 1. Due to the apartheid subtext it makes sense, and 2. How on earth did they get decent funding without it being based in LA?! Having said that, I think the premise of such a script requires he “return” to the US in order to comment on events and prejudices there during that time (and the after-effects of events leading up to it - Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, etc).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far to many people think that Jesus from the Bible was light skinned, even though he grew up in what we call the Middle East.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you ever met anyone who lives around the Mediterranean? He would look like a version of that guy who worked outdoors. He was from the Levant not sub-Saharan Africa.

  I live in Greece, so …yes, I meet lots of them every day. Firstly when I had the script-idea I didn’t think there would necessarily be a need to “prove” that he “returns” as the same race as previously anyway. Of course just having him return “not white” would nudge people to connect dots to the historical whitewashing regardless. As an atheist I would see the whole thing as a fiction-based-on-fiction-based parable anyway. Aside from that there are quite a few who debate that he wasn’t from the Levant, as mentioned here en.wikipedia.org/…/Race_and_appearance_of_Jesus (not that I agree with any particular theory, just that there are many competing theories, and I’m not even convinced such a human even existed).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The one change that worked: I set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ three years ago – and have never looked back⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I did a similar but more generalised thing since long ago, when I got my first pager (pre-mobile) in '95. I made myself a solemn promise that I would gratuitously and unapologetically use silent-mode, DnD, etc (including more recently auto-DnD every late-afternoon-to-mid-morning, even on weekends, when it became a thing) to live an almost exclusively asynchronous life. I almost never answer direct phone-calls too, often even for many of the recognised numbers. My modus operandi is this:

  If it’s a real emergency a call might be unavoidable, but if it’s just typical-urgent it could be an SMS (key part of that acronym is Short) which I would see relatively soon. Alternatively a sensitive/private urgent requirement could be fulfilled via Signal. Otherwise email (pgp-encrypted if it has to be private) which I usually catch up with every day or two. Also I disable all non-critical realtime app-notifications entirely. Additionally whenever someone calls/emails me with an “opportunity” requiring “immediate response because they need a confirmation by yesterday!!!1” I know that means the work is going to be like that too (absent time-management or time-discipline, bouncing between crises in parallel) so my go-to response is along the lines of “Thanks, but such a shame it’s so last-minute - it would be impossible for me to properly consider this against the rest of my schedule and decide responsibly whether I could do it. I hope you find someone.”

  I didn’t choose that for the sake of being antisocial, I chose it because I felt that “flow state” and “focus-retention while tackling complex problems” are extremely precious resources, and also increasingly rare. Most (not all) of the time if you don’t push back to protect that then others won’t voluntarily protect yours for you, because a lot of people only respect their own time, mental-bandwidth and priorities, and not those of others. I found that batching tasks together to grind through them in bulk without interruption is not only useful at work, but in most of the mundane/administrative parts of life too, because it minimizes the destructive effect of context-switching".

  I discovered a very astute validation of this in an essay by Paul Graham “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Far to many people think that Jesus from the Bible was light skinned, even though he grew up in what we call the Middle East.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  After reading that I just had an idea for what I think would be a good premise for a film. In the 70s Jesus “returns” in the US somewhere, but as someone who gets labelled as a black man, noone believes him. Because he keeps getting knocked down at every turn due to systemic racism, and because he is so fed-up with the “White Jesus” trope he joins the Black Panther Party. He ends up being shot by a cop. Final shot slow-zooms in to show cop’s name on a tag. First name Judas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Working below minimum wage to save the planet⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  And also the tax/pension/health/VAT deductions from money earned is x% for varying scary values of x, but the equivalent from money “avoided” AKA “money you didn’t need to earn because you didn’t need to spend it because you fixed stuff yourself” is 0%. That is the reason DIY, Right-To-Repair, barter systems, etc are all demonised institutionally. They are wedge-issues which run counter to the fostered futility-narrative that keeps the wage-slaves quietly running on their mouse-wheels, and out of the way of the ownership-class while they constantly “repair” society to their liking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The internet is bad ux, everybody. There's too many choices.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  PACK 1a €5/month Get access to “my self-hosted VPN + obfuscation proxy”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Be the change you want to see in Lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  In terms of the “default instance” suggestion, I have an interesting hybrid suggestion. What about having an “easy on-ramp” instance where you get registered for one month with a hard-exit (auto-migrate to other instance, perhaps using some kind of federated-auth/token system for the migration, and forced password-setup on first use of the new instance). At any point during on-ramp the user could configure destination-instance from a list in the settings (or configure auto-export for manual import to any other “auto-migrate-unsupported” instance), with optional early-migration if the user has decided before the end of the month. Optionally a recommendation engine could iteratively curate a list of suggested instances based on usage during on-ramp (admins of those instances could provide - limited number of - tags of their choosing for the engine to use for matching). That part could be opt-in because probably a lot of users would find it creepy. The UX would need to be very user-friendly “pointy clicky” because that would be the overwhelming target demographic of such an instance.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Giving the neighbors a laugh⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Humble-brag number-plate, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real estate market is tough⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “luxury…” www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'll take a liberal. Just 86 the tofu.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not enough spam… www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Watching videos of people screaming "shooter on the roof" at law enforcement⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But… but he’s not a hurricane… I guess they could fix him up with horse tranquilliser and bleach afterwards though. (adding a /s here for the terminally oblivious)