RE: https://mastodon.green/@gerrymcgovern/116816776704190016
“UN warns of global water bankruptcy as AI data centers strain groundwater”
It’s maddening just how much of the world’s current woes amount to a game of “Stop hitting yourself!”
Remote
Charles Castleberry
@MythingPerson@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Retired software architect, traveling the world, living out of my backpack, currently in Cuenca, Ecuador. Taoist, Buddhist, reader, gamer, mudita addict, INTJ, Bacon Number: 3, scifi/comics/anime fan, queer, mostly ace, and can't taste bitter. Gnostic by nature. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️⚧️🧘♂️🖖 🇺🇦
Profile header Alt-text: From Heartstopper, swirling colored leaves against a blue & yellow background.
Profile pic Alt-text: From the comic Action Philosophers, a raging bearded man crying “Plato Smash!”
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Joined December 11, 2022
Dabbling in Fiction at::
Pronouns:
At your discretion
Current Games:
Listening to:
Imaginary Worlds, The Memory Palace, Dear Hank & John, Serious Trouble, Breathing Space (Scifi western anthology), Camlann, Answer Me This
How weird is it that I knew this was about Mitch McConnell before I ever clicked the link to the quoted post.
#StrangeDays
Oh, gods, am I going to have to start having sex now? No way, let me resubscribe! Where's the link, I’ll click it right now!
This is fantastic. A #Firefox add-on that lets you put custom titles on your windows, like “Main”, “Socials”, “Languages”, etc., so that you can identify them in the Window list no matter what page they happen to be displaying at the time.
It's the simplest thing, but it's going to make my daily life noticeably easier, and how often does that actually happen?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler/
Oh, the indignity of being a non-sentient species in a world of sentient, curious, tool users. 😆
RE: https://mastodon.social/@fj/116447587766627589
Well, this has Four Corners beat all to heck. ❤️
Quoting
💗 Schengen
“Have you ever wanted to fly across a border more than 40 times in one minute? No? As of last month, you can do it anyway: By hopping on a swing in the towns of Baarle-Hertog-Nassau, you can fly from the Netherlands into Belgium and back.”
https://europeancorrespondent.com/en/r/borders-are-a-construct-but-this-swing-isnt
Boosted by @kagihq@mastodon.social
RE: https://mastodon.social/@kagihq/116094604303162917
OMG. I wasn’t surprised to see Dothraki and Klingon in their language list. I was a little more surprised to see Elvish (Sindarin), good for them. But the existence of translations to Gen Z are making me laugh so hard my sides hurt.
There's something very freeing about knowing that complaining about something inconsiderate that a friend did will have little to no effect on their future behavior. You can simply decide if they're still worth knowing, and proceed from there.
I don't have any borderline friends, so the answer is always “Yes”. Which means I can just let go of my annoyance and say, “Yep, that's them alright,” and go on with my life.
After posting about it into the Void, of course. :-)
This is *great*. The main thing I count on Wikipedia for is having enough eyes on the content that enthusiasts will fix factual errors. Having a notoriously unreliable “contributor” is the one thing I *don’t* need.
Replying to
@afewbugs I still don’t know who won the Superbowl this year. I love this place! 😁
Plus, I got to see a lot of #SuperbOwl photos. So, definitely my people. 🦉👍
They did it! 🎉🎉🎉
I have never been prouder of something I had absolutely nothing to do with.
Reading Children of Dune, and this bit of micro-fiction leapt out at me. Talk about prescience.
>>Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
—LAW AND GOVERNANCE
THE SPACING GUILD MANUAL
A useful reminder that no one is obliged to give you meaningful context for their posts.
On the one hand, I know my ancestors back to Charlemagne (and arguably back to Philip of Macedon, if you believe the boasts of emperors). On the other, I make no assumptions whatsoever about the sorts of persons any of them were.
This probably relates to something undisclosed. Fair enough, get it off your chest! The Void is here for you, your scream is very important to us. ❤️
Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan, by M.H. Foster, is delightful. 🙂
The ultimate champion of evil gets out of the rat race and becomes a turnip farmer.
>>
She laughed. “[…]you’re quite good at social navigation when you choose. That suit, for instance.”
“Mrs. Crankshaw insisted. It belonged to her son.”
“It suits you. The color brings out your eyes.”
I hadn’t known eyes could be brought out. Well, not with a suit, that is. I filed this away as another human mystery.
Replying to
@ruben Based on the recommendation of a friend, I went with CachyOS, which is an Arch Linux distro and supports XFCE & ZFS (though I use KDE Plasma & BTRFS myself), and it's worked really well for me. The only (minor) challenges I had were with setting up less common s/w like Dropbox and some custom gaming & peripheral software. And the CachyOS installation wiki was solid.
https://cachyos.org/
Replying to
@kagihq@mastodon.social Kagi’s usefulness — that it returns high quality search results. I’ve turned a couple of friends into regular users, after I recommended it and they saw how effective it is, and I think both have subscribed now.
Replying to
Ok, this is lovely.
Dancing Queen, Byzantine Greek cover
https://youtu.be/_pzQthCuaP8?si=tU2Eo25gNAkSR-Ab
IMHO, the most compelling argument for atheism is how gods damned stupid the human body is. “Intelligent Design” my ass. And everything about reproduction sits at the very pinnacle of the what-the-fuckery that is mortal biology.
You can certainly say that an immortal, omniscient, reincarnating being capable of creating universes with its peers wouldn’t mind a bit of nonsense — and to be clear, I do say that. But that it’s nonsense is inarguable. 🙄
I swear, if you claimed that the only reason I made this yoghurt cake was because of how pretty it is when I do it right, I’d have a hard time denying it.
Whelp, I guess that’s my earworm for the day sorted.
RE: @lunastation@wandering.shop
Write what you'd like to read has always been my favorite piece of writing advice.
That’s one of my favorite parts of WWR (Writing While Retired). Since I don't have to make a living at it, I can write what I like and, if other folks like it too, awesome. But, really, I'm writing it for me, so that I get to live in the place I create, with the people I like, continuously for weeks while I write, review, and revise it.
So I get to read something I like over and over. It’s fantastic! 😁👍
What Went Right This Week, from #PositiveNews
https://www.positive.news/society/good-news-stories-from-week-16-of-2026/
Spent the day rebuilding my website to not use WordPress. I used to keep a travel blog in it, but I changed ISPs & restarted it as an author page, and my gods the new WordPress is an incomprehensible mess. All I need is a place to put blog entries, book descriptions, maybe some short stories. I don't need this huge, complicated thing that makes it crazy hard to do anything simple!
It's easier for me to just write raw HTML/css/js, and it turns out I still can after a decade away. Yay, me! 😁👍
RE: https://mastodon.world/@OpenSexism/116848074881856737
My gods this is so stupid. Both genders should be viewed as equally incompetent and untrustworthy when they use AI.
Quoting
"The study found that women who submit resumes created with AI assistance are evaluated as less competent and less trustworthy than men who submit identical AI-assisted resumes. To the evaluators, women’s AI use signaled inability, while men’s AI use signaled initiative."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/06/25/women-who-use-ai-seen-as-incompetent-men-who-use-ai-seen-as-pragmatic/
Open quoted postJust finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time series. Four books (open to more in the future, though they each have standalone plots so no more are needed), and I think the second is the best, but they’re all really, really well written scifi and *hugely* creative. The first 3 won a Hugo for Best Series, in 2023. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough, if solid, complex, far-future scifi is your jam.
#bookstodon
https://bookshop.org/p/books/children-of-time-adrian-tchaikovsky/854d8d3ca3125264
Thinking about how the slightest tweak of letters can totally change the meaning of a line, a relationship, a book…
“the night you took me to the gardens in Parijat”
versus
“the night you took me in the gardens in Parijat”
#bookstodon
Replying to
@Tutanota@mastodon.social Hey, Tuta, I was wondering if you’d consider doing a “physical ecosystem replacement” article? I’ve used a MacBook/iPad/iPhone together for ages & I love their integration into one sharing ecosystem. But with Apple becoming more problematic, I’m looking for a different solution. But all of my searches suggest few options other than Apple/Google/MS, for sharing notes, music, file access, etc., across all 3 types. With your expertise, I’d love to know if you all have suggestions. 🙏
Replying to
@Tutanota@mastodon.social Thanks, I appreciate it. :-)
Replying to on social.coop
@afewbugs@social.coop My kid sister *hated* it when I called her words she didn’t understand. I used to ask how the weather was in German, with a sneer in my voice, or call her an australopithecus. Drove her mental. Good times. ❤️