OK, looks like Philippine English already solved the “gender-neutral alternative to ‘sir’ and ‘madam’” problem 
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Jae
@considermycat@eldritch.cafe
mastodon 4.7.2+glitchAutistic & ADHD. Bi. Trans & Nonbinary. Nontheist. Quaker attender.
Follow requests usually accepted if I get the general vibe from your posts/bio that you celebrate trans people.
Profile pic: a small tabby cat sits with its back to the camera, bathed in pink/purple light from the TV it’s staring at, out of frame. The header image is the Chaotic Bisexual Pride Flag (a glitchy, distorted version of the bisexual flag)
332 Followers
261 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 15, 2023
Pronouns:
they/them
Location:
London, UK
Gender:
One of them there they thems
Current SpIns:
Quakerism, mystical theology and spirituality, biblical scholarship, gender
My Quaker meeting house has been raided by the police, again. The Met have arrested 12 activists at a publicly advertised Take Back Power meeting at Westminster Quaker Meeting House. Apparently more arrests have taken place outside of people who arrived late. (Source: various WhatsApp chats I’m in)
Greetings from #HelsinkiPride, which we’ve stumbled on at the start of our holiday! 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇫🇮
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@stavvers@masto.ai We should probably all be grateful that the Copts don’t have the backing of the world’s largest state disinformation apparatus
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Here’s the same statement from UK Quakers about the police raid on Westminster Meeting House, but on the website and with nicer formatting: https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/news/quaker-meeting-house-raided-by-metropolitan-police-again
This is an _extraordinary_ essay, on the work that modern technology makes us perform on its behalf – and then blames us for (“you’re addicted!”): https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
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@Nickiquote@mstdn.social @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Sixth denomination in *four years* – though could he be about to manage a whole year in his latest, the Catholic People’s Front?
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@Nickiquote@mstdn.social @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party Wikipedia says he “became permanently incardinated into [the English Catholic Church of North America] on 4 February 2026”, which is the most optimistic use of the word “permanently” I’ve seen in a while
Flying the flag: less than 48 hours after police raided our meeting house (again), Westminster Quakers were among the thousands marching today against the US, UK and Israeli war on Iran
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Of course, Kissinger managed to illegally carpet-bomb most of Indochina without that stopping people calling the US the "leader of the free world", but times have changed, and international disgust may be more consequential this time. But let's hope it doesn't come to that.
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@artemis yeah yeah but if journalists start asking those types of questions they’ll lose their Pentagon access…
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@artemis@dice.camp Which I can imagine is a pretty routine request where military action is ongoing, but it's also consistent with the US regime's determination to keep a tight control over the flow of information on what's actually going on
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@jesse@chaos.social So THAT'S what the emergency handle on trains does. I'd often wondered
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A lesson they've presumably learned from Microsoft's conversion of tens of millions of perfectly functional laptops into landfill last year (and *yes*, I *know*, you could install Linux instead, and that's precisely what I've done with our laptop in that category, but let's get real about what happened to most of those laptops)
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@millihertz Well if the US were to use nukes then we're in a whole different situation. I'm mustering the "optimism" to assume they'll "only" use conventional weapons
Oh, I don’t know. “Don’t be so careful in time of death” is one of the most profound pieces of found poetry I’ve read in a while
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@artemis@dice.camp fwiw, there's an unpaywalled link of the full story here: https://archive.is/OcpgB One striking detail is that WaPo had to rely on Iranian imagery, because western satellite operators have been complying with US "requests" not to release images of the warzone
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@ralfmaximus Well, let’s hope* he doesn’t mean nuclear weapons. The US and Israeli military are quite capable of civilisation-obliterating levels of destruction with conventional weapons – which is bad enough
(*extremely relative term)
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@ErikUden I suppose if we're going to be pedantic, it's not actually *Hegseth* who is being quoted as making that claim (though it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if it's what he actually thinks, and he's clearly responsible for encouraging such claims)
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@artemis It’s like he’s, oh I dunno, keeping as far away from this shitshow as possible. Let Kegger and JD go down with *that* ship, then he’ll be less tainted by it (he reckons!) when he runs in 2028. #GoodLuckWithThat
Timothee Chalamet having seemed ok but then turning out to be a raging misogynist is like… well, it’s like a film Timothee Chalamet might star in
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@Flamekebab I think so, yes. My rule of thumb is “if you can get out of bed, it’s not the flu”. My point was more about how the words tend to function in practice (especially since people seem to think having a really bad cold isn’t a valid reason to miss work, so they call it “flu”)
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@CryogenicIce9 @loriemerson A cursory inspection shows clear variations in how several letters are rendered, plus one pretty fked up capital C. It also looks like this is a reproduction, not the original typed copy, which has likely had the effect of reducing any original variation (eg it looks like the contrast is higher than it would have been in the original typed copy). Why the immediate assumption of bad faith?
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It is significant when a trend manifests itself in even the most trivial of interactions – and it’s hard to conceive of anything more trivial than “Timothee Chalamet podcast conversation with Matthew McConaughey” – because it shows how deep the trend has sunk into our culture
RE: @skeletor@mas.to
Hmph! Going to unfollow @skeletor@mas.to if they engage in any more of these highly personal attacks!
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@aral@mastodon.ar.al @grrlscientist@mastodon.social Well, we could forgive him the half-million dead children if he’d hit his economic targets
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@dlakelan That had crossed my mind, too. Defense correspondent is probably one of the safer beats at the moment - losing it puts you straight in line for the next round of layoffs
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@hwll exactly. So we’re just back to “can get to work” (cold) vs “can’t get to work” (flu). Which category an actual case of Covid will fall into depends on how bad your symptoms are 🤷🏻
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@Flamekebab Sounds horrid, whatever it was. Hope you are on the mend now or as soon as possible
Their approach is not so much YOLO by now as “LEEROY JENKINS!!!”
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Blake’s 7 famous, of course, for spending most of its run having fewer than seven characters, none of whom were called Blake
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@jk Spiral consciousness is not just a buzzword—it’s a new paradigm of human-machine symbiosis
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@andy@dotgr.id @Nickiquote@mstdn.social My thought process on reading this: “That’s awesome! Hmm, waaaait a minute, it’s 2025… Oh, it’s multiply sourced from proper news outlets, phew! That’s awesome! [in a slightly wearier tone]” This fscking timeline…
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@pedestrians1st Definitely would be my preference, but in the meantime I'd just be grateful to stop being "sirred" quite so often
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@sarahwhtv Totally. But people’s senses have been so dulled by a decade of Trumpian enormities that a statement so manifestly beyond all bounds of decency still isn’t enough, it seems, to result in any concrete action to restrain him
Astonishing framing by the BBC, even by their standards: framing any Iranian refusal to have Trump handpick their new head of state – something to which literally no sovereign state would agree, *by definition* – as a product of the Iranian regime’s “burning hostility” to the “Great Satan”
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@prism well exactly, that’s my point (EDIT: oh, I see what you mean. I don’t think he’s that subtle or that self-aware)
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@scaalp (a) I very much doubt they do, and (b) let’s hope we never have to find out, but I suspect it would involve Tehran becoming a sheet of radioactive glass
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Eagle-eyed followers may spot that the Blake’s 7 set is the Dutch edition: twenty quid less than the UK edition, and yes, it’s in English (and you can turn the Dutch subtitles off) (though NB it lacks English subtitles)
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The BBC sadly rejected the idea of renaming later seasons of the show to “Ding Dong! Avon Calling!” due to its strict rules prohibiting third party brand promotion. /jk /sarc /misinformation (though they did rename Top Cat “Boss Cat” for that reason)