It was fun growing up in the countryside and things like banshees and fairies being taken as a fact of life. I had a childhood friend that would come in to school saying she heard the banshees howling during the night and then woke up to find out a relative had died.

There was a news report that resurfaced a few years back, accessible here, about the Housing Executive in Newry trying to get a fairy tree chopped down to build houses, and even after trying to bribe the workers with £200 no one would touch it and they had to build around it instead. And another where some builders halted work in the Mournes once they realised they were inside a fairy ring, 3 of them went on to suffer accidents that they attributed to revenge by the fairies, the foreman apologised to the fairies, and even the reporter was too worried to step inside the ring. We were told the legends too, like Tír na nÓg or Finn McCool, but I think it’s amazing how much of the superstition and old mythology has persisted through the years, even after the country becoming Christian and even now as it becomes more secular.

There is a bank in the UK that used employee bank balances to prove they didn’t need a pay rise last year, which they were able to do because banking with them was a condition of employment

When I was in school they once checked everyone’s phones to make sure we had installed Twitter and followed the school’s accounts for each department. That was about a decade ago so it’s probably TikTok or something by now.

Tor’s channel is great, the neo-Nazi lesbian BDSM Victorian-style video game-developing cult was one of the first of his I’d seen and it’s a wild story.

I don’t understand why the other commenter thinks a video in the videos community is spam

Depends where you’re from really, and how thick an accent you have. I spent a weekend decorating my first house accidentally talking in nothing but innuendo until it was pointed out to me that I should never go into a DIY shop, obvious gay that I am, and run around asking for cock.

I think a lot more people are bisexual than they realise but the whole “everyone’s a little bisexual” thing that’s been cropping up everywhere lately I find a bit homophobic. It’s especially a dangerous view to take for lesbians since so many get pressured with the whole “you’ll like it with me” sort of thing. But even being a gay man myself it sucks so much having people in our own community keep telling us we don’t actually exist, plus if it’s a preference then you can justify shit like conversion therapy a lot more easily. It’s a spectrum for sure but a lot of us still sit pretty firmly to one side or the other of it.

Got expedition 33 running on the steam deck (with some amount of tweaking to make it run smooth - valve should not be marking that game as verified) and it has absorbed every moment of free time I have. Fully understand the hype now. Apart from that, Outer Wilds had been sitting in my library since the summer sale untouched and I’ve finally gotten into it, and Dispatch was really fun and beautifully animated.

I love mine. It’s pretty unobtrusive but there’s a ton of open-source applications available on the store. Probably the most similar to the original Pebble (besides the new pebbles of course) right down to the MIP display. Tried a pinetime but it’s very limited by comparison and an IPS screen on a smartwatch is a terrible idea.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.