Somhairle

@eithin.bsky.social

203

Posts

Queer, trans, disabled, he/they. Art jeweller, amateur material culture historian. Welsh, living in Scotland by the sea.

Posts Replies Media

Well, Starmer is proving that it was never about electability. As if we needed more proof.

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Somhairle

Reply to

John Rogers

The craving for aristocracy is an endemic failing in the human condition. It reinvents itself in a new acceptable form every time it’s beaten down. It must be attacked ruthlessly, relentlessly, and eternally.

You can call Curtis Yarvin a dick, but he's a real master of the philosophical school of /quid vis audire/.

Oh, dear, is Curtis Yarvin still a thing? I thought he'd been deprecated ages ago. - never underestimate the ability of idiots to idolize other idiots.

All beautiful work!

The Ignyte ballot also includes five visual artists with really different styles. Here is Rovina Cai: (1 of 5)

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Somhairle

7 Labour MP's defied the whip to vote for the SNP Amendment to lift the child benefit cap, to stop children starving, they have immediately been suspended.

Sir Kid Starver really wants the moniker of Sir Kid Starver to really stick doesn't he as he literally starves children and is threatening to withdraw the whip from anyone that doesn't agree with starving children.

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Somhairle

b/c centrism is NOT a midpoint on a spatial metaphor of a political axis based on where folk sat in a French parliament, that lie is just cover for a politics focussed on defending the centre of power & privilege that has the fascist "Right" as a fringe tasked with keeping out the egalitarian "Left"

Why are so many dudes obsessed with centrism? Centrism wouldn't have led to equal rights, or Obamacare, or mixed-race marriages, or legalized gay marriage? And every definition of American centrism I've seen so far is just lower-r Republican politics.

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Somhairle

This is one group's estimate of biomass by taxa, represented as a "Voronoi diagram" which is similar to a pie chart. Take a minute to take it in, and I'd love to hear what aspect of this you find surprising. For example, amphibians and reptiles are negligible biomass on this scaling. 🧪

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Somhairle

This sums it up perfectly. It’s not a conversation.

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Somhairle

Reply to

The Ignyte Awards

Ignyte voting is now open through Aug 31 and it's free to participate! No membership required. We encourage you to read/engage with the work of these finalists to inform your vote. ignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com/vote/

Vote, The Ignyte Awardsignyteawards.fiyahlitmag.com Public voting for the 2024 Awards is now OPEN. WINNERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN NOVEMBER

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Somhairle

Ruppell’s starling and friend 🪶 📷 Maasai Mara

In the early years of the pandemic, I watched someone argue herself into not masking because "a 5% chance of a 50% decrease in my quality of life is a risk I can take". I hope she's still healthy.

“The lower estimates for Long Covid are only 5%” My guy, that is 1 in 20. For an illness you are getting once or twice a year. After ten years that’s 50-100%?! Those odds aren’t evenly distributed to be sure, and ‘Long Covid’ is a broad range of conditions….but those odds still suck AND blow

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Somhairle

The thing I love about Shakespeare's history plays, and that is I suspect the most accurate thing about them: it's a soap opera in which an extended family behave in unnecessarily dramatic and appalling and sometimes grimly hilarious ways, but when they do this *it fucks up the entire country*.

Over the last week I've been readin wirks in Doric, Lallans, an Orcadian, an my ain new-kent Scots is birlin about all over the place. A bibliophile's Scots, I spose - scrieve as ye read as well as whit wey ye spik.

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Somhairle

Move to Scotland they said…

Mati Ocha, The Reverent Creed (Transcendent Green Book 4): heartening community-focused system apocalypse fantasy, set in the Scottish Highlands. Authentic Gaelic culture and magic, and plenty of the language itself. Also, giant mutated Scottish wildlife. (No haggises yet.)

The idea of SF as a philosophy evokes a sort of horrified twitch in me - even without reading the unironic use of "manifest destiny" in the article. A lot of the "iconic" SF the article talks about was basically "non-disabled cishet white US men and their faithful robot servants inherit the stars".

This piece is rather bewildering. I may have thoughts later... classicsofsciencefiction.com/2024/07/20/i...

Is Science Fiction Dead?classicsofsciencefiction.com The April 8, 1966, cover of Time Magazine asked in large letters: Is God Dead? I would have answered yes, because starting in late 1963, when I turned twelve, I began to struggle with the idea of beli...

Moonstorm, by Yoon Ha Lee @deuceofgears.bsky.social - a realistic portrait of a traumatized teenage overachiever in a horrendous dystopia. With space mecha, hard choices, and lesser evils.

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Somhairle

Israel is in breach of international law and the Geneva Convention. The UK must act: ▶️End arms sales ▶️End political & military support ▶️Sanction those guilty of constructing this system of occupation & apartheid ▶️Support Palestine's right to self-determination & statehood

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Somhairle

I wish accounts with even a moderate amount of influence would say "I will be masking at [large event]" rather than "Hey is anybody else planning to mask" like they don't wanna be the ONLY uncool person who cares about disabled people & carers ever getting to go anywhere again

Post-apoc, community driven, historically informed novel - sounds good to me!

There is a larger conversation about publishing leaning too heavily on authors' social media followings as a PR strategy for years but I'm tired, so please just pre-order my book: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-...

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Somhairle

Makes me think of when loads of web services, including Facebook, went down because Kik and npm where being dicks to one of these Ron’s and he said “fuck this” and deleted a tiny function that half the internet relies on to put numbers to the left of other numbers.

leave ron alone

How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of codeqz.com A man in Oakland, California, disrupted web development around the world last week by deleting 11 lines of code.

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Somhairle

I mean, I'm pretty sure this is a haunted/cursed sculpture and someone threw it in the river in a vain attempt to destroy it...

On of my friends pulled this out of the Thames around Brentford. We’re calling him Norbert and we’re trying to help him get home. If you’ve lost a weird wood guy please get in touch. RTs appreciated

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Somhairle

Worth thinking about how long Tolkien goes on in Return of the King about despair being a weapon, and presenting defeat as a forgone conclusion being a deliberate and effective tactic

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Somhairle

Over at #Ebooks Direct, #SharkWeek's now safely over... but "Deep Wizardry" and all other novels in our #YoungWizards series inventory are still 50% off as part of our #Summer #Reading #Sale. Drop in and grab a bargain with the $19.99 "All The Wizardry" bundle! dduane.link/AllTheWizardry #booksky

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Somhairle

*Thanks them in Long Covid*

Hancock and Hunt failed to prepare the UK for the pandemic, the Covid Inquiry finds.

Finished last night: The Tenth Muse (Divine Apostasy book 10, AF Kay) and Veridian Sterling Fakes It (Jennifer Gooch Hummer). Yes, it was a long night awake. Both pretty good. First standard late-series fantasy, good if you liked the rest. Second: artist bildungsroman, lightweight romance.

Prompting an LLM is not craft, because it does too much of the work for you, and all at once. The whole design ethos is that it does the work for you, and that’s what makes it unusable as an art tool in and of itself. Because the work is the art.

Honestly, if GRRM wanted to be treated like a showpiece product, rather than a participant, he could have made that clear. But there should be non-judgemental, non-shaming formal help available for people who can't use the internet for bookings etc. - it's normal to provide that help elsewhere.

This is an awful lot of words to say: "He was asked to fill in the same form as other people but couldn't be arsed." www.theguardian.com/uk-news/arti...

Game of Thrones’ George RR Martin falls foul of Glasgow sci-fi event’s strict ruleswww.theguardian.com Author’s efforts to take part apparently stymied by application protocol, but he still plans to attend Worldcon

OK, LLM image-generation megathread incoming, responding to a challenge to find a way forward for them rather than just complaining. (Though I still maintain that “stopping people using them” IS a way forward.) What would a usable image-gen AI look like? 1/