up the shoreline

I just discovered that you can get WhatsApp to transcribe voice notes! This changes everything!

I'm quite excited by the upcoming Midterms in the USA, where we will very likely see Trump lose the House and quite possibly the Senate.

But I'm also quite excited that on the 27th of October Israel are having their election, and the polls show it's highly likely that the current electoral coalition will be replaced with a less war-crimey one.

1. The BBC continues to be institutionally transphobic

(tags:LGBT transgender bbc bigotry )

2. The mother of dinosaurs (awesome sculptures)

(tags:dinosaurs sculpture )

3. Majority of Christian nationalists in Britain rarely go to church

(tags:religion fascism UK racism bigotry )

4. Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers

(tags:bots drones Russia Ukraine war )

A couple of months ago I started getting the occasional 15 minute gaps to myself in the evening*, and felt up to returning to my play-through of Dark Souls 3**. And I reached the point where I was fighting a very-late game boss, who arrives on a dragon, and got stuck. After a dozen or so attempts I could defeat the dragon, and eventually, about a month a go, I reached the point where I could defeat the dragon without taking any damage. But I was darned if I could beat the rider.  I recorded this to show Jane at the time:



As you can see, I do a pretty good job of defeating the King Of The Storm (although I can now do it about twice as fast) and then I last 25 seconds of not doing any damage before being annihilated.

Well, *today* in an attempt I sadly didn't record***, I killed both of them.  And then sat there trembling for about 30 seconds while the adrenaline wore off.

Next up: the DLC. I hear that the land is peaceful, its inhabitants kind.  I'm sure everyone will be lovely to me.


* I'm not at the moment, as Gideon wants me to play either board games or Roblox with him every evening.
** Technically a re-play, as I restarted with a strength build after getting 95% of the way through with a Pyromancer and realising that I was leaning too much on help for the trickier bits.
*** my 6th, I think, while Jane took the kids swimming - we're alternating who gets a couple of hours with no children each week.

I first encountered ignosticism over a decade ago, and it's made some discussions much easier, basically because I refuse to engage with them unless the conversation looks to actually be useful.

The basic idea behind ignosticism is that discussions of "God" are meaningless unless the term is defined, and that the vast majority of the time the usage is so vague that you literally do not have enough information to have a meaningful discussion.

There is a solution to this - before you can discuss God you need to define what you mean by the word, pinning it down enough that there is mutual understanding of what the question is actually asking. Sadly, it turns out, most of the time people are very bad at explaining what they mean by the term, and you can safely conclude that without going back to basics and defining terms the conversation isn't going anywhere. If the person you're discussing things with doesn't have *some* kind of coherent meaning behind what they say then communication is impossible.

Once I saw this for religion, it became obvious that this was true of a whole host of discussions people have, and so they have also ended up on the "Will not discuss this unless people can define their terms" list. This most frequently includes more nebulous ideas like "Meaning", but also reminds me that there are plenty of terms* where there are multiple (or nebulous) meanings to words (or the meanings have changed over time), and I want to know what a actually person means before getting too caught up in a discussion. If nothing else because sometimes people use the same word with two different meanings in the same conversation, allowing them to unreasonably "win" an argument.

So now there are whole areas of discussion I overhear that I just stay out of, and many discussions where I am much more alert for them devolving into language/logic games rather than fruitful exchanges of views. It's definitely helped a lot.

* Examples include "Consciousness", "Free Will", "Zionism", "Respect", or "Bimonthly".

1. BBC Apologizes To PinkNews Over Misconduct Documentary & Article

(tags:BBC UK LGBT OhForFucksSake )

2. Germany is turning abandoned coal mines into 23 lakes; the former mining landscape is becoming Europe's largest artificial wetland

(tags:Germany coal nature )

3. 'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone - how Nick Park made A Grand Day Out

(tags:animation stopmotion history UK )

4. "I Pointed AI at 400 Years of Historical Archives. It Found a Forgotten Meteorite, Lost Rhinos, and Unrecorded Volcanic Eruptions."

(tags:history archive ai volcano )