Last line completely unnecessary.

Dunno if ‘they’ do, but I do. You baby.

The OSA is nothing to do with kids or parenting and everything to do with further developing surveillance of the UK and controlling what we can access.

I guarantee you, at some point after this will come prohibiting content deemed terrorism such as mentions of the word ‘palestine’ and ‘action’ in the same paragraph for example.

Sooner or later we’ll have our own pseudo or real great firewall. I expect them to come after VPN use at some point too.

Can confirm the ubo custom filter method works perfectly.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind - except for Hulk Hogan” - John Donne, probably.

No, it happened in the early 80s so bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Budgie, Saxon etc

The ones where I have filterable control over what I see and who I interact with and who aren’t pushing ragebait at me or tracking me. So, fediverse services basically.

You can tell them about The Royal Standard which dates back to 1086 and is in the Doomsday Book or Ye Olde Fighting Cocks which is dated to 793.

As I get older ebooks are simply better. I can adjust font, font size, line height, kerning, leading, margins, backlight warmth on a device that can carry all the thousands of books I have and which weighs ounces.

It’s difficult to convey to non Brits just how strong and deep the urge to place all citizens under total surveillance runs in the political classes. Its beyond party politics - all parties want it and have for decades. We have (I think) the largest CCTV system in Europe, possibly the world and the police use facial recognition as a matter of course and encourage private businesses to use facial recognition too.

Sundial by Catriona Ward. No spoilers but its a very dark psychological horror. I’m not far into it but I’m already hooked.

Excession and Player of Games are my two favourite Culture novels.

If you don’t want to listen (which is cool, audio isn’t for everyone) you can download the transcript - head to the archive/resources page and you can grab the PDF from there :)

It wasn’t my first time reading it (its one of my favourite books!) but it was for my two comrades so the discussion was pretty far ranging, on both the surface level of the book and the subtext too.

Hate is too strong a word I think - I nothing them - but they produce the sort of soulless indie/pop ballad that you know will end up in the soundtrack of Hollywood paint-by-numbers romcom that would’ve gone straight to DVD a decade or so ago. The unending radio play rotation would force the song (and we could be talking about any and all Coldplay songs here) into your brain and then five years later you’d find yourself humming it as you suddenly realised a longe bar version of it is playing in the lift (elevator USians) you’re in.

The threadiverse tech is better (Lemmy/Piefed/MBin etc) and it is a great feeling to know I’m not getting tracked and profiled by big tech or inundated by ads, or force fed ragebait via an algorithm I neither want nor need. The users are better, mostly, although I have noticed an uptick over the last 3 or 4 months of reddit-style dickheads being dickheads - but I can just block them.

Niche content will come I think. If the threadiverse can resist the self-defeating drive to ‘grow at all costs’ and just let it organically grow, more people will come but a lot more slowly. But of course that will bring a change in the user culture too. Its quite nice being somewhere with low to no tolerance for right-wing shit.

As for Reddit, I don’t have an account any more. My main of almost Digg migration antiquity was deleted when Spez shit the bed over the API thing but I’d been on Lemmy prior to that anyway off an on. My alt got deleted about 6 months ago when I realised I hadn’t used it for months. If I absolutely have to visit a sub I use a front end.

We have to.

God cared for Adam until he cast him out of Eden. Adam and Eve were punished by god which is an abandonment of sorts. A turning away at the very least.

When the Shelleys (and others) were writing it was the time of the Enlightenment (and Revolution) and writers and political thinkers from across Europe and the US were using god and satan in a new way - less as supernatural beings of unlimited power and more as allegories - god was superstition/tradition/the ruling class and satan was science/progress/revolution. For anyone interested, the academic Peter Schock wrote about this in his Romantic Satanism book and Per Faxneld of Stockholm University wrote an excellent paper on Milton’s Satan as a political rebel.

I think they’re both pretty monstrous but in different ways. We can empathise with the plight of a creature that has no purpose other than to (essentially) satisfy the ego of its maker and still be appalled at its actions. Victor is monstrous in his inability to take responsibility and not consider what he’s doing.

There’s an argument that Mary Shelley was putting Frankenstein in the role of God and the monster as Adam as a commentary on religion. She, like her parents and her husband, was inspired by the Satan of Paradise Lost (the monsters reading primer!) in which Milton had his Satan question what right god had to ‘rule’ just because he’d created. And just like god did to another of his first creations, Lilith, Frankenstein cast away the ‘bride’ of ‘Adam’.

It’s a truly excellent read, however you look at it.

List of Send instances.

A lot of us are and have protested for years. The previous gvmt didn’t care and the current one don’t either because its not really about kids, its about control and surveillance. The ruling political class want to know what its citizens are up to and/or want us to know they can id us any time, especially those of us who are noisy about political issues.

Our right to protest is just about gone, including the right to wear masks. We are legally obliged to provide pins to our phones when detained and we can be arrested if a protest is deemed obstructive - which includes being too noisy. We can even be arrested just for discussing holding a protest of some kind.

At the same time, we are told that vocally supporting non-violent groups is now terrorism and can be punishable with prison time.

And the vast majority of the UK population sit on their collective arses moaning about immigrants and watching Love Island. They don’t care - genuinely, they absolutely do not care their rights are disappearing one by one.