I have to carry a stool with me in some situations. It’s frustrating, but the prospect of my legs saying “nope” and just landing on the sidewalk is worse.

Where, too, is the parental agency to determine whether or not their children are profiled and data-mined by 3rd party "ed tech" platforms throughout their educational life? Why are the obvious problems being sidelined in favour of a half-baked shiny object?

My modular home is 45m, but it’s not in the back of someone’s garden. They could be one good way of tackling the housing crisis, in a state run building programme of purpose built homes where tenants can live with autonomy, but not as overpriced sheds rammed into existing properties

Abandoned campfires found at Shadow Mountain Bridger-Teton National Forest employees have found at least three abandoned campfires at Shadow Mountain since the road to the dispersed camping area opened a few weeks ago.

FFS people. PUT OUT YOUR CAMPFIRES!

www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/environ...

Lost the zest for living, have they?

Car brain is really something

The trail of broken hearts will be... devastating.

Africa has 2,000 languages. AI content moderation covers fewer than 20 The data-labelling industry relies heavily on workers in Kenya and Nigeria to annotate what AI systems learn. Those same workers rarely see their languages reflected in the systems they help train.

The data-labelling industry relies heavily on workers in Kenya and Nigeria to annotate what AI systems learn. Those same workers rarely see their languages reflected in the systems they help train.

Support this vital work: globalvoices.org/donate

globalvoices.org/2026/04/20/a...

Today has been a Good Day:

I have won at Yarn Chicken.

*holds up a yarn "butterfly", containing the left-over 150 cm (or so)*

*does a happy dance, to work through the impatience of waiting for the new item to dry, post-blocking*

The most excellent.

The Public Scholar publishes one week from today. Please consider pre-ordering and/or asking your library to order. Authors really need your pre-orders to make a book go.

I think it's a useful book! More importantly, so do real scholars and writers!

www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

The formulation, "Can {group} put {thing} behind it?" always gets a reflexive response from me, along the lines of, "I dunno - maybe when y'all stop serving me up {thing} to deal with?"

Or sometimes, "{Thing} doesn't go behind me until I'm certain it won't then knife me in the back."

That's definitely a silver lining to that cloud! (Thanks for letting me know.)

Really wondering about the name of that POS-CEO now...

How MAHA Fucked Up My Surgery | Shouldn't Need to Be a Lawyer by Matthew Cortland Get more from Shouldn't Need to Be a Lawyer by Matthew Cortland on Patreon

🧵 New post: "How MAHA Fucked Up My Surgery"

I was catheterized by 2 new graduate nurses (one of whom had never done the procedure on a patient before), using incorrect technique, without adequate pain control, after a delay that doubled my volume past the hospital's own intervention threshold

They couldn't make the cut.

... so a complaint like that once, I'll deal with by "turning up" enunciation and projection.

The reaction of the conversation partner can be extremely telling.

(Not attaching this to anyone's post - don't want to derail.)

I'm still masking in public - indoors or where there's too dense an outdoor crowd.

I'm beginning to twitch anytime someone reflexively complains, "I can't understand you through the mask."

I do my best to enunciate and project...

Judge orders release of El Gamal family from Dilley ICE Center The family has been detained since last June after the father was arrested and charged with attacking mostly Jewish protestors at a Boulder, Colo., event.

The El Gamal family will be released from ICE’s Dilley camp after ten months of imprisonment.

A mother & her five children have been held for almost a year.

The mom is dangerously ill, the children are sick & traumatized.

Public pressure helped get them released

Keep fighting to close the camps!

Sometimes the only thing standing in the way of your goals… is you.

If I see "japan" or "japanning" in a text I'm reading, I check the publication date, and the setting of the story/prose, because that particular usage was already old-fashioned in my teens (in the 70s).

I spent today at the hospital and didn’t see a single respirator (other than my own).

There were a few people wearing surgical masks.

Signs saying it was a “mask friendly” environment.

No free masks.

No mask mandates.

Tons of coughing & sickness.

Masks belong in healthcare. Period.

*smiles* I was of an age when my mother would get very persnicketty about how late I was up, so Star Trek wasn't in it for me, then.

Sometimes, one just has to chicken out, get a plate, a fork, and a knife, and dine rather than merely eat a thing.

I have a few series like that.

Where anyone recommending it to me gets "the speech" acknowledging its a well-done thing, but my anxiety levels spike way past "fun" and the pay-off of Good Drama simply cannot compensate.

Heh, yeah.

Weirdly, years and timezones far away, and something in my heart just plinged when considering one of our local station's sign-off, the extremely common national anthem with a photo of the flag.

I have a friend with a birthday today, and it was (as they say in Ireland) "a roundy-one", so that was a nice counterweight.

(Later, she shared a photo of an outing she'd had with her sister, lunch and a stroll in the spring sunshine.)

Turning the Corner: Momentum Builds in Ukraine’s Strike & Ground Defence Campaigns While Pacific Democracies Enhance their Strategic Deterrence. My weekly update on war and strategic competition. This week, Ukraine's long-range strike & ground ops, Russia still not generating momentum in its spring offensive and Pacific security issues.

Ukraine is in a much better position than Washington seems willing to accept.

mickryan.substack.com/p/turning-th...

I had something of a running battle with Loving Spouse about fridge magnets - his opinion was that it made the fridge look messy.

My love of decoration was as a steady drip-drip-drip on his stony heart. ;)

He's even written love poetry to me, using word-magnets.

*hugs from an Internet stranger, and wishes of strength to you*