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Michæl La💤
@mlazz@aus.social
mastodon 4.7.20 Followers
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22 Posts
Joined December 14, 2023
When I was a kid, the emotion I most associated with ANZAC Day was "pity".
Pity for the poor scared buggers forced (by politics, law, economics or tradition) to go and huddle in a cacophony of filth and germs and whizzing lumps of metal.
I feel like we've lost that in the past couple of decades.
Lest we forget that war is shit and nothing to be proud of.
One of my backburner creative outlets is writing music using the open-source software Musescore. I write about one piece per year, if I'm lucky, but I enjoy having something to muse over in my downtime.
Here's one of the better pieces I've written, as played by the Musescore synths. It's the first movement of my "Swingphony", Op.5,6,7,8
Replying to
@macronencer@mastodon.scot @TheBreadmonkey@beige.party
A Swing dance teacher once told me a Zen quote:
"Enter through form. Exit from form."
But I can't find a source online, so maybe he just made it up himself.
(The context was a lesson on musicality.)
Replying to
@luciedigitalni@aus.social @MarkDeasy@aus.social
There definitely is a loyalty tax (at least for Origin and AGL). There's a "retention discount" that they only offer you after you've changed to another provider, which is cheaper than their best advertised plan.
Every year for the past 7 years, when the previous year's Origin discount expires, I jump online, find the comparable standard plan from AGL and sign up. Then about 2 weeks later I get a call from Origin offering me a hefty discount for switching back (used to be 25% but is now more like 15%). I say "OK" and I'm sorted for another year.
It helps that the AGL plan is usually slightly cheaper than the advertised Origin plan, so if they finally decided to stop the merry-go-round I'd be still on the least worst option.
The person on the phone at Origin admitted one year that this is a thing that they both do.
(YMMV, but it's worked for me in Qld for 7 years straight.)
Happy Thrimilchimonath - the Old English "month of the three milkings" (when the pasture was so lush that you had to milk the cows three times a day).
Boosted by @troberts@theblower.au
They really need to rule Like a Version covers out of scope, because it's an insult to the artists of 2025 to lose out to a bunch of reheated hits of the late 20th Century.
Replying to
@dgar@aus.social I still remember the hidden track at the end of that album.
https://youtu.be/MuznLGM2lcs?list=OLAK5uy_mDhpsy0gPnHMiVjx2N9gs8vIrJ-n4GBu4&t=235
Feeble
@drahardja@sfba.social
Reminds me of this meme:
My cordless computer mouse started blinking a red light on 4 Feb this year, indicating that its battery needed to be replaced.
Give that it regularly does this, and since it was still working perfectly well, I made a note of the date so that I could see how long it would take until it actually ran out of battery. I also put some Blu-tack over the light to stop it annoying me.
It only just stopped working yesterday - nearly 3 months later!
This is a mouse that I use for WfH as well as personal use, so it gets about 8 hours use per day. It's not like it's critical equipment either, if it runs out I can just use the trackpad until I change the single AA battery.
Replying to
@jimbob @PaulMcEwan
That read very similarly to my attempts to use LLMs for work. The best I've managed so far is to get it to turn my vague hand-wavey description of the problem into more specific names of methodologies that I can then search for via more traditional means.
I don't know enough to know what sort of evidence you are required to show your employer to prove that you've been using Copilot, but it certainly sounds like it would be quicker to get Copilot to generate that evidence while you read the manual.
Replying to
@shlee
As an added bonus, this bit literally just reminded me that I was going to check how old my car battery is, and whether it's due for replacement.
https://youtu.be/0nLMdhYUzLo?t=15
It turns out all I need to remember something is to have James Hetfield yell it at me lots of times while the word is repeatedly flashed in front of my face.
Replying to
@maudenificent
Coorong
(Not sure if it's spelt with a "K", or if I'm comflating it with the "Kooyong" tennic centre.)
Replying to
@neenish_tart
Looks like they did a poll of Like a Versions just a couple of years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_J_Hottest_100_of_Like_a_Version
Replying to
@Em0nM4stodon
I've come to Mastodon from Facebook a year ago and can report that I personally find boosting to be annoying and I have boosts hidden for everyone I follow.
If I don't, the ratio of personally written posts to boosted posts is about 5 to 1 and my feed is swamped with well-meaning spam.
When I want to know what's going on outside my bubble, I enjoy scrolling the "Explore" feed, which is how I encountered this post. I understand this feed to be informed by both Boosts and Favourites (though opinions seem to differ). I therefore dole out the Favourites very liberally.
I guess we're all different and it's great that the Fediverse empowers each of us to tailor it to our needs and preferences.
Replying to
@janeishly@beige.party @CiaraNi@mastodon.green @agturcz@circumstances.run @antygon@mastodon.com.pl
I say that as someone whose social life reached its zenith in the Swing Dance scene in the 2000s, where I met (in addition to many many good friends) the lady I would later propose to on a dance floor, and then marry and celebrate our umteenth anniversary just the other day.
You might argue that people weren't filming everyone back then? Well, here's a random clip from a local event I went to just last month, where nobody cared they were being filmed.
https://youtu.be/EsZVoqy3rb8?t=128
The age range is fairly broad, but there are plenty of youngsters (Lindy Hop is a young person's dance, and perfect for college kids).
tl;dr Swing Dancing (and any dancing) certainly is a much better way to meet people than dating apps in my experience.
Interesting concept of "aggressive immobility": When things are shit, but you have a fragile web of work-arounds that let you function, so that you now fear any change - even improvements - that might break those coping mechanisms.
https://youtu.be/IxlK8Kf-6Rs
It's expressed in terms of Russian society in the current war/regime, but I wonder if it applies to aggressive conservatism in general across the world - especially in periods of high change and low safety, when coping is that much harder
I've certainly felt something similar when software updates. Sure it's fixed a bunch of bugs, but now my workarounds don't workaround anymore.
Replying to
@MissConstrue @stevekillelay
All important milestones in worker's rights, including the Australian stonemasons in 1856 (who we're quite proud of on this side of the world) ✊🟥
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workers%27_Day#Origin
"On 21 April 1856, Australian stonemasons in Victoria undertook a mass stoppage as part of the eight-hour workday movement. It became a yearly commemoration, inspiring American workers to have their first stoppage. 1 May was chosen to be International Workers' Day to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago."
Replying to
@janeishly@beige.party @CiaraNi@mastodon.green @agturcz@circumstances.run @antygon@mastodon.com.pl
Not sure which coin slot to insert my 2c into in such a branching conversation, but social dancing has always been a situation where someone would feel socially exposed. 400 years ago at a country dance, the youngsters might be dancing under the gaze of the majority everyone they'd ever known in their little village. And 10,000 years ago, the youngsters might be dancing in front of their entire social world (~150 people).
And it's always been a case of "totes awks" or "shamejob", especially for young men for reasons nicely outlined in this interesting video presenting a hypothesis on the evolutionary psychology of dancing:
https://youtu.be/bY94eFCNv4g