Richard Gadsden @po8crg@wandering.shop

"What is it like to be human?" the visiting alien asked.
"What is it like to be an alien?"
"Bewildering, feeling you don't fit in."
"Same."
"But interesting, and there are times you do fit in."
"Yeah."
"So... It's like being people?"
"It's like being people."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

"That's a girly cocktail" oh you mean a female-presenting tipple?

Before we get all 'The Sky is Falling' with Alt-Right knuckleheads migrating to specific instances that cater to them, remember:

1. The block feature actually works here and should be used liberally if you see bad faith arguers or worse.

2. Instance-level personal blocks can be executed on the web client by going to the user, opening the additional […] menu and clicking 'Hide all from this instance'.

3. Petition your local moderating team to ban and suspend instances outright. We'll listen!

I declare #CakeForTransFriendsDay.

I'm fed up of "coming out" days that ask trans people to come out in an unsafe world, doing all the risky stuff, while cis people ignore us.

Today, 14th Oct, every year, the onus is on cis people to buy cake for their #trans, #nonbinary and otherwise genderly-interesting friends.

Trans people's genders are what they say they are. This has been known and settled for decades.

People's access to gendered spaces is currently based on their gender, and that's how it should be.

The transphobes calling themselves feminists are participating in patriarchy.

My heart goes out to everyone who has been traumatized and is having it brought up again. You have the right to take care of yourself today, whether that means engaging more or pulling back.

I got an unexpected brown envelope today.

It said my PIP had been reviewed after some change in the law.

There hasn't been any change to it, but it's a big long letter that didn't (to my panicked self anyway) make that very clear until my heart had skipped SEVERAL beats.

If I've had this, probably lots of other people have too, so... brave hearts, everyone. And I hope your letter is as benign as mine.

Today is Petrov Day, celebrating the courageous call made by Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov in 1983.

This man correctly identified the warnings raised by the Soviet missile detection system as a false alarm, probably preventing significant military conflict between the US and the SSSR.

Moral of the story: whenever you have the opportunity to stop an all-out nuclear war, do it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

Okay, it's been forever since I played Magic: The Gathering, but I couldn't resist this pun, so I made a thing.

@bdunnette Weird that "cowboy" is one of very few formations where we use "boy" to refer to an adult man (unlike "girl").

Also "cowchild" sounds even worse.

Quoth my (so far clearly delightful) copy editor for The Raven Tower: "Note: This author sometimes uses commas in an unorthodox way, to indicate pacing or tone." It's a fair cop, Copy Editor!

I wrote about use of m*ster and sl*ve in tech:

https://deninet.com/blog/2018/09/09/even-tech-words-matter