Roy Brander🍁

Retired civil engineer and GIS programmer.
http://brander.ca - which has all my contact info.

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[email protected]

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nprofile1qqspm0tzxv0y68p3a6sufnedj2wh5v99f3e40lcg3hgcp2pyhvml64qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43q9qsk3m

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relay.ditto.pub

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npub1rk7kyvc7f5wrrm4pcn8jmy5a0gc22nrn2lls3rw3sz5zfwehl42qj5fe5j

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Last Notes

2026-07-28 18:32:39 GMT

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@nprofile…vf35
Funny that people used to value an estate outside the city to get away from the smell.
Greetings to you all from your local sewer works and sewer workers. We don't need applause, we just quietly revel in saving more lives than surgeons.
Unnoticed.

2026-04-05 21:52:58 GMT

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@nprofile…l70y
Been trying to explain all day that America did this 36 years ago and the WaPo reported it and the Pentagon accepted the figure of 170,000 dead kids...and nobody cared, and now nobody knows...
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/0623strategy.htm
Oh, and if you read "Kill Anything That Moves" by Nick Turse, about Vietnam, you'll see it's 30 years older than THAT...

2026-01-29 19:02:42 GMT

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@nprofile…kahw
Chortle all your please.
I'm reminded of the far more pathetic videos of anti-vaxxer maga pleading for the vaccine just before intubation, to be told it was far too late for that.
It made no difference to maga in the whole: they just never mention their losses again and move on. (Never admitted that they were wrong about Iraq, either.)
This town's voting patterns will not change by a whole percentage point. Down from 65% GOP to 64%....yay.

2025-12-07 17:20:59 GMT

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@nprofile…fj3p @nprofile…998y
That would be untrue if the boss knew how to do the job.
I really think that "bosses who don't even understand the jobs of their underlings" is the core problem of business at present.
I watched it grow through my career, gave boss after boss the short-version of what I did (I got good at it, 5 bosses in 8 years) and none wanted more detail than that.

2025-11-27 18:18:01 GMT

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@nprofile…h6dl
They don't need a vow, so much as just sneering at it as economically hopeless.
Thanks to Hal Kvisle, CEO of TC, for saying it would take 5-10 years to build.
In short, it depends upon a solid, >$50 oil market right through the 2030s, and into the 2040s.
It requires a $25B pipeline through BC and a major oilsands expansion, with processing plants and pipelines to/fro Edmonton, for another $25B.
Who's going to risk $50B on the 2030-2045 oil market being good?
I'll wait.

2025-11-23 19:21:36 GMT

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@nprofile…yldr
Never mind "protection" can we just get off the damn thing?
Every single government department, at all three levels maintain twitter accounts. Schools have Twitter accounts. Paving jobs and snow days are announced on Twitter.
Major project: no level of government gets federal money for communications, ads, etc, if they remain on Twitter, or any foreign-owned social media service. (No Facebook,)
Mastodon for all, pressure on major Canadian corporations (rail, air, utilities)

2025-10-23 17:47:21 GMT

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@nprofile…6wdt @nprofile…998y
Wishing Cory a good time in Vancouver at his unfortunately sold-out talk at the writers' fest!

2025-10-21 18:26:15 GMT

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@nprofile…ap2a @nprofile…dtsc
To me, it's been so painfully obvious that Carney could do a cost-free Trump-like political stunt that gains attention, gets press, and is hard to complain about: get the Feds off Twitter and loudly insist that the provincial administrations do the same. Then the munis.
How many Twitter accounts do our 3 levels of government have? How many journalists only stay on to follow gov't announcements?
But it's free - Trump can hardly bitch about lost "business"...

2025-10-20 22:18:35 GMT

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@nprofile…p7lw
How near? I plan to maintain my site unto death. So that remark conveys a threat.
I assure you, when the Facebook Police come to incorporate my website into their alleged "content", brander.ca will NOT go quietly.
I will hire gravestone engravers to carve the pages into cliff faces in the Rockies, and simulate the hyperlinks with red strings of those plastics that time cannot decay.
One day, it will teach descendants that "indexing" used to be better than "search" in many ways

2025-10-20 22:01:30 GMT

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@nprofile…p7lw
Speaking for http://brander.ca , I am annoyed by the use of past tense.

2025-07-31 19:26:20 GMT

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@nprofile…x7m7
Yeah, I ran into this with my thinkpad. Went round and round on it, but it seems to be, as Wayne and Garth would say, "DENIED" down at a hardware level.
Mean to get around to buying a "Sandisk Ultra Fit" to boot from. You can leave it in the socket without worrying it'll be snapped off putting it in a case, or bumped.
I do keep my largish photo/music collections on a 128 SD card so I can rsync either over network, or just put the card in the desktop for a few minutes.

2025-07-24 17:54:34 GMT

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@nprofile…6urt
But in the PhD defense scene later on, a confident male academic makes what he thinks is a blistering point.
Then he reads upside down from her notes, and sees she's about the absolutely stomp on his entire career with field data that proves he's wasted his life.
Just before she opens her mouth, he shakes his head an inch and mutters:
"...Clever Girl..."
And then she bites his head off.
But just metaphorically.

2025-05-25 17:27:22 GMT

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@nprofile…6php
Cute, but the way to really dramatize how gentle a slope Olympus has is to note that a person climbing it could not see the top, since it is over the horizon the whole way up.

2025-04-21 03:18:04 GMT

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@nprofile…k7vf
This is the theme of the famous essay, and then book, by Adam Serwer:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/
...which notes that pictures of crowds taken at lynchings had thumbs-up, happy faces proud to be there. It's a bonding.

2025-03-24 16:55:33 GMT

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@nprofile…fynq
cleantechnica.com
and
volts.wtf

2025-03-23 16:41:59 GMT

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@nprofile…fynq
How about "which state"?
CBC today has a story of two musician sisters being harassed at length by Ohio police, and the Ohio police calling the complaint 'hate mongering'.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6694117
I'm just wondering if we can start mapping which US States have serving MAGA cops actively promoting their politics.

2025-03-23 16:34:16 GMT

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@nprofile…fynq
It's awkward when such triggering stories don't come with names or any other specifics.

2025-03-11 18:16:06 GMT

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@nprofile…jqvx
The "agile" guys almost got it right. All the best programming I ever did was side-by-side with the customer, the final user.
This is when the basic functions are all done, and you're messing with which ones should show up how, what the output looks like, how you input.
Mostly UI, but also logic of what-you-want-to-see. What inputs have only 3 things as 90% of the responses (adaptive drop-down that shows most-frequent responses at top, etc).
It's a SERVICE job; serve the customer.

2025-03-10 17:02:58 GMT

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@nprofile…eu3n
Aren't Trump's first-noted phonemic paraphasias from 2016?

2025-03-04 23:24:06 GMT

Journalists have lost the ability to do research, I suppose. Andrew Cockburn, an OG real journalist, thought to look up the USGS estimate of where the planet's "rare" earths are:
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earths.pdf
2/3rds are in China and Brazil.
America has double what Canada has.
Russia already has double America's!
...and Ukraine is not on the top ten list.
It's another made-up issue, like the dread Canadian fentanyl plague.
What DOES Ukraine have a lot of? Oil & Gas. It's ALWAYS Oil and Gas.

2025-03-01 23:10:05 GMT

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@nprofile…7c02
The caption on that photo in the Kyiv newspaper was
"President Zelenskyy Visits Russian Front"

2025-03-01 16:10:58 GMT

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@nprofile…eu3n
If you aren't getting sick, you must be in a natural environment.
Also horrifying: if we could look inside our lungs. Not just smokers, any city dweller.

2025-02-21 19:01:30 GMT

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@nprofile…gpxc @nprofile…e3ky
This Sunday the 23rd, there's a much bigger demonstration at the Art Gallery.
It's for Ukraine, but that's now an anti-trump demonstration
https://www.ucc.ca/stand-with-ukraine/stand-with-ukraine-2025-call-to-action/

2025-02-20 23:25:50 GMT

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@nprofile…fynq
At least the USA is safe from that. They've had their assess kicked now by rice paddy farmers, Baghdad shopkeepers, and then by medieval goatherds.

2025-02-20 16:38:26 GMT

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@nprofile…8mk5
Why I keep using "Russians move in to mine the Arctic Islands" as my go-to scenario for the US not coming to help us against Russia, i.e. same as Ukraine.
I'm sorry, but I have to throw Gwynne Dyer at you AGAIN. The "northwest passage is of only mild interest to Russia or anybody else:
https://gwynnedyer.com/2009/the-northern-passages/
Except America, which Harper was trying to counter with the same Naval Base and ships idea 16 years ago(!)

2025-02-19 20:56:57 GMT

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@nprofile…gpxc @nprofile…e3ky
The Canadian government should start trolling them with
- Advisories for Canadian natives and other Canadians of Colour to always carry their passports to avoid ICE deportation.
- Hire the fired CFPB staff and start a CFPB Canada that also serves Americans
- Poll Puerto Rico about joining Canada as 11th province. (Billboards in San Juan are CDN $2000 per month, each. I've been thinking of about just doing one personally...)

2025-02-17 18:17:16 GMT

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@nprofile…0nz2
And they will pay ATTENTION to those calls, as soon as they look out and see a million people on the street.

2025-02-15 17:25:21 GMT

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@nprofile…u00v
Quite a lot of Canada simply is immediately Ukraine-descended.
Here we stand. We can do no other.

2025-02-13 20:41:21 GMT

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@nprofile…2mzm @nprofile…qz4x @nprofile…lm25
No blacksites, either. Yes, I'm sure;' we aren't that good at keeping secrets.
The logic was the same as guns. You're at greater risk with one in the house. That logic only applies to citizens who can call police.
If there are no police, you actually, I'm sorry, DO need a gun in the house.
And I don't believe the NATO police would die for our NW Territories, if Russian icebreakers showed up on the Arctic shore to start a new lithium mine.

2025-02-13 19:59:31 GMT

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@nprofile…lm25 @nprofile…qz4x
I wrote my MP to ask that we consider a nuclear weapons program.
http://brander.ca/blog/nukes_please.html
...friends and chance encounter people (dentist, etc) are guarded but basically supportive "gotta look at it, at least".
It's the journalists and social media bloggers who write back as if I've gone nuts.
Mind you, that was yesterday, before the Ukrainian concessions, and the direct 51st-state message repeated.
Maybe today I'm not quite so ahead of the wave.

2025-02-13 18:49:54 GMT

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@nprofile…8mk5
Wait, I know: you're friends with lots of Ukrainians, why not ask THEM about Canada's best next-move?
If possible, ask today, while they're reviewing their own News From Washington.

2025-02-11 19:42:46 GMT

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@nprofile…8mk5
Good to see you busy. I still have a problem with Too Much News - dropped you and other substacks with pain, dropped most political social media follows...
..but find myself hyper-commenting all week on my new bonnet-bee that Canada must build nuclear weapons, because NATO is dead, I can admit that now: nobody will come to protect us. The whole non-proliferation bargain was based on NATO protection.
SocMed like the Mafia: they keep draggin' me back in.
https://socialbc.ca/@RoyBrander/113964741620186928

2025-02-08 17:57:57 GMT

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@nprofile…qz4x
No Vancouver, alas. They always go to Seattle.
But I'm not crossing that border. Sorry.

2025-02-02 17:05:59 GMT

I can't believe that I have to start this, but I'm not seeing it anywhere else, so I'll just beg readers to boost towards virality:
CANADIANS! Don't Travel To The USA!
The biggest spending you can withhold from them, practically, is your visit. And the most public.
Write your favourite hotel or B&B, tell them you're not coming, and why.
Post on all your social media that you won't be going, beg others to do the same.
All others. In the world.

2025-01-31 20:14:54 GMT

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@nprofile…gpxc @nprofile…e3ky
Suggested language:
"Tomorrow morning, Trump will send a bill to the CEO of General Mills for 25% of his oats purchases; to the CEO of US Steel for 25% of his iron ore; and to the CEO of GM for 25% of his aluminum.
Nothing will happen in Canada, at all.
Perhaps the CEOs will switch to other vendors, but they'll still be more expensive vendors, or they'd already be there.
So it'll cause inflation in America. Nothing in Canada, if they can't find other vendors."

2025-01-31 18:43:47 GMT

"... all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land..." - Article VI.
Only Paul Krugman seems to be pointing out that it's flat-out *illegal* for Trump to tariff Canada, because treaties are "supreme" laws, it's more-illegal than ordering the army to burgle your house.
This one is special, because Trump signed it, called it "the fairest, most balanced, and beneficial trade agreement we have ever signed into law"

2024-12-19 18:57:06 GMT

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@nprofile…fynq
Somebody advise the ghost of Edward Teller, that we've finally found a place for his giant h-bombs.

2024-12-10 17:57:40 GMT

Well, another cri-de-couer only my few followers will see.
Today, Syria's "Infamous" prisons of harsh conditions, torture, and murder are in the news. As we celebrate the releases, do note:
When the Canadian services mistook Maher Arar for another guy with possible terror connections, and advised the US FBI that Arar would be on their soil for a few hours, changing planes with his family, Americans kidnapped Arar with no warrant and sent him to SYRIA for a year of torture. They're best at it.

2024-06-19 17:29:45 GMT

I am up to 75 followers (what is wrong with you people?) and should probably admit to being quoted extensively for the front-page Calgary Herald story this morning, from my great wit and wisdom about large water main failures:
https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/braid-backyard-garden-soil-kill-giant-water-pipeline-revelations

2024-05-08 00:29:04 GMT

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@npub1ept…jcl3
Now you tell us; I have to call up a whole bunch of cell members and tell them to stop seizing the means of production.

2024-03-03 17:59:22 GMT

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@npub17ys…3n6u @npub1typ…c8hh
I've always like that "fast" means "quick" but is also used for locking something down, "Fasten", or "a mountain fastness" for a solid redoubt in the rock.
I believe it's that English comes from multiple languages, that have similar sounding but different words.

2024-03-03 17:56:25 GMT

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@npub1m8v…t2f8 @npub1typ…c8hh
Almost no plants - where does the atmosphere get its oxygen from? I also wondered that about Trantor, all covered with buildings.

2024-02-19 18:27:50 GMT

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@npub1lf4…kcjr
If Harry wants to buy some credibility, he should take up his Mom's anti-mine activism.
It's an underserved issue, to put it mildly, could use some visibility. Talk about "out of sight"...
Congrats on the WIRED sale.

2024-02-07 18:30:54 GMT

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@npub14ka…um78
My blog take a few days ago:
http://brander.ca/stackback#troll

2023-12-31 23:02:58 GMT

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@npub1lf4…kcjr
HNY, Justin Ling. You've put in a great year of work, duly appreciated. Whatever SS's issues, it's allowed me to say proper thanks.
"Real applause is green. And folds." (Heinlein)

2023-12-17 20:32:50 GMT

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@npub1s69…l9l2
Seatbelts were similar.
Man, the Law was reaching right into your car, your private space, they need a warrant to search it, and telling you what to do with your body.
One guy drove around and around the police station with the seatbelt dragging on the ground beside the driver's door, until somebody wearily came out and gave him the first ticket, so he could be a Hero against Tyranny.
They tired out, admitted the obvious when THEY had kids, and now everybody wears seatbelts.

2023-12-12 20:09:38 GMT

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@npub1typ…c8hh
Yes, we are a total monolith with no internal dissension on the matter.
Kidding.
We have ONE province that is, you are right, a "petrostate", where oil&gas prosperity needs sweep all other facts and problems away.
The other 90% of the country, and the Feds, not so much.
The Feds keep hoping to just smooth the fight over with subsidies, concessions.
They're hoping to skate another year or two, to when the industry starts folding up by itself. The oilsands will die first.

2023-12-05 20:59:30 GMT

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@npub1typ…c8hh
Yeah, I was merely joshin' ya.
(I know, shouldn't do that on the Internet, you can't see me wink.)

2023-12-05 20:23:38 GMT

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@npub1typ…c8hh
So, he just published a paper. On the frontiers of Black Hole Theory.
Yesterday.
Why did you write "back in the day"? Oh, you *meant* "yesterday". Got it.

2023-12-02 00:06:54 GMT

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@npub1lf4…kcjr
It's an amazing tribute to the power of network effects providing monopoly.
You couldn't ask for a more anti-power bunch than journalists, but X has had to get THIS bad before even a few of them will leave for services with fewer network effects, a smaller audience.
I wonder if a court would take a review of the X user-base decline, or rather lack of, as establishing that an 'effective monopoly' had been established.

2023-11-21 16:09:09 GMT

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@npub14ka…um78
What if two Canadian octogenarian rockers and polio survivors took a principled stand against Spotify, and nobody came?
I was so proud of the two of them, standing alone in a cold wind, as it were, while Beyonce and Taylor Swift, who could have really done something, sheltered in the basement, not even peeking out.

2023-11-18 22:47:45 GMT

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@npub1gmx…atcq
I'd never heard of the guy until he threw DJT off pre-X on Jan 7. And I said, "That's a good thing, but it's ****ing weird that a private businessman can just make that decision...and also, NOT make that decision on the five previous occasions where DJT reportedly crossed the "ban forever" line.
And then it was explained that Dorsey and the whole board forced Musk to finish the buy, knowing that 6000 employees would be immediately fired.
Good to know.

2023-11-07 22:51:13 GMT

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@npub1t7d…pqpp
I've got the paper copy from 2003, with Theo's most-restrained-blurb-in-history on the cover.
"People have been clamoring for an OpenBSD book, and Michael has stepped up to provide one."
I mean, he could have tossed in the word "good", to be nice.
I miss the drinking sessions that we'd have after the Hackathon guys every year had given a talk to the Calgary Unix Users Group. Some OpenBSD contributors led interesting lives...

2023-11-07 19:59:01 GMT

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@npub1yqk…zdlu @npub1hyk…3p33
My story was having to click past three screens that insisted I sign up for Prime to buy something.
On the third, the option to NOT get Prime was, no joke, in six-point type in the corner.
I carefully clicked on that... and was signed up for Prime.
I managed to un-subscribe from it, cancel the purchase, and remove the credit cards.
I couldn't actually kill my Amazon account - the screens to do that went in circles..and one noted I'd lose the Kindle books.

2023-10-16 18:30:58 GMT

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@npub14ka…um78
Hey, you know fun thing to point out? That the Gulf of Mexico has 3000 of these things, nearly all built in 30 years - that's two a week. They cost $100M-$250M, recently.
Two a week for 30 years.
And they say the green transition will be impossibly expensive.
Blogged back at a Telegraph article to that effect today:
http://brander.ca/stackback#defeatists

2023-10-13 19:39:49 GMT

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@npub14ka…um78
Is there science on wind turbines harming reindeer?

2023-09-29 16:25:20 GMT

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@npub14ka…um78
RIP, and watch the Adam Driver movie "The (torture) Report" showing how she was one of the very few that cared about torture. Bravo.
ahem, however...I think it is difficult, this morning, for American Democratic activists to not heave a *visible* sigh of relief that kind nature has turned one of their embarrassing liabilities into a messaging asset.

2023-09-26 18:39:16 GMT

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@npub1t7d…pqpp
About 25 years back, I spent months writing a longish program in Visual Basic 3, because we were going all-Microsoft and I was assured it was The Thing, that automatic GUI creation was the Future.
Visual Basic 4 did not support my program; there wasn't even a way to port it.
That was the last time I depended on any commercial software to be the underlying platform that I had to depend on. Anything but open-source is just begging to have the rug pulled out.
Sole exception is Excel.

2023-09-21 21:09:08 GMT

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@npub1yzt…qh0x
Saw your new book touted in the Vancouver Sun. Congratulations!

2023-09-20 19:16:35 GMT

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@npub19fc…ay3c
It was actually Doc Savage's "Fortress of Solitude", where Doc, lacking superpowers save for Science, would to to invent the gadgets that filled his vest (not utility belt) with crime-fighting tools.
Street and Smith, Doc's publishers, were paid for any IP that DC wanted to skim off; they picked Superman's Fortress, and Batman's utility belt, which looks way tougher than a vest of pockets, if less useful.
The diff is Batcave is a home, Arctic fortress is summer retreat to think

2023-09-03 22:32:29 GMT

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@npub1typ…c8hh
Wasn't Hamlet counting himself the king of infinite space just before Milton's birth?
The " infinite" always suggested outer space to me...
https://youtube.com/shorts/qom1EfOgh1s?feature=shared

2023-09-01 19:25:52 GMT

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@npub1xtr…2zj8
I've been getting mileage for years, in Canada, with the comment that the TO Globe&Mail has a section called "Report on Busines" and another called "Investing", but no section called "Working for a Paycheque", or even, ah, "Labour".
I don't believe that American papers have those sections, either, not even with their incorrect spellings.

2023-09-01 18:31:32 GMT

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@npub1typ…c8hh
I've been memorizing them since I was 19, and could only take one book out for a month in the mountains. Though, the whole "Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" is a 135-line challenge unless I just refreshed it.
This is my story about what one poem did for me. Told its the best thing I ever wrote. (Re-reading now, I should mention it is from 2000, and is "pre-Google". "Altavista" was the first google.)
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/branderr/snow.html

2023-08-23 19:49:43 GMT

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@npub1lf4…kcjr
Justin, maybe the problem is just that "bird.makeup" is down and I'm not seeing it echoing X, but it's just *weird* that in 3 hours, no journalist has tried:
"In the Game of Thrones, Mr. Prigozhin, you win or you die".
Not even a "One does not simply fly into Moscow".
...what the heck is wrong, you guys off your feed?

2023-08-15 23:19:24 GMT

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@npub189n…satx
In fairness, they did this in places with almost no Black people. It's not like they needed an excuse; if they had one, so much the easier.
But lacking them, they still managed.

2023-07-03 00:13:23 GMT

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@npub1lf4…kcjr
Oh, dear. And I liked his work in Israel, liked "Goliath".
Being a "tankie" for awful people who at least promise stability is easier to criticize, of course, when your life isn't endless chaos. At some point, Robert Mugabe promising "either me or chaos" may start to look tolerable.
I'll just not-listen to that testimony, thanks, and I'll just avoid something called "Grayzone" should I stumble across.