Spyke

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What were you surprised to learn wasn't actually normal?

When I was much younger: that normal people could see much further than me.

One of my oldest memories is going into a McDonald's for the first time with glasses; I stopped and read the entire menu, because I couldn't believe normal people could read it as soon as you walked in. I always had to get up to the counter to make it out.

I got a lot better in school after that!

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The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media

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I think the USA's National Weather Service Twitter presence is a good example.

If you look deep enough you'll see caveats like "supplemental service provided by NWS" and "Twitter feeds and tweets do not always reflect the most current information", but the truth is that a lot of people (and news organizations) depend on Twitter as their main interface to the NWS, and rarely if ever go to their website.

That obviously creates a tension, which bubbles up in scares like this:

Before last weekend’s storm, the National Weather Service’s Baltimore-Washington office sent this tweet saying that because of a new Twitter policy, automated tweets that show advisories, watches, and warnings might not load.

Contrast that to a world where NOAA (the federal administration which runs NWS) has their own instance: they get the benefit of being able to disseminate updates in a consumer friendly 'social media' style and they retain full control of platform and can be sure the service won't be held hostage, or go down in the middle of a storm.

Finally: if you're reading this from the USA, consider contact NOAA/NWS to let them know you'd like a fediverse presence, I did!

til

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My life so far:

  1. Be born in UK, be able to work / live anywhere in EU
  2. Emigrate to USA to try that for a bit (can always move back to anywhere in EU if I don't like it!)
  3. Brexit
  4. Trump

And yes, I do miss the trains.

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What's a myth/misconception you heard about the world that's went away as you got older?

A bit meta: That people who were wrong or mistaken about something just needed it explaining more clearly, and then they would stop saying things which are wrong or mistaken.

I wasted far too many years of my life trying to convince father-in-law of so many things, only to realize there is nothing that can be said to disabuse him. The problem wasn't the lack of facts or clarity of explanation, it's that he is fundamentally incapable of acquiring new information if it's inconsistent with his prior understanding or belief.

Moreover I realized that where I am ashamed of being inaccurate or uneducated about something (and so am keen to correct myself), for him it's always the case that I must be wrong or mistaken, because he can never be wrong or mistaken.

news

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The meals will (I assume) be allocated on inmate numbers, so the animal will be reared, killed, transported, then thrown in the trash because someone doesn't want to eat it.

More generally this is the weird 'opt out' culture of food, where vegan is considered the exceptional position, which is kinda stupid, in my opinion.

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Brundle knows sarcasm

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Tweet says

🤣🤣 Absolute BRUTALITY from Martin Brundle at #SilverstoneGP

Attached video is Martin Brundle trying to ask question, being denied, then turning away to camera and saying (with deep sarcasm)

oh well, I'm sure it would have been extremely interesting

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What are the best/highest quality Video Games ever made?

For me it's Half Life 2 because I have such a specific and vivid memory of playing it the first time in my rainy London flat in 2004.

It was this exact moment when I had the experience, for the first time in my life, that:

I'm in this world, I am a part of the game.

Funny OP calls out Half Life: Alyx as one of the best VR games, when VR is all about being 'immersive'.

But for me that moment 16 years earlier will always be the moment I first experienced being 'immersed' in a video game.