Not yet, but the steam hardware page has just been updated to say the emails will go out "within a day" so hopefully it won't be much of a wait

My office does exactly this, it has the thermostat set as cold as it can, and the sensor is in a cooler and shadier part of our floor (where management sit I believe). The rest of us sit in a glass-paned south-facing death trap that fluctuates between 25°C and 15°C multiple times a day on any sunny days. I work from home most of the time so thank fuck I don't have to experience it during this heatwave.

There seems to be a mix of briefings going out suggesting Burnham will make Miliband the chancellor, keep Reeves to appease the bond markets, or tack further right and appoint Mahmood. It will be the first real signal of which version of Burnham we're getting I guess.

"We and our 2,565 advertising partners respect your privacy" is always a good laugh before hitting decline on the ones uBlock doesn't catch automatically

You can use uBlacklist with a list of AI websites to filter out a ton of crap in search results. It's good for blocking out AI slop websites but probably won't be too effective for individual YouTube videos.

It's always such a red flag in news articles when they mention vague "experts" but don't explain who they are. The Guardian is so bad for it, even though they're the most tolerable of the mainstream British options. A lot of the age verification stuff was a vague "experts say this will help" but if you dig deeper the experts end up being someone who's went from working as an MP to being appointed to some directorship of a charity, and not someone with technical skills that could explain the cybersecurity issues, easy circumventing via VPN etc.

They did pay for the "shit your pants" spell, and that does happen shortly after death...so in a roundabout monkey's paw sort of way I guess that one worked

"Bullying works" is one of those really nasty, regressive takes that always shocks me when it appears in otherwise progressive spaces

It was fun growing up in the countryside and things like banshees and fairies being taken as a fact of life. I had a childhood friend that would come in to school saying she heard the banshees howling during the night and then woke up to find out a relative had died.

There was a news report that resurfaced a few years back, accessible here, about the Housing Executive in Newry trying to get a fairy tree chopped down to build houses, and even after trying to bribe the workers with £200 no one would touch it and they had to build around it instead. And another where some builders halted work in the Mournes once they realised they were inside a fairy ring, 3 of them went on to suffer accidents that they attributed to revenge by the fairies, the foreman apologised to the fairies, and even the reporter was too worried to step inside the ring. We were told the legends too, like Tír na nÓg or Finn McCool, but I think it's amazing how much of the superstition and old mythology has persisted through the years, even after the country becoming Christian and even now as it becomes more secular.

Disclaimer that this is from an Israeli tabloid but it's quite a new story so hasn't been picked up elsewhere. I thought the other day that some awkward compromise is what the EBU will likely pursue and here we are. I don't think it's good enough to simply perform under a neutral flag, they need to be banned from the competition.

This is a vote of every member EBU broadcaster in every country, regardless of whether they participate in Eurovision. I don't think the results will be easy to predict in advance as even the Vatican would in theory get a vote and countries with multiple broadcasters in the EBU get a vote for each.

I've been here! Clubbing isn't really my thing but it was a fun night. Haven't been since covid happened, and it's supposedly more of a tourist trap for straight people these days. I remember some Eurovision act got a lot of shit for "performing at the Kremlin" but it was actually this one in Belfast.

My favourite tidbit of queer history in Northern Ireland happened here after our former first minister's wife, Iris Robinson, was caught having an extra marital affair with someone 40 years her junior, a 19 year old that she bribed to try and hush it all up. She was disgustingly homophobic to the point that there's a whole section of her Wikipedia dedicated to her homophobic remarks. After the story broke of her affair, the DJ in the Kremlin stuck on the song Mrs Robinson by Simon and Garfunkel.

There is a bank in the UK that used employee bank balances to prove they didn't need a pay rise last year, which they were able to do because banking with them was a condition of employment

When I was in school they once checked everyone's phones to make sure we had installed Twitter and followed the school's accounts for each department. That was about a decade ago so it's probably TikTok or something by now.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn't heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people's minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don't get the nuances of why using it in that specific context -- on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix -- was bad, but that for most people it's still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn't know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn't even realise who the owners are.

The same man who pledged to abolish tuition fees, immediately abandoned that pledge to gain power, tripled them instead, and was then caught afterwards having already scrapped the plan to abolish them internally while still publicly campaigning on it?

However, leaked documents revealed that the Lib Dems had actually planned to abandon their tuition fee pledge before the election even took place.

A month before Clegg promised to get rid of the “dead weight of debt,” senior insiders said the party should “leave” the pledge before entering any negotiations to form a coalition government, saying: “Let us not cause ourselves more headaches.”

That article is an interesting read on how the big three keep lying through their teeth on tuition fees as well. And how the National Union of Students opposed tuition fees for over a decade until the now-health secretary Wes Streeting became their general secretary.

At Belfast Pride a few years ago I saw someone holding a sign saying "be gay, eat soup."

There was a YouTuber I used to respect and looked up to when I was a teenager and I hadn't checked his channel for years. Last year I looked at one of his videos after the US election and he was using the fact that it's a dangerous time for queer people as his segue into shilling for BetterHelp. Not a chance any YouTuber is unaware of the issues with it by now, anyone who shills it knows damn well how dangerous that platform is, and I don't think my opinion of someone has dropped as quickly as that. It's bad enough to shill that awful company but to exploit your young queer audience's fears post-election and people's mental health issues and act like they're doing them a favour? Absolutely fuck that.

For sure. I saw someone commenting yesterday that Russia invading Poland's airspace was "a distraction from the Epstein files." Not everything that happens in the world revolves around America's shitty probably paedophile president!

I don't remember much innuendo on the sites I played as a child (club penguin, bin weevils) although I've got vague memories that the censoring was so severe you could learn swear words based off seemingly innocent words being blocked out of the chat. The bigger issue at that age was how exploitative some of those sites were with microtransactions and I can only imagine it's gotten worse with the current MMO's for kids.

There was one I briefly played as a child where one of the starting missions was growing something in a garden but if you were a free playing customer you had to plant in the public garden and wait 24 hours, so I'd come back the next day and find someone had stolen the stuff I'd grown and couldn't progress. It was a weird way to learn about wealth inequality and the privileges wealthier kids got at the age of seven.

There was another site advertised on one of the kids TV channels here when I was younger that encouraged kids to sign up and mark off the chores they'd completed and each chore you completed netted you a prize like a trip to Disneyland. What the ad didn't tell us at that young age was that your parents would have to pay for the prizes through the sites affiliate link. I think I was at least mature enough by that stage to understand we'd been had and it wasn't my parents fault but it's crazy that nearly twenty years later the internet's somehow gotten worse for exploiting kids for micro transactions.