Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled.

> Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use?

There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text.

> Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...?

None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold.

> But are you / they in the cloud?

No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage.

> Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN.

*Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*

Sheena Liam, contemporary embroidery artist of Malaysian Chinese descent #womensart

Pencil drawing of Malyck (from Guild Wars 2) from earlier this year, shortly after I started using physical notebooks again.

It felt so good using pencil after so long! Graphite is how I first learned how to draw. I still love that feeling of pencil against paper.

#GuildWars2 #GW2 #PencilDrawing #Art #MastoArt #Drawing

In my Portable Puzzle Collection, it was recently (a few weeks ago) the 20th birthday of the game "Mines": a reimplementation of Minesweeper which ensures every grid can be solved by reasoning rather than guesswork. The first click in a completely blank grid is guaranteed to be safe, and to open an area of more than one clue, and after that, you can always identify a safe square to open next by thinking about the currently visible clues.

This makes it possible to generate grids with a much higher density of mines than standard randomised Minesweeper, such as the example shown here with 99 mines in only a 16×16 grid. I actually didn't predict that this would be possible when I wrote the grid generator originally: I only expected to be able to play on settings like the standard Windows ones, without those nasty last-minute frustrations. The ability to turn up the density by more than a factor of 2 was a very pleasant surprise – my algorithm was far more effective than I had anticipated!

The odd thing about Mines is: in the past 20 years, this one game has received far more bug reports about insoluble game instances than any other puzzle in my collection. Very likely more than all the other games *put together*.

But not one of those reports has turned out to be a real bug in the grid generation. In cases where they sent a save file or a game ID, I generally played through the game myself to make sure; if they only sent a screenshot, I've always at least pointed out something I could see in the picture. *Everybody* who sent this kind of report turned out to have missed something.

Happy 20th birthday, Mines!

one adult: "I'd like one custom pornography, please, and consent to compensation for your efforts."

an adult artist: "I consent to this exchange. That'll be a non-zero amount of money please."

payment processors, breaching the fucking wall with explosives: "I don't consent, perverts! Hands in the air! Do it! Do it now!"

@keeya I think the one that does like doors and windows refuses to listen to robots.txt, so I unfortunately firewall blocked the IP :drgn_3c:

@odoben it's all bs! :D

@odoben Always gotta have enough bs

@GrueneBundestag Grüne? Ich sehe ganz viele andere Farben wohl, und grün fast gar nicht :D j/k

@GrueneBundestag Die Linke hat übrigens auch mitgemacht.

https://www.n-tv.de/der_tag/Aufsehenerregende-Aktion-Gruene-und-Linke-erscheinen-als-Regenbogen-im-Parlament-article25861124.html

Bunt, vielfältig, offen! 🌈 Wir kämpfen im Bundestag für queere Sichtbarkeit und gegen queerfeindliche Hasskriminalität. Die rechtliche Diskriminierung von LSBTIQ muss beendet werden!
Dazu haben wir heute einen Antrag zum Schutz queerer Personen eingebracht.

Fairly often on here I see people sharing stories about #PublicLibraries being like a secret cheat code around late-capitalist extraction and the collapse of communitarian values we see every day in a world built on individualism, consumption and individualistic consumption. Here’s another one:

After arranging a drag queen story hour at her very rural library, out of the abundant depth of her caring and curiosity and without a great deal of political context, and not quite knowing what she had gotten into when chuds with sidearms and bibles showed up to block the door with their pickups, and being very appreciative when, truly spontaneously as we’d never organized together before, a much larger number of anarcho inflected antifascists of all flavors appeared from across the region to help keep the day safe (the queens were extremely sparkly and the kids were extremely giggly), the librarian was so appreciative and got so curious (again, as librarians do) that she now wants to put together a series of intro workshops around topics like de-escalation, mutual aid, protest safety, community defense and consensus-based autonomous organizing.

So, tl;dr.. some christofascists showed up to be mean and dumb about queer and trans people and scare little kids and now the targeted library is starting to look a little like an anarchist infoshop 🖤😂🖤

#EverydayAntifascism #EverydayAnarchism #CommunityDefense #HugADragQueen #HugALibrarian #FuckFascists

@balinares "stand back, I know regexes" xkcd comic vibes :D

#BudapestPride
Ist euch allen klar, wie krass und politisch explosiv die Lage im Bezug auf die #BudapestPride diesen Samstag (28.6.) ist? Die Regierung von #Orban hat im Februar ein Gesetz verabschiedet, um sie zu verbieten. Die #Polizei hat die #Pride letzten Donnerstag verboten. Der #Bürgermeister von #Budapest und die Stadt haben sie daraufhin zu einer städtischen Veranstaltung erklärt und sind der Meinung, dass sie dementsprechend ohne Genehmigung durch die Polizei stattfinden kann. Die Polizei hat eine andere #Rechtsauffassung.
70 #Europaabgeordnete, die Bürgermeister von Amsterdam und Brüssel, eine spanische Ministerin und viele weitere Politiker*innen reisen an. 30 Staaten haben das #Verbot scharf kritisiert. #AmnestyInternational auch.
Der 28. ist sowohl der exakte #Jahrestag der #Stonewall #Riots als auch der exakte Jahrestag der Auslieferung von #Maja !
An #Symbolkraft ist das ganze somit fast nicht zu überbieten.
Bitte boosten!
#pridemonth #freeMaja #Ungarn #Menschrnrechte #queer #lgbtqia

@ishikisatoru がんばれ～

@balinares Congrats!

[comm] Stealthy Sunbird 🗡

Lines+Flats commission for Fefquest on FA! :>

#arakkoa #avians #WorldOfWarcraft #Warcraft #WoW #Furry #FurryArt #FurryArtist #MastoArt #Commission #ArtCommission