Views from the Reading Room

The beta Create Entries page, which is even older than I realised, is going to become the default Real Soon Now (see latest dw_news post), so this is me testing it!

There are a lot of things that make me go "our politics is shit, what else is new" but something about what happened in the Channel on Wednesday, the reactions to it, and a flood of emails I got on Thursday, made me finally put ... whatever the laptop equivalent of "pencil to paper" is.

To BoJo and Priti Patel:

No one would attempt to cross the Channel in a small boat if they had another choice. Almost all of those who do are coming here to seek asylum, as is their legal right. Numbers have increased in recent years because you've closed all the safe routes: resettlement (for the first time in many years, we have no commitment to resettlement under the UN system or otherwise), family reunion (which was excessively strict, but at least it was there), and the Dubs scheme for unaccompanied children (with the pretext that space has run out, when in fact many councils have offered spaces that you haven't responded to).

Almost every part of the Nationality and Borders Bill will only make this situation worse. The best way to actually oppose the criminal networks that are exploiting these people would be to reopen all those safe routes, and add either a humanitarian visa specifically for asylum seekers, or a way to claim asylum at an embassy abroad. Reducing the causes of people fleeing - e.g. stop arming despots, do something about climate change - would also help.

You say people should claim asylum at the first safe country they get to, but we have no land borders except with Ireland, and receive less than our share of asylum seekers in Europe. The people who are determined to come here specifically do so for one of a handful of reasons: family reunion; an existing connection with the UK such as having studied here; they know some English and no other European language. In the 20th century, the UK earned a reputation as a place of safety. We no longer deserve it, but desperate people fleeing across a hostile landscape don't know that. They certainly don't know the ins and outs of our asylum system, so any supposed deterrent effect of changes in the law is completely useless.

I'm sure you'll use this tragedy as an excuse to "crack down" on "migrants", piling more cruelty on top of what they've already been subjected to. I implore you to think again, and redesign your policies from the ground up, starting with international law and the principle that human beings are human beings.

The MP one is based mostly on a template from Refugee Action:

( cut for length )

If you're registered to vote in a currently-in-the-EU country, do! It's tomorrow! (or some time in the next few days, depending on country). For anybody other than that hypocrite Farage, or that thug who calls himself Tommy Robinson! The lower the turnout, the higher the risk that the extreme right get in. Remember it's proportional, so if your usual preference is usually out of the running, it's different for this one.

I'll be voting Green, which hits the trifecta: they're pro-Europe, explicitly anti-austerity (unlike any of the other pro-Europe parties in my region), and of course, best in class on climate change. My ward just elected the first Green councillor in my borough, and nationally they've got about 3 times as many councillors as they had, so they're on a roll.

I feel the phrase "use it or lose it" hanging in the air more than usual ... (Thanks rydra_wong for the reminder to post.)

My watch stopped and the battery's pretty new so it must be the watch (confirmed by the guy on the market stall with the batteries). Chimes are on holiday till 10th October and Timpsons quoted £56 for a repair, which is more than I've ever paid for a new one (the one I've been using for the past 10 years was a prize), plus it wouldn't be while-you-wait, so: time for a new watch. I've had problems with both plastic and leather straps in the past, and the one that just died has a metal strap, which is great but heavy and they're also expensive, but I found one with a "woven material" strap which is also super cheap, so I'm experimenting with that. (I suspect it's actually plastic, at least in part, but it looks nicer and doesn't feel nasty like your regular plastic strap.) I'll have to wear it for a while before I can tell whether my wrist finds it irritating.

Then I got back to the computer and loaded Firefox and it's changed! Apparently I'm on a beta, which I don't think I asked for, is that random? There's been several changes to the appearance, which I guess I'll get used to, and all my extensions have disappeared aaaaaaaaaa! The only one I was actually using (since Java stopped working months ago) was AdBlock Plus. There are several possible replacements; I picked AdBlock, in the hope that it would work the same and I wouldn't have too much of a learning curve. I like the green thumbs-up on whitelisted sites, i.e. here, but it remains to be seen how easy it is (having lost all my custom filters) to find the culprit if it starts blocking something I need.

PS: via the AdBlock help system, How to stop auto-playing videos (HTML5; I assume they've also got one about how to block Flash). Take that, YouTube!

I'm going away for the weekend, to an anime con. I think it's the first time I'll have been away overnight since 2010. We're starting super early tomorrow (driver's choice): I must remember to set the alarm! It's also the first time I have a laptop light enough to be tempted to take it with me - but I probably won't have time to use it and I don't want to be worrying about breakage.

So: AFK till some time on Monday, not that anyone expects to hear from me anyway.

but I'm still well behind on many things. I did catch up with my reading page.

I had to get a new laptop. I'm still learning Windows 10, and haven't customised everything yet. Should I uninstall AVG so I can activate Windows Defender?

Meanwhile, there are lots of new themes.

Meme via chagrined and alias_sqbr.

At 33:
I lived in: a mid-terrace house within walking distance of the town centre. I'd moved in at the beginning of the year, from rented accommodation, after getting a job that paid enough to get a mortgage. I barely knew any of the neighbours.

I drove: nothing. Nobody taught working-class girls to drive when I wor a lass! [when I was young in the North]

I was in a relationship with: no-one. I called myself celibate, because I didn't have the vocabulary I have now.

I feared: I don't remember. Probably big things like nuclear war and environmental disasters.

I worked at: a small software house a (longish, but straightforward) bus journey away, as a computer programmer, maintaining and developing financial management systems for the construction industry.

I wanted to be: the same, but better paid with a shorter commute and fewer annoying colleagues! Working part-time for an equivalent rate would also have been excellent, as I was definitely shorter of time than of cash.

At 58:
I live in: the same house. I've had some work done on it and I paid off the mortgage the first time I was made redundant. I still know very few of the neighbours; most of them are (comparatively) new.

I drive: still nothing. The jobcentre's "removing barriers to employment" doesn't stretch to paying for driving lessons.

I am in a relationship with: no-one. I now identify as aromantic (a word I'd never encountered until I met the internet) and asexual (which, back in the day, I only knew as the term for critters that reproduce by splitting).

I fear: Nothing? I worry about things - on a global level, mostly climate change; on a personal level, mostly cashflow.

I work at: housework (not as much as I should) and looking for work (same?). I've been unemployed since I was made redundant the second time, and have pretty much given up on ever getting another job. The most important thing I'm doing, actually ... mainly consists of waiting, because my financial advisor apparently doesn't want to issue progress reports until he's done All Of The Research, and is waiting in his turn for the company currently sitting on my money to respond to enquiries. (That's "my money that I earned in an earlier decade". It's grown under their management OK, but if they want to be my actual pension provider they need better customer service.) Recent changes in the rules mean that I should be able to derive an income from it that'll last till I can afford to retire properly, while being adequate in a way that my current benefits aren't.

I want to be: retired! A bit of "the change I want to see in the world" wouldn't go amiss too, but I can't see much beyond that horizon.

How many issues have the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP, the SNP and Plaid Cymru all in agreement?

If you're in the UK, pretty much whoever you voted for, you've probably noticed that our voting system is a big mess. The Electoral Reform Society and Unlock Democracy are running a joint campaign to do something about it, with a petition which is to be handed in on May 18th: Make Seats Match Votes.

... well, the best at-a-glance commentary on the dickery in question that I've noticed, anyhow.

This might be a strange topic for my first post in months, and I've got a horrible cold and had a very bad night and thought posting was a few levels of engagement above what I'm currently capable of; but I saw this and it got my brain in gear. Posted on someone's tumblr that I follow by RSS (not being on Tumblr), I've traced it to its source, which is Monday's chainsawsuit comic.

I don't know whether it's embeddable; there's a feed here, chainsawsuit_feed (which has a lot of other things on it as well as the comics; also, sometimes NSFW). Transcript by me:
1) Two people, the one with a self-satisfied grin says "well i think that all lives matter".
2) The person with the self-satisfied grin is holding a fire hose. "we should care exactly equally at all times about everything".
3) There are two originally-identical houses, one of which is on fire in a major way. The person with the fire hose, saying "all houses matter", is hosing down the house that isn't on fire.

Unusually for the internet, Kris Straub's commentariat mostly seem to get it, though as you go further down that becomes less so ...

(Since I'm not on Twitter, I wouldn't know what they were talking about if I didn't follow This Week In Blackness. Panel 0 would be the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.)

Hello Dreamwidth, it has been ... mumble ... weeks since my last post.

This one is being written on my new (well, reconditioned) laptop, which I'm still trying to get to work in a usable manner. At the moment, if it's connected to the router and the charger, the router loses its internet connection. It's taken me most of a week to work out that those are the failure conditions, and I still don't know why. It wouldn't be so bad if the battery life was the 3 hours it's supposed to be instead of more like 1½. At some point I'll turn on the router's wifi and see whether connecting that way makes any difference; I know how to turn it on (in theory), but not what all the other parameters on that page mean. Any wifi experts out there?

Something I can recommend: DuckDuckGo. I've seen people recommend it on account of privacy, but the thing that persuaded me to give it a go was this:

Our intention is to not auto-correct searches. That is, we intend to completely respect the query you type in, and (in some cases) display a 'Did you mean?' link at the top when relevant.

In other words, I can search for "obscure thing that the poster expected readers to recognise" without wading through pages of "much commoner search term that happens to start with the same letters". Hurrah!