George Budd @Gbudd@qoto.org

This is probably the best thing I ever posted on Twitter. The memory is pretty dear to me; I'm sharing it here so it still exists somewhere if that place collapses.

Just had a guy and his two kids in the shop, the oldest was 4 1/2, she told me so proudly ... She had a beautiful lavender cardigan on and matching socks ... I told her I loved that colour, we had a little chat about purple and all the purple things we have ... Then she asked me "are you a girl?" ... I looked at her dad and said can I let her know, he said yes

I crouched down to her level and said "that's a nice question you asked" ... and then said "I was born a boy, yuck, and for many reasons I always felt like a girl" ... Her eyes lit up, and I got a huge hugz and she whispered in my ear, "you're a girl"

I am more than likely the first trans person she has met, I made her feel comfortable and listened to ... one at a time ... Her dad thanked me for being kind.

Never dismiss a childs question, you might feel they are abrupt, they are not, they just want to know

First impression are important

Hugz & xXx

On Mastodon we aren't just chasing away the fringe people or the vulnerable. We're chasing away a whole slice of society that "offends" the uptight white tech bloke.
I look through replies and I can show you this: any woman, but particularly a woman with an opinion, gets a whole lot more replies telling her she's wrong.

And an unhealthy number of the guys who randomly read this post are nodding. Of course she would. Women are stupid.
Fuck off and splutter your indignation elsewhere.

They won't come right out and say, I'm glad that (horrible thing) happened to that Black person/woman/man!

They will not do this.

What they *will* do is say 'He was no angel!' and scour our pasts to find that one time in 1st grade when we put gum under the table.

What they will do is talk, /to each other/, in coded language. To let the other racists, whether they know they are or not, that they are not alone in their beliefs.

That their beliefs, their uncomfortable beliefs that Black people are inhuman and subordinate and ghetto and violent savages, *are* actually valid. Their beliefs that White people are totally innocent and unbiased and the real victims, actually, of reverse-racism.

Their beliefs that their hatred of Black people is Black people's own fault.

It's our fault they hate us.

It's our fault they want to do to us the things they want to do.

They will argue with you until they are blue in the face without ever addressing anything you say because they also need to believe you are wrong about everything. Even more than that, they need to believe they are more right than you about everything.

Helped a mate out with some yardwork today, went inside for lunch, hey how long have you had that grandfather clock, oh yeah that hasn't worked in ages...

Made bedroom eyes at that damn thing all afternoon, finally turned to my mate and said CAN I HAVE A GO ON YER CLOCK and my god, working on clocks is So So Nice

Here’s one of mine:

I always hide my home address with black electrical tape on my ID cards. Because most of the time when I show my ID there is no need to reveal my home address.

Once at the liquor store the cashier noticed it and questioned me about it. After I explained, she said she thought that was smart and that she was going to start doing the same.

Completely unexpectedly, I felt I had indirectly helped someone improve their safety and privacy with something so simple to do. It warmed my heart and made my day 🥰

#Caturday #Coronation

On the BART this morning (6.30 am), Benson and I got on a car with a guy having some kind of mental break on it. He was loud, talking and shouting to himself. He made weird sounds. He was disruptive.

And you know what?

No one killed him.

Benson and I gave him a wide berth; I kept an eye on him in case he tried to approach my dog.

But he was alive as he rode the train.

The mentally ill, the indigent, the broke down folks - they all deserve to survive a train ride.

Jesus christ, America.

#blacklivesmatter

Look at the Homestead Act 1862—it gave white people lots of land and economic power.

Look: white enslavers of Black people in the US were paid COMPENSATION after enslavement *nominally* ended in the US

Look at the GI Bill—gave white military men $/jobs

In other words…LOOK.


#BlackMastodon #Mastodon #history #usa #reconstruction

I have to let you all in on something.

At this point in my career I’m privileged to mentor a lot of young people, especially veterans and college students. And every so often they’re like really excited to meet me and say they would like to be like me. This totally blows my mind because they go to like MIT, Stanford, or Purdue ….and they’re usually in the second year of a PHD and they run their cybersecurity competition team and speak 9 languages or something….

I was a TERRIBLE youth. Yea, I eventually went to DePaul which is respectable and I have three okay undergrad degrees - merely because I had no choice but to enlist at 17 and the military kicked the crap out of me. I went to community college first the hard way around. I almost didn’t graduate from high school. I was a miserable, unhappy, uncool gnc goth kid who hacked computers and swore a lot. Those schools would have .blown their noses at my application and probably banned me from the campus for being a delinquent.

What I want to say is if you’re one of those rock star young people, I’m super impressed by you, and you’ve picked one hell of a role model. Keep it up, and don’t burn out.

If you’re that totally screwed up teenager, though, I might not get to see you at awards ceremonies and touted by the top professors at cons, but you can make it too. Even if nobody is ever in your corner.

#ELI5 Why is water see through?

I'd never thought about it like this. Wow.

Michael Penn's video on defining the natural logarithm as the integral of 1/x got me thinking about how this was slightly mysterious to me when I first encountered it in high school. Usually, the integral of x^(n-1) is x^n/n (plus a constant). But n = 0 is this weird exception. How could you get from an unpromising expression like "x^0/0" to the natural logarithm?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAbPwgre2Vs

I'm mad. Someone showed me this link:

https://www.mathartfun.com/

And now I'm broke. 😡

But, I have to do some research (playing with toys) to figure out this lesson idea I have that involves various weighted dice-- and they have a lot of really fun dies. Well, if I like this lesson idea I'll make the school buy me the next batch. Purchase orders are such a drag.

Rather than Republicans thanking me for my service on Veterans day I would rather they keep their hands off of the benefits I earned during that service. Veterans earned benefits, Your corporate donors didn't .
@housegop

I'm barely a suicide survivor. It's not that I never felt that way again, it's more that I understood that the darkness passes. Hope all reading this know it too. Let's all stay alive together.

My 16 y old kiddo has been battling severe depression and social anxiety for several years with my husband and I by her side all the way. Several days ago a young entrepreneur fair was announced and I suggested the possibility of participating presenting a product using some of her beads work. I was delighted to see she started producing right away. She hasn't been enthusiastic about anything for years. I'm writing this with tears coming down and wanted to share proudly with you.

"This is a public service announcement... with guitar!"

41 years ago today
"Know Your Rights" is a song by the Clash, released on this day in 1982 as the first single from the album Combat Rock.

The three are:

"The right not to be killed. Murder is a crime, unless it is done by a policeman, or an aristocrat".

"The right to food money, providing, of course, you don't mind a little investigation, humiliation, and if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation".

"The right to free speech (as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it

#punk #punks #punkrock #theclash #knowyourrights #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Today's XKCD is hard https://xkcd.com/2765/

It's one of his interactive ones where you control a lunar lander style craft - but you can't get far and end up deep in a gravity well

#xkcd #space #game

BREAKING!: Pica opts to settle in lawsuit over couch scratching incident and accusations of being a “Cute inquiline of human apartments” estimated damages: a record 2.6 million head kisses

In a statement to the press through her lawyers #pica said “That’s a lot of head kisses and we want to emphasize that this does not imply we are ‘baby’ however we felt we owed it to America to put this contentious case to rest.”