"skimp on engineering" doesn't just mean not hiring enough developer skill to keep up with bugs & vulnerabilities.

it also means caring about & investing in developer expertise. companies basically don't do that, because they'd rather have their devs build some minimal viable-if-you-squint product and then *lay them off* and keep collecting rent on it.

devs aren't stupid. if their employer thinks they'd expendable, why shouldn't they treat their work as expendable?

I wrote "begging people to care" but I don't think we're really even talking about individual people here — there's a ton of folks who *wish* they could care about more than keeping their lights on, but are too busy trying to survive in an actively hostile world. I get it. Do what you gotta do to conserve your ability to take action to defend yourself & yours.

but the corporations who are happy to skimp on engineering & pass the costs onto the rest of us, cuz they keep getting paid? fuck them.

I changed the first "burn down" to "catch fire" b/c I think it might actually be the architectural engineers' job to ensure that even if the building does catch fire it probably won't burn down?

there's a thing that's been eating at me, software engineering wise

(and I do mean engineering here, even though I usually describe myself as a software developer)

where, like

the measure of a good electrician isn't that your lights turn on. the measure of a good electrician is that your house doesn't catch fire.

computer experts are begging people to care about more than keeping the lights on & meanwhile houses keep burning down. it's not elitist to wish your city caught fire less often.

is it okay to name a space opera entity/planet/people Vulkan, after the Greek god, or is that reserved for Star Trek?

alternative is Hephaestus, which is better in some ways & worse in other ways

(Vulkan is compact & punchier, but a more dexompressed & laid-back approach fits better here maybe? being intentional, if not necessarily consistent, about greek vs. roman names for things matters more probably. We do want more city-state and less empire…)

26-page comic about being plural (cw: bullying, [verbally] abusive parents, wholesome bf) https://bsky.app/profile/yumehop.bsky.social/post/3mrd2parsis2i for a Kondansha manga contest (reads right-to-left)

I would do 3x 8h co-sleeping shifts / day (and totally fuck up my back/spine/next until I figure out what the deal with side-sleeping and pillow height is)

is there a way to be affectionate and cuddly as, like, a full-time job

in conclusion I love you, "the trans agenda is for kids to die of old age" means you too, & if you think it'd be helpful for your followers you can boost parts of the thread if you want

even if all you can do is be alive — that matters, because people can look at you being alive and see that it's _possible_, and that _matters_. I've met too many who couldn't imagine making it to 25, or 30, or 40, much less old age.

(and that's all the weeds and the shrubs thought they were doing, too.)

you don't need to "thrive". no one is mad at you for not being a mighty oak.

"but all I do is complain about dumb shit on social media"

you know what that's better than? queer silence & ash.

I'm thinking of stuff like getting out of school and into the workforce & looking around, and there's some people your age and more people 10-20 years older and a couple of people who've been doing databases or cars or whatever the fuck since the 80s and can tell you about it. what if a chunk of them had been visibly queer & you could have talked to them about it? what would that have meant for you?

the weeds turning ash into shit & the shrubs turning shit into shade don't have a grand plan for reforestation, they're just trying their best to _live_. if you asked them what they were doing they'd say "struggling".

the side effect of them struggling and living and taking up space is that the world around them gets a little more livable & that _matters_.

"elder" doesn't mean magic, doesn't mean leader, doesn't mean activist. it just means old. it just means not dead and still around.

if you're queer and about my age (tipping into the back half of 30s) you're in this weird place where you're objectively not old, and the idea of being some kind of "elder" is ridiculous… but you probably don't have many queer people older than you in your community, either.

which puts you on your local leaderboard for "queer elder" & all you gotta do is _not die_.

cuz we didn't really have queer elders around, coming up, and that sucked, but that doesn't have to be true for the next batch.

thinking about generational recovery, like forests after a wildfire or volcanic eruption.

it's not linear. one year out it's not "the same plants as a mature forest, but they're only one year old now."

recovery happens in waves and the first wave is _weeds_. little scrappy things whose only redeeming quality is that they're alive and they showed up. they eat ash and turn it to shit. then I think you get little shrubby things that grow in shit and cast some shade for the generation after them?

where would one find you in a store?

where would one find you in a store?

I think the ideal future for me is living in intentional community, having some responsibilities within it, & working part-time for as part of that community for something connected to that community, either to do with keeping it running or an outward-facing mission (education, public service)

maybe normally when you "die" the loop just resets, and you only get the dead zone if you've (in that loop) converted to a religion with an afterlife or s/t

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup style "pick up to 1 god" could be fun, actually

imagining Fallen London style "death zone" with things you can do while dead (one of which is "respawn & reset the loop")

if a core concept is extending your loop time to get further before everything resets, then the death zone would be like… you can stay here indefinitely, but is that a good use of your time? maybe if you *really* need to practice chess for some reason

I wonder if something like actions with a % chance of just dying & ending the loop would be interesting or just suck. like if you plan a route through the mountains & don't have cold weather gear there's an X% chance you don't make it. it'd suck playing a regular rpg like that & having to go back to your save point over and over, but that's the point of loops, right? if you're doing 100 loops then a 70% death rate is just a cost multiplier.