The Casual Critic
thecasualcritic@writing.exchange
<p>Ecosocialist from Scotland. I write blogs about things I read, watch or play, because writing is fun. </p><p>My cat is much cooler than me and occasionally I will post a picture.</p>
Posts
-
Post #2035637
We&#39;re getting loads of pamphlets now for the Scottish elections, and it&#39;s dispiriting how banal they all are. Everyone wants to improve the NHS. Everyone wants to address the cost of living crisis. Everyone hates the other parties. There&#39;s no real ideological dividing lines, so if you&#39;re not &quot;into politics&quot;, you can be forgiven for not knowing how to vote. I wonder how much this is a consequence of a society unmoored from ideological anchors...
-
Post #2035636
The inevitable has happened and we&#39;ve now been told to &quot;make #ai happen&quot; at work, without any clear direction about why, how, or what it&#39;s supposed to achieve. Maybe I&#39;ll task it with selling paperclips.
-
Post #2035635
Great time today having to work out why a BIOS update pushed by our laptop&#39;s manufacturer breaks windows secure boot, effectively bricking the machine. 😖 #tech
-
Post #2035634
Billions spent on #AI, but can Word keep a caption attached to an image or even keep pictures on the page where you want them? No. Should&#39;ve stuck with LaTeX.
-
Post #2035633
And we&#39;re off on our posh #interrail. First stop, London!
-
Post #1679425
I remain baffled by the insistence of recipe books to underestimate how long it takes to cook something, usually by a factor of two. #cooking
-
Post #1679422
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116438195217556334 This is some hard needed optimism, but I worry that for the #UK some of it is misplaced. The &#39;drill baby drill&#39; brigade is getting louder, which is due in part to the enormous &#39;spark gap&#39;, ie the difference in cost between gas and electricity. With electricity still four times the price of gas due to quirks of the UK energy markets, even highly efficient heat pumps are barely competitive with boilers.
-
Post #1679420
RE: https://mastodon.social/@iFixit/116444347963000664 And this is why I&#39;m still happy with my #fairphone
-
Post #1679418
#Labour going for ye olde misleading graph tactics in the Scottish elections. Yes. Fine. You&#39;d be the largest party if nothing had changed since the 2024 general election. Shame for you that time is a thing though. #scotpol #ukpol
-
Post #839948
My profile tells me it&#39;s just over a year since I joined Mastodon, so a bit late for an #introduction but I hear it is a good way to get started on here. As per my bio, I&#39;m an #ecosocialist from #scotland . I&#39;m principally on here because I write #blogs where I #review things I read, watch or play. Other than that, my key interests are #culture, #politics, #cats, #taichi, #SF, #books, #systems, #cybernetics, #taoism, #environment and #degrowth. Recommendations for fo...
-
Post #533839
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116125085939566418 This excellent blog by @pluralistic chimes with my observation that, at least in the UK, public provision always feels like it&#39;s purposefully unpleasant and ugly, to hammer home that government is bad, and so are you for relying on it. It also convinced me to move &quot;The Big Con&quot; by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington to the top of my to read pile.
-
Post #145855
@pluralistic@mamot.fr 's blog on why social media barons hate sociality reminded me of Stafford Beer's introduction to variety. He starts with a simple system. Then introduces a cat. The cat, doing what cats do, makes the system massively more complex. Beer uses this to explain that an effective system needs as much variety as its environment, or cleverly attune to it. Or you change the environment and shoot the cat. That's what techbros do when we don't conform to their dat...