@technomancy This is almost exactly a joke from Strange Brew.

@shiro This has been a problem for a long time. In the early days of Twitter, not many people had smartphones, so they built a SMS gateway. Text their shortcode and it posts to your account, someone you follows and it texts you the message.

Then numbers got recycled and people with new phones started getting preposterous nonsense.

Looks like it's died down a lot, but search there for "stop texting this number" and you'll still find confused and upset people.

@shiro Also, my last company moved into a brand new building. The elevators got set up with emergency phones that were linked to normal phone numbers. And since they're for emergencies, they automatically answer any call and pipe the audio through the built-in speakers & mic.

So sometimes when riding it, you'd hear a phone ring and then a confused mystery voice would ask for whoever had that number before.

@cstanhope Wow, that's really something.

I assume you did not accept.

lol. lmao

I got an email reply today to set up a phone screen for a job I applied to four months ago.

They seem to be well organized and right on top of things, why wouldn't I want to work there?

@technomancy It's so funny that Tetris in vim is cursed, and in Emacs, it's just another part of the install.

So I've been watching a bunch of old TV that I saw in syndication as a kid. And this episode of My Favorite Martian, holy shit.

A kid's rabbit eats a "martian vitamin" that got dropped onto the floor and grows to enormous size.

So far, pretty normal for this show. Every episode is our intrepid but bumbling heros ineffectually trying to cover up whatever martian woo-woo happened.

BUT

but

in this case, the giant rabbit is a person in a horrifying costume, and the only sound it produces are series of distressed groanings

It's absolute fucking nightmare fuel

These things are normally, like, Martin is half invisible, or stuff keeps flying around the apartment, or they have to play a shell game to move the spaceship around, or brains get swapped, or something like that.

just look at this shit

"Let's put a giant rabbit in this episode. It'll have articulated nose and ears so we can explore a whole world of expressions. Also, it'll move on its hind legs, completely unlike a rabbit, have a rictus grin and emit terrifying, nightmarish ululations. Children love this show."

@aphyr Yeaaaaah. I mean, when I was that age, it was all local BBSs and there wasn't TOO too much awful that was going to happen.

Today's internet is radioactive. Facebook and Google trying to eat all your personal info, YouTube serving radical disinformation, brigades SWATting people.

She's gotta get some level of comfort, but it's a real struggle to insulate from the awful parts.

After two years of living in mostly isolation, my older daughter is having a hard time with losing her social group. She's 15, queer, and artistic.

We'd like to get her connected with some new folks, but I'm reluctant to throw her into the meat grinder of mainstream social media.

Is there a Mastodon instance she'd fit in on?