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Piers Cawley

@pdcawley.bsky.social

990 followers 490 following 750 posts

Folk singer, carer, recovering programmer. (they/him)

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Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 21

New post on my Blog! Wonders will never cease.

Just don't ask what the ratio of emacs-lisp changes to actual new content on the blog is.

bofh.org.uk/book/adrian-...

Service Model, by Adrian Tchaikovsky // Just a Summary

A robot valet kills its master for no apparent reason, then heads off on a _Pilgrim's Progress_ to understand his malfunction.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 21

FUCKING APPLE!

IF YOU SET THE PATH IN /etc/zshenv THEN DON'T FUCKING DO IT AGAIN in /etc/zprofile AND OVERWRITE ANYTHING IN ~/.zshenv YOU ABSOLUTE FUCKING MELTS.

They had fucking unfucked this once, but no, they've decided to refuck it all over afucking-gain. Fuckers.

Reposted by Piers Cawley

Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · Aug 19

All the protected powerful men

aswinn
It is truly bizarre to me
-- not just misogynistic but like bizarrely
deranged -- to live in a world where you believe that hundreds of women are lying about one man who must be telling the truth.
MY VOICE MY CHOICE

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 19

Too fucking right!

Scarred For Life @scarredforlife.bsky.social · Aug 19

I beg to differ

Reposted by Piers Cawley

Scarred For Life @scarredforlife.bsky.social · Aug 19

I beg to differ

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 18

I love the looks to camera!

And the whole thing, but they sell it somehow.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 16

Butter! Duh!

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 14

alt.callahans?

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 14

Every year as my birthday approaches, I need to update bofh.org.uk/wishlist/. Updating it for this year took about an hour.

Updating the site to work with the latest Hugo has taken two and a half days so far, and the Github Actions based deployment system is still broken, so I'm deploying by hand.

Wishlist // Just a Summary

Things Piers would quite like as birthday or Christmas presents

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 14

Given the iOS Safari web inspector (which despite this moan is *marvellous*) a hard stare.

"No. Those two images, which you claim are 256px wide, are not the same fucking size! Get a hold of yourself!"

This is not helping me track down what I screwed up in my stylesheets to fuck up the sizes.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 14

Yay for James!

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 14

Grandad brag: Younger [step] grandson got a bunch of A*s and into his first choice uni. Elder one has a play on at the Edinburgh Fringe.

www.edfringe.com/tickets/what...

www.edfringe.com

Reposted by Piers Cawley

LRB Bookshop @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk · Aug 13

it's time for the most fiendish literary quiz of the year. "Who said it - John Wycliffe or Wyclef Jean"

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 12

I mean… extremely sweary is absolutely on brand for DHH.

But yeah, it's very hard to accurately describe him without copious profanity.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 11

Absolutely. The discredited study implies we would all become concentration camp guards.

The fact that Alois Baletshofer was a guard at Auschwitz simply demonstrates that Alois Baletshofer was a concentration camp guard and implies nothing about the rest of us.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 11

Zimbardo had to force his “guards” to follow his script. What it shows is that the assholes were always assholes, but that most people aren’t assholes. The fash want you to give up hope because the Prison Experiment’s conclusion is inevitable, but in reality, it’s bollocks.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Aug 11

Except that the Stanford Prison Experiment has been discredited.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 21

Agreed. But Nation was Terry's best work.

Reposted by Piers Cawley

Dr Kat Day (she/her) @chronicleflask.katday.com · Jul 19

This isn’t the female gaze. This is the male gaze. It’s men who are obsessed with the physicality of other men. Women, in the main, would much rather see a man who looks like he’d make himself a stack of buttered toast and let you steal a slice

Screenshot:

No room for wokeness!
@Wokenessisevil
Notice how no one, not a single soul, has ever complained about the female gaze in entertainment.

[photos show Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) and Alan Ritchson (Reacher) with ripped muscles]

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 20

I'm *wincing* at the spacing—em dashes should be set without spaces. Personally I prefer to use en dashes with spaces – like this – but to each their own.

But never surround an em dash with spaces. Please. I'm begging here.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 20

did they get buggered up by a writers' strike, or was it an unforced misstep? It started out so delightfully.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 19

Watching #TOTP the morning after.

Downsides: You've all already done the best shitposts.
Upsides: Fast forwarding through so much shit from the late nineties.

How on earth did Wes get into the charts? I'm not complaining at all, just surprised.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 19

Ooh… floor to ceiling! Excellent choice.

We've had fitted bookshelves in every house we've owned and they're just essential if you ask me.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 10

Something of a non sequitur, I know, but I just wanted to send you some love for your writing.

Piers Cawley @pdcawley.bsky.social · Jul 10

A thing I love about the Toby books is how long it took her to realise that <love interest> was utterly smitten with her and the stuff she'd taken as sarcastic was in fact deeply felt and completely earnest. The reversal of clichéd gender roles there is just one more reason I love those books.