Dammit, EU…!
Every day, multiple times a day, the typical resident of the EU bumps into an EU reg, and it is never — IT IS NEVER — a good thing.
The General Data Protection Regulation came into force almost a year ago. This is the one where the mediocrities in Brussels thought to themselves, “wouldn’t it be nifty if we protected the privacy of our citizens?”
The result was a shit-ton of pointless new regulations. Every organization in the EU (including little ones like the historic society I work for) had to elect an Information Officer (that’s me!), pay a registration fee to the government (tax had to come into this somehow, yes?) and develop dozens of make-work policies and procedures to deal with the fact our members voluntarily gave us their mailing addresses when they signed on.
Naturally, this does nothing to curb serious information breaches by the usual suspects — banks, government agencies, social media and the like — but eats up the scarce resources of little orgs with pointless hamster-wheel exercises.
You can bet Brexiteers are people who have to deal with this shit, and Remainers have people who do it for them.
Oh, and then there’s this ^^^. About once a day, surfing the web, I run across a website from outside the EU that thought to itself, “fuck it — I can’t be bothered to comply with some overseas regulation I don’t understand. I’ll just block the whole continent!” Probably forever.
Thanks, faceless bureaucrats!
January 9, 2019 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 6
History’s slowest invasion force
In the last six weeks, hundreds of people — mostly men, mostly describing themselves as Iranian or Iraqi — have crossed the Channel in dinghies to land on their own or be picked up by our Coastguard. Which, of course, they do. And bring them here. Which, of course, is why they keep doing it.
Mostly next door in Kent, (that’s where Dover is), though a few washed up closer to home. We carefully lock doors these days.
Where are they getting the dinghies from? Why now? Why Iranians/Iraqis? Nobody knows. But at least they’re allowing us a lively discussion (see above).
Around 60 migrants are believed to have come ashore between December 23 and December 30 but reports from charities and refugees in Calais suggest the figures could be higher.
The Mail on Sunday reports that 66 migrants made it to Britain on Christmas Day alone.
Last month Home Secretary Sajid Javid declared a “major incident” over the number of migrants trying to cross the Channel to reach the UK.
Of the 504 migrants seeking to cross the English Channel in 2018, 276 managed to get to British waters and coasts, and 228 were intercepted by the French authorities.
If you haven’t seen anything on your news, not to worry — we haven’t much either. Except local sources.
They have to explain where all those abandoned dinghies on the beach are from after all.
January 7, 2019 — 8:24 pm
Comments: 9
Stupid commies never learn
Shot:
E-Bike Anti-Dumping and Anti-subsidy Measures Re-Shore Thousands of Jobs
“Re-shoring of e-bike (Electric Power Assisted Cycles, EPAC) production will immediately create up to 4,600 new jobs, if definitive anti-dumping and anti-subsidy measures are imposed on imports of EPACs from China,” according to the European Bicycle Manufacturers Association.
[…]
Since the imposition of the provisional dumping duties in July 2018, e-bike exports from China to the EU have dropped significantly. According to EBMA “There have been only approximately 10-15,000 units per month in August through October, while the Chinese e-bike exports peaked to an average of 100,000 units per month from January to May.”
Chaser:
It is with great regret, that FreeGo Electric Bikes Limited has ceased trading and will soon be going into liquidation
For any enquiries, please contact the administrator below
To recap, the EU noticed the Chinese were selling an awful lot of bikes in Europe. So, they put a stop to that. Result: almost five thousand new jobs magically transferred to the EU? Lol no. Local bike manufacturers and retailers forced out of business because who the hell did you think was selling those bikes?
FreeGo, which specialized in inexpensive electric bikes, used to make their stuff in Germany, until it because prohibitively expensive. Moving to Chinese factories was the only way they could stay afloat in the low-end market. And now they’re gone.
Yeah, my bike is a FreeGo. Stupid commies. I am pissed.
Have a good weekend, Capitalists!
January 4, 2019 — 7:42 pm
Comments: 17
Somebody ported Nethack to Steam!
I’ve posted about Nethack before. It’s one of the first dungeon slash-em-up games. It was the very first computer game I ever played and it ate a whole year of my life. Thirty four years later, it’s still the most fun game I’ve ever played.
Because even the very first PCs were capable of storing incredibly large and complex relationships between variables, which is “all” Nethack is.
Take the humble cockatrice. If you touch a dead cockatrice, you turn to stone. Fine, once you learn that, you never touch another dead cockatrice. You probably know better than to eat a tinned food ration that smells of cockatrice. Ah, but what if you fall into a pit on top of a cockatrice? Stone. What if you’ve been temporarily blinded and you’re feeling your way across the floor and suddenly, dead cockatrice? Stone.
But wait. But what if you have a pair of gloves? Can you run around poking monsters with a dead cockatrice and turn them into stone? Yes. Yes, you can. Just don’t trip and fall on it.
Under the hood, the formulae that create the dungeon and the monsters therein are incredibly complex. I could never work out some relationships from behavior alone. It wasn’t until I peeped at the source code that I began to understand how complicated a thing it really is.
Anyway, Steam reviewers are crying foul. Nethack is a giant cooperative labor of love and you’re not supposed to charge for it. There are plenty of places still to play it for free.
But I paid less than £4 for this version and, as far as I’m concerned, I’m not paying for Nethack. I’m paying for the dev’s effort putting it on Steam. It includes some light music and effects and a decent manual. And Steam achievements, if you care.
I paid for my very first version, too. It was technically to cover the cost of the floppy.
See? I play semantic games, too.
January 3, 2019 — 9:30 pm
Comments: 6
Boo…!
Eh. I tried to combine a picture of a weasel with a picture of a sulky toddler. It didn’t work out so good.
Reminds me of when I were just a lass and I had a new job as an illustrator for an engineering company. A boiler engineer asked me to draw a cartoon of a boiler with a stomach ache. I did my best.
His reaction was, “no, no…that’s a boiler with a headache.”
The worst part was, I knew exactly what he meant and he was right.
So anyway. First day back to work tomorrow. There’s nothing too onerous waiting for me, it’s just the idea of the thing.
I’m going to go take a long, hot soak in my expensive Christmas bath goo and ponder, for the umpty-umpth time, why I was not born to wealth.
January 2, 2019 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 7
Happy New Year!
An homage to the great J.C. Leyendecker. Homage. That’s what we call out-and-out art theft, right?
You probably know Leyendecker better as the “Arrow Shirt Man” illustrator. But before Norman Rockwell, Leyendecker was THE Saturday Evening Post cover man. He was brilliant. Much beloved of painters for his technique painting hair (among other things).
Of course, me being me, I screwed up. I intended to find the Leyendecker cover from New Years a hundred years ago, but this is actually the 1909 one. Because math. Because, consarnit, I’ll see 2018 out as innumerate as I saw it in.
Happy New Year, everyone!
p.s. watch me get done for child porn.
December 31, 2018 — 8:04 pm
Comments: 16
Soul patch Santa
I have a personal Christmas card made up every year. I image search a classic Coca Cola Santa and then Photoshop him into something silly. It’s great fun. As it turns out, you can ‘Shop the hell out of those images without breaking them (a lot of them are pretty anatomically wonky anyway).
So let’s do that. Here’s to shaved Santa.
Hope the old bastard brings you everything your heart desires.
December 24, 2018 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 12
It begins…
We have a holly tree in the back garden, but most years the birds have had alllll the berries before Christmas. Not this year, though — Uncle B. nipped out and got a little vaseful for my library (which I insist on pronouncing libr-r-r-r-r-y).
I’m declaring Christmas officially ON starting….NOW!
Those pale things in the upper left corner are my panties drying on the rack. Merry Christmas!
p.s. Happy Solstice — it just gets brighter from here!
December 21, 2018 — 7:21 pm
Comments: 14
Same manger, different tune
Okay, that feels more Christmassy. We had the carol service in our local church Sunday and it set the mood just fine.
After all this time, I think I’ve finally adjusted to their carols. It was hard because some of them are the same as ours, but sung to a completely different tune.
Case in point: Away in the Manger, our version; Away in a Manger, Brit version.
That’s not our local church, by the way. That’s the cathedral in…York, I think. Ours is nearly that old, but it’s a funny little country church. It’s almost always a muddy tromp across the sheep fields and I love that most people turn up to church in jeans and wellies.
The picture is the first one that turned up on a search of “Church of England Carol Service.” And if you think that’s lazy, the next two weeks will astonish you!
December 17, 2018 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 10
Tree talk
We went out to buy our Christmas tree today, but came back empty handed.
Our usual place is a local farm that grows them. It’s hard work, though, trudging out into the field, slipping around in the mud (there’s always mud) picking out a tree. I always feel a bit like the Hand of Death, tying the tag around it. Last year, most of the good ones were taken and it was forever before we found a good one.
Turns out, our farmer is selling them to a local store, so we went there. Didn’t spot one we liked, so we decided to drive out in the country to a place that had a Christmas Trees sign up a few days ago. The sign wasn’t up when we got there and it was getting dark. It’ll wait.
We usually go for a nice fat six foot tree. Norway spruce that size were going for about £40. That’s…about fifty bucks at the current exchange rate. Does that seem high?
Oh, for you Monty Python aficionados, the tree at right is The Larch.
p.s. in the previous thread, HL King asked about the specs of my new computer. They are:
16GB (1x16GB) DDR4 2400MHz Single Module
Windows 10 for high end devices
Intel Core i7 8700 3.2GHz Processor
Fractal Design Define S Mid Tower Case, Black, Silent Design
240GB NVME SSD
1TB SATA HDD (7200RPM)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5
BeQuiet! System Power 9 500W Power Supply
Iiyama G-MASTER GB2730QSU-B1 27″ LED Monitor – 16:9 – 1 ms
It is blazing fast, it runs damn near silent and I love it.
p.p.s. Have a great weekend, y’all!
December 14, 2018 — 9:23 pm
Comments: 21