brianvastag.sciencemastodon.com.ap.brid.gy - Profile | ThreadSky

[Mild spoiler for latest Severance episode] A friend cautioned me that I might not want to watch the latest #Severance episode which was mostly about Mark and Gemma's relationship. But grief triggers are idiosyncratic and Gemma leaves me cold so the episode didn't add any grief to my pile.

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

I hope someday someone can write about how my federal scientist colleagues are just gritting their teeth, continuing to do science, no matter how many wrenches are thrown at them. They'll keep collecting data for the public good until the very last minute. They are heroes.

submitted 20 hours ago • 2 comments

I'm using a very standard VPN & this screen has never popped up before. #Reddit can get fucked. Full of nazis & bots anyway.

submitted 20 hours ago • 1 comment

An octopus flashed me. 😲 #ocean #reef #Hawaii #octopus

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Is an apparently unhoused family crammed with all their stuff into an ancient rusty Nissan Leaf pulling a free 3.1 kw from a WalMart chargepoint station solarpunk? Cuz most of that power mid-day is coming from rooftop and utility scale photovoltaics.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I, for one, am not surprised that lawyers are the class of people who seem to be using LLMs the most to shirk their work.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

This morning's entertainment was a cockfight in the front yard. One of these morons ended up thinking he owned the place. (I thought I was taking video but it was pre-coffee.)

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Friend Michelle Nijhuis has a thoughtful piece out today about how wolf lovers and wolf haters came together and bridged their differences. "Yet by discovering what connected us before addressing what divided us, we had kept affective polarization at bay. That freed us to speak our minds […]

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Is the spinny/trippy drugged-out camera-moves in a club scene been overdone to death or what? #TV #film #movies

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

My late partner Beth heavily shorted #Tesla in 2020 or so and that investment would be paying off nicely now...

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Looking forward to setting this up as a media/plex server. I tried linux once 20 years ago and it was very frustrating but it seems that getting this little thing set up should be pretty straightforward.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I mean, how much could a birb cost?

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Apparently flights to or from California to Hawaii had to turn around tonight due to issues at Oakland ATC. #FAA #flying #travek https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1iw211r/whats_going_on_with_flights_from_sfo_to_hawaii/

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

[A GenZer reads "Dracula"] Whyyyyyyy is Bram Stoker promoting blood drinking so gross. 😩😵

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

Finished listening to Andy Serkis read "Fellowship of the Ring" and it was mostly great...except for a few of the characters where Mr. Serkis dialed up his overreacting to a 13 or 14. His Sam makes the poor hobbit sound like the biggest, dumbest bucktoothed bumpkin you've ever seen. And he made […]

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

So embarassing that the US lost a hybrid war to fucking Russia, a tinpot oligarchy that's insanely corrupt and only has 1/3 of our population and ONE FIFTEENTH of our the GDP. But information warfare is cheap and the US government made many many many mistakes responding to the war, especially […]

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Heidi is a very good patient. (Poor kitty has urinary issues.) #cats

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

German & French governments going all-in on chronic illness denialism, spreading the lie that people these days just don't want to work as the number of workers taking sick leave continues to rise. The pernicious lie that people who are sick are really just lazy will never, ever, ever fucking […]

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Good morning to this li'l porupine pufferfish who thought no one could see it. Check out the side eye. Puffers give nothing but side eye. LOL. (zoomed and cropped from GoPro 10 footage) #ocean #marine #Hawaii #fish #reef

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

You may think #Hawaii is paradise but here people idle their Tacomas and F150s burning $6 a gallon gas on perfect 75 degree mornings to run the AC. It's happening now as I try to enjoy the sunrise.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Stanford billed Medicare $778 for a 20-minute video appointment with my specialist. One conversation that is rarely had in talking about healthcare costs is that doctors would have to accept salary cuts in a single-payer system. I'm pretty sure Canada and the UK don't have specialists who make […]

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

My public service today was letting a student nurse try to start my IV. She did not succeed but she did get some experience with vein valves and scar tissue.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

I wish I still worked at WaPo so I could take a Bezos buyout and flip off Will Lewis as I departed.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Deactivated my FB a few days ago....which means FB still has all of my data forever lolol.

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Ordered a raspberry pi 5 that I plan to use as a Plex server and as an online backup for my stuff if I can ever get Google takeout to actually give me all of my fucking photos. (The downloads constantly break and no I don't want advice.)

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Fishing: Hard mode #Hawaii

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Derek Lowe at Science writes that he's heard that every NIH institute director has been asked to resign by the #Musk administration. The new NIAID director seems really good & responsive to #LongCovid patients as I recently wrote in a feature article...turns out she may spend very little time […]

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

This is kind of niche, but a famous hotel on Kauai that was bought by resort giant Starwood has been a disaster. They didn't pay my friend who worked in their spa for 9 months, they continually exploit local workers, and when I went there for a drink with a friend, the servers ignored us for 20 […]

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

Everyone in space world complains about the SLS but to get Elmo's Starship to the moon requires something like a dozen launches of Starships full of fuel to refuel the giant lunar lander Starship in orbit...which seems... ambitious and dumb given that a lander does not need to be as huge as […]

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Listening to Andy Serkis read "The Fellowship of the Ring" is audio comfort food. #books

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

If you know of or are involved with an organization that helps people in a way that the #TrumpAdministration doesn't approve of, and the org is worried about continuing to do their work while protecting their employees, volunteers, and clients, I am happy to meet for free with the org to work […]

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

I guess Kindle policies are getting more restrictive...I switched to a Kobo ereader 2 years ago and love it. Buh-bye Amazon. I just read some of this thread below with someone complaining about the Kobo UX they tried in...2013. Kobo integrates with Overdrive (libraries) & Dropbox & Google Drive […]

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

After years in Big Pharma, a chemist pivoted to help save the species that made weight-loss drugs possible. #giftarticle #biodiversity #nature #ozempic #wegovy #pharma […]

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

The Hawaii legislature is like 90% Democrats but many are old conservative Asian grandparents and they will never ever ever let anyone have legal weed. Every year a bill is introduced, and every year the same 3 or 4 people with (basically) lifetime appointments kill it. Often the person who […]

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments

Post on #Kauai subreddit says National Wildlife Refuge folks working to save the few remaining native birds on the island were all fired with very little notice yesterday. Science is the enemy of fascism in case you hadn't noticed. #USpol

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

13 years of being sick and I still buy concert tickets with the hope that I'll be able to use them. Out $120 and one non-happening date tonight. You really don't want post-viral illness and the only way to prevent it is to...not catch viruses.

submitted 17 days ago • 2 comments