Matthew Skala @mattskala@mstdn.io

So, which one of you is the serval and which one is the bag?

What really hurts about spending the time to craft 4,000 words of lovingly artisanal privacy policy, is knowing nobody's going to read it anyway. https://northcoastsynthesis.com/privacy

In my generation, Beef Stroganoff was the butt of jokes. I've seen some indication that one or two generations before mine, it was considered to be actually a somewhat fancy thing, with which you might impress dinner guests. And I think in this generation people aren't familiar with it at all. What changed?

Okay, new storefront: https://newstore.northcoastsynthesis.com/ . The main URL probably cuts over later tonight, unless showstopping issues turn up. It doesn't look quite as nice as the old, but it'll do for now and I hope to make it better later.

People in Berlin, especially those who are into synthesizers: you should go to SchneidersLaden and try out the Leapfrog Filter. Both because it's fun and because I could use the buzz. https://www.schneidersladen.de/de/north-coast-synthesis-msk007.html

Incidentally, you cannot find this stuff on the Web by searching for "camouflage makeup" - that is something else, and the military users are scrupulously careful about their terminology. Just *exactly* like the difference between a doll and an action figure.

How long will it be before someone decides military camouflage face paint is "blackface" and needs to be banned - or has this already happened?

This article is important, as is the more well-known one to which it responds. Although the concept is applicable in many directions, the "Code of Conduct" brigading within the free software movement comes to mind. Attempting to make a community more welcoming *if it comes at the cost of the values on which the community was founded* can be a big problem and so it's important both to know just what those values are, and to recognize and respond when they are threatened. http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/

It's funny how people are still using "platinum" as a metaphor for something very expensive, higher tier than gold. These days the price of platinum (about US$890/oz) is very low. It costs significantly less than gold (about US$1285/oz). Platinum right now is even cheaper than palladium (about US$980/oz), which is traditionally the "Platinum Lite" metal.

Japanese curry tonight

It was a dependence on case insensitivity of the Windows filesystem. Someone didn't know the difference between the letters "p" and "P", a bit of knowledge some of us learned in kindergarten.

So I had to install Node fucking JS on Slackware and figure out how to use it, and although that was the expected toxic hellscape it did actually seem to work. Except customizing the expensive paid theme didn't. I could customize other themes, just not that one. There ensued several days of arguing with the tech support people of several different entities all of whom blamed each other. Finally I ended up debugging the problem myself without help and you know what it was?

So I had to move my Web store off of Shopify and I wanted not to have to change its look and feel. Ended up buying an expensive paid theme that looked as much as possible as my old (heavily customized) Shopify theme, figuring I could customize it myself to more or less match the old one. Found that themes on the new system can ONLY be customized by putting them through the new system's proprietary build system, which is based on Node fucking JS.