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  • My polling station is at the pub and it was custom to get a picture of us holding a pint in front of the sign until my wife became a councillor six years ago. We're planning on a polling station pint again for the first time in years today, but it's a bit too early to make the picture right now.

    Ps. If you haven't done it yet, cast a ballot on my website https://publicslate.co.uk

    There's nearly as many votes as seats now and the data is interesting.

  • Rural Eerie, by Flange Circus

    All profits from the digital sales will go to the Woodland Trust.

    The countryside: a place of tranquillity, less compromised by modern life, harmonious communities, innocence and safety. This much is the rural idyll. Yet the rural is also the unknown rustling in the hedgerow as the country lane is travelled at night. It can be the half-seen shapes and shadows in the woodland and copse; the desolate hillside, the treacherous rocky crag; the lone leafless tree atop the knoll. The countryside is the space where supposed closely-knit social ties become like suffocating and impenetrable knotweed to the outsider, the incomer, the blow-in. It is the place of curious rituals, wyrd practices and often unfamiliar and still-surviving lore: a space haunted by the ghosts of occluded pasts. Beyond the supposed rural idyll malevolent forces often work, uncanny sensations prowl and the eerie is always lurking and ready to be encountered.

    Rural Eerie seeks to explore this countryside through music, sound, spoken word, poetry and visuals. It hopes to bring to the surface different ruralities – real, half-remembered, imagined, absent and present – and make us think differently about the countryside.

    A number of poets and writers were commissioned to speak to this idea. Each poet and writer gave Flange Circus a number of keywords from their writing and the band then crafted individualised soundscapes befitting their work.

    Presented by Flange Circus, Emily Oldfield (Haunt Manchester) and MASSmcr, Rural Eerie was debuted and performed in its entirety on the 19th October 2019 at The Peer Hat in Manchester, as part of the Gothic Manchester Festival 2019 (bit.ly/2XF8kKB). An abridged version was performed at the Manchester Folk Horror Festival III 1st Feb 2020, also at The Peer Hat in Manchester (youtu.be/egd7JTdDyxY).

    Flange Circus are:

    Pete Collins: Keyboards, Programming, Noises, Visuals.

    Bon Holloway: Keyboards, Programming, Field Recordings, Noises.

    John Taylor: Keyboards, Accordion, Noises.

    The poets and writers appearing on Rural Eerie are:

    Emily Oldfield:

    Emily is a writer originally from Rossendale, currently based in Manchester. She is interested in the intersections between writing, place, community and under-covered histories. Her first poetry pamphlet ‘Grit’ was published with Poetry Salzburg in March 2020. During 2020 she has been working on a project about Winter Hill as part of Penned In The Margins’ Edgelandia series and is the Editor of Haunt Manchester (Manchester Metropolitan University). She has also written for a number of music websites including Louder Than War and At The Barrier.

    Mark Pajak:

    Mark has written for The BBC, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, among others. His first pamphlet, ‘Spitting Distance’, was selected by Carol Ann Duffy as a Laureate’s Choice and is published with smith|doorstop (poetrybusiness.co.uk/bookshop/). You can find him at: markpajakpoet.com

    Helen Darby:

    Helen is a poet and performer who has lived in the North West of England for nearly 50 years. Her piece for Rural Eerie is inspired by harvest rituals, folk music and the rise of populism in contemporary times. You can find her at: Helendarbypoetry.com

    Sarah Hymas:

    Sarah lives by Morecambe Bay, England. Her writing appears in print, multimedia exhibits, as lyrics, installations and on stage. She also makes artist books and immersive walks. You can find her at: www.sarahhymas.net

    Andrew Michael Hurley:

    Andrew Michael Hurley is a short story writer and the author of three novels, The Loney (Winner of the 2015 Costa Book Awards First Novel Award), Devil's Day and Starve Acre. He teaches Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School.

    Track 12, ‘The Desolation’, is read and performed by Louise Holloway. This comprises a number of stanzas of the epic poem ‘The Desolation of Eyam’ by Mary Howitt (1827). The last stanza is from Canto II of ‘Medicus-Magus’ by Richard Furness (1836).

    All music written by Flange Circus.

    Field recordings from various rural locations in: Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and North Yorkshire.

    Produced, Mixed and Mastered by Bon Holloway at High Peak Recordings, New Mills, Derbyshire. www.highpeakrecordings.com

    Mark Pajak, Sarah Hymas and Andrew Michael Hurley were recorded at Manchester Metropolitan University with the assistance of Lucy Simpson.

    Flange Circus would like to extend special thanks to Lucy Simpson and Emily Oldfield. Without their dedication and enthusiasm, Rural Eerie would never have happened.

    We would also like to thank: all the poets and writers, MASSmcr, Haunt Manchester, RAH! Manchester Met (@mmu_RAH), The Three B's, Mrs. H., KMH & DCH & MNH, Nick Kenyon at The Peer Hat, Ian Rothwell and Salford City Radio, Richard Skelton, Kevin Fisher, Matt Gannicliffe and you. Especially you.

    1
    A Rant about Front-end Development
  • I've been forced to do react for years and I still don't like or understand it. Most times plain JavaScript is easier and quicker to write and quite maintainable if people can resist the urge to take the piss with nested anonymous functions.

    I honestly can't get my head around the idea that people can hit the ground running with react, but can't write unabstracted JavaScript. It's like a MotoGP rider not being able to ride a push bike.

  • I made a website that lets you use ranked choice voting in a mock UK General Election to explain how it works.
  • Sorry about that. Only way I could think to stop spam was to use IP as unique id. Try disconnecting from WiFi.

    Edit: if you've already voted, it overwrites that vote with the new one. This is just the quickest laziest way of stopping someone using a bot to skew the results.

  • I made a website that lets you use ranked choice voting in a mock UK General Election to explain how it works.

    I don't know if this is too self-promotey to put in the more serious subs so I'm putting it here. I need to blag being able to do the django framework so I spent a week fannying about with it to make this. Feel free to mess about with it, give feedback or repost it on reddit or any other lemmy knock-offs.

    19
    I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity
  • it's pretty good for things that I can eye scan and verify that's what I would have typed anyway. But I've found it suggesting things I wouldn't remotely permit to things that are "sort of" correct.

    Yeah. I haven't bothered with it much but the best use I can see of it is just rubber ducking.

    Last time I used it was to asked how to change contrast in a numpy image. It said to multiply each channel by contrast. (I don't even think this is right and it should be ((original value-128) * contrast) + 128) not original value * contrast as it suggested), but it did remind me I can just run operations on colour channels.

    Wait what's my point again? Oh yeah, don't trust anyone that can't tell you what the output is supposed to do.

  • What's the best torrent client these days?
  • It depends what you want to do with it. Webtorrent-desktop has been my go-to for a while now. It's great for videos as it'll stream mp4 in the client or open mkv in VLC within a few seconds of starting a download.

  • Is it just me or do Lemmy communities tend to skew left wing? Why might this be?
  • There are sections of both the right and the left that have anti-authoritarian tendancies.

    The libertarian right tends to view things purely in terms of government over reach, whilst the left tends to view things in terms of the power of capital.

    Leftists saw Facebook pushing propaganda for the highest bidder, Reddit trying to be safe to sell to investors and twitter basically becoming a project to reflect Elon Musk's personal opinions.

    Out of that came a bunch of attempts at creating new social networks. The right wing attempts were not cognisant that the aforementioned were the natural result of trying to get rich off it, while the left attempted to make it impossible to get into that position.

  • Why don't electric car manufacurers put solar panels on the car roofs?
  • Solar panels on cars are thought of the wrong way. The responses in this thread really demonstrate that.

    It's true that they're kind of pointless on EVs, because they're never going to supply enough power to not need a proper charge, which makes the panels redundant.

    Where they could be useful is hybrids, sold as something that makes the engine 10-20% more efficient.

  • Where have you never been, but is close to you?
  • Almost went to Stonehenge after visiting family down south. They wanted £60 and wouldn't let us take the dog in.

    You can apparently get in cheaper if you're a member of English Heritage. So we looked online to see if it was a fair deal and what other sites membership grants you.

    Turns out that English Heritage are a bunch of robbing bastards (they literally stole seahenge!) that enclose our historic sites in order to charge money for access to them.

    I won't be visiting if I have to pay them.

  • Is there any reason the fediverse doesn't use torrents to not ddos itself?

    This is a question that comes to mind every time I spend a few days focusing on the fediverse. Normally I'm on the microblogging side, but now I have a Lemmy account it might start a proper discussion.

    So, to the point, pretty much every fedi platform has similar problems with small servers taking a beating whenever a post goes viral. This ends up costing the server owner a bunch of money trying to keep their server alive while thousands of instances attempt to pull large static files from the original host's post. This recently instigated this call to action on this forum.

    I've never seen the question of torrents answered and it feels like a lot of effort and a bit self entitled to get the ear of fedi software devs to implement torrents as a solution, so I'm putting this here.

    If media files were made into torrents when a post was being created, an extra object could be added to post objects like

    {... 'torrentcdn': { 'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg': { 'infohash': 'ba618eab...', 'torrentLocation': 'https://directlinkto.torrent', 'webseed': 'https://imagePathAsKey.jpg', ... } }

    This would not break compatibility as it would just be ignored by anything not looking for a 'torrentcdn' object, yet up to date instances could use this instead of directly pulling the static files.

    This would benefit instances as when a post goes viral, the load would be distributed amongst all instances attempting to download the file.

    This could also benefit clients and instances as larger files like short videos could be distributed using webtorrent, massively reducing the load on server when many people are watching the same video.

    Thoughts?

    22
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MA
    manicdave @feddit.uk
    Posts 7
    Comments 54