@cstross Anyone trying to spin "Muslims voting for a woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man" (quote taken from elsewhere) as evidence of a Muslim conspiracy deserves every hard time they get.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Ah, yeah. I think there we're getting into the fact that Western comics tend to pass between authors while manga are often very much single author driven. I've seen Punisher arcs where he's presented with a straight up heroic character (which... doesn't really ring true to me, honestly) and one's where he is all about the revenge and really the only redeeming quality he has is that the people he wants revenge on are not very nice™. Manga tend to be more consistent on character motivation from what I've seen.

Still poking at the edge of whether I've understood you (I'm actually pretty interested in what we can learn from the different ways that other cultures approach storytelling, hence the digging), would somebody like the original (book) James Bond fit the bill? Obviously a nasty piece of work in many ways, choosing to keep the world a safer place for everybody else as a line of work bit with little evidence that I remember that he does for any particular moral reason.​

Also: just to be very clear, I know that many people working in education are not about the pieces of paper and the bureaucracy. But I've also worked in local councils, and I can tell you straight up that a small subset of the back office are absolutely obsessed with having the correct string of letters in the expected places and making sure that people are in the "right" box in the system.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I must admit that I loath Deadpool who doesn't really come across as loveable to me at all, so I may not be the best judge there. And you don't get much blanker than Wick.

But I suppose I'm not really seeing the line between people like Punisher and Lone Wolf, so I may have missed part of the essence of what you're saying.​

Writing bios is the weirdest thing. I just had to write one for a local authority in the UK who want to know why I might be qualified to teach secondary school level computer science to somebody, and to my ears it both sounds weirdly boastful while at the same time I know that it probably doesn't include what some of the officials are looking for/expecting.

"Why does it matter that he's taught hundreds of people over 15+ years? He didn't even finish his degree, and he has no initials after his name at all!"

@[email protected] @[email protected] Isn't this also basically the Punisher, Deadpool, etc? Obviously not nice people, sometimes in fairly upbeat settings (if not always upbeat stories) but who only interact with enemies who are so obivously worse than them that they appear... not quite as morally bankrupt. See also things like John Wick, although that has the whole glanced at initially redemption overtones that are almost part of the character if you squint hard enough.​

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] ​Ah, yes. That is hard. Although mentioning remote work has reminded me of somebody else. @[email protected] , do you happen to know anybody in Padua who can recommend reputable estate agents? I know it's not right in your stomping grounds but I don't have many contacts "up North"

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] A lot of the best deals here go by word of mouth, so if he is moving there for a job or similar it may also be worth asking any local contacts. It's far more acceptable here to both ask for and recieve help with this type of thing from 'professional' contacts than it can be in the some parts of the UK.​

@[email protected] It's almost as if software architecture needs to try and solve real, specific, problems rather than being chosen according to fashion. Who would have thought?​

@[email protected] "I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million security researches all face palmed at once..." ​

@[email protected] @[email protected] I needed to speak to a plumber about irrigation for a large garden a few years ago, and yeah. Whole new world of plumbing knowledge and terminology I didn't understand layered on top of horticultural terminology I didn't understand.​

@[email protected] @[email protected] I cringed this morning when I saw somebody saying 'oh, I'd love to set up my own blog but I'm not sure how' because I'm sure that at least 15 helpful IT professionals have now convinced them it is impossible.

(Although also, hats off to people like @[email protected] who are actually doing the hard work of writing guides that make sense to the rest of the population)

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have been promoted repeatedly in my career for being mediocre at translating between my fellow IT professionals and ... well, anyone else.

Yeap. I've been thinking about this as well. Maybe especially because of my #adhd (which - let's face it - is not rare in the industry) I'm keenly aware that scanning walls of existing code for bugs and existing test suites for holes is way, way harder and more error prone than writing the same code/test cases yourself. Which is why we ask devs to produce small, scoped, change requests and try and spread the review load.

mastodon.online/users/pseudo... ​

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​...and have the scars and the tears to prove it

@[email protected] ​Although she's not based in Italy right now, @[email protected] might know some groups it would be good to pass this on to?

Fedi, a good friend needs to find a place to live in Padua (Padova), Italy. He has citizenship, but doesn't speak the language well. He's not wealthy but he's able to afford a small place. He's currently in the UK.

Can anyone help me find him a letting agent or any other source where he can view and apply to rent an apartment? He's tried calling a couple of places to no avail.

@[email protected] ​Fun fact: my mother has expert card shuffling skills because as the daughter of a merchant navy captain she was one of the only people the sailors trusted to deal for money games in or out of port (she would have been around 10 at the time and didn't normally travel with the ship). The captain, of course, couldn't be involved but the crew preferred having relatives of the captain run the game than the local casino.