Ours was “{town} Free Wi-Fi” when we lived in the town centre for a while, just to confuse tourists. It was more of a getting stabbed area than a fun SSID name area though.

I much prefer my powder inhaler because I can feel the difference much faster, but yeah it wouldn’t be great in an asthma attack situation. It’s not something you can take a quick puff of, and the lever mechanicism on most of them would be impossible to operate in quick succession while struggling to breathe. My local practice doesn’t like to give out reliever inhalers anymore, as they believe if you need a reliever then really it’s your preventative inhaler that needs to be increased in dosage, and it just means if I’m sick with the cold or something then I’m totally reliant on the slower powder inhaler to get air into my lungs. There’s a cruel irony to the fact that climate change has caused an increase in asthma and now we’re being blamed for causing it with our evil lifesaving medication.

Are we just copying the ‘free speech zones’ from the US during the Iraq war now?

I really don’t like this route the UK has went down the past few years. The Tories cracking down on protests, people being arrested for holding “not my king” signs or even just blank pieces of paper in the vicinity of the king, and now all this bullshit from Labour to crack down on pro-Palestinian protestors.

Bloons TD fits this for me, I play it when I’m too ill to think properly but still need something to pass the time

“We and our 2,565 advertising partners respect your privacy” is always a good laugh before hitting decline on the ones uBlock doesn’t catch automatically

Honestly it does feel like he’s campaigning for them at this stage. I don’t think anyone is going to like this policy, even the far-right who he is trying to appease with this aren’t going to trust a mandatory government app on their phones.

Getting a fairphone 6 with /e/OS is one of them, besides a few snags I’m really happy with it.

The other is getting a henry vacuum cleaner. They’re affordable, strong, insanely repairable, look cute, and are made in the UK by unionised workers which is nearly unheard of these days. I probably sound like a shill but it’s nice when the more ethical/local option happens to be one of the better options anyway if you weren’t considering considering those things.

I just got one as well, it uses MicroG to replace Google Play Services. Works really well, there aren’t any apps I use on my fairphone that didn’t work on my old S24 besides contactless payments. I just stick my card in my case or you can use Curve to replace Google Wallet/Pay.

It depends on the bank, but it works for both my current account banking app and my savings account in the UK with no issues. Only difference has been no contactless and there are solutions for it on /e/os but then you compromise some privacy for it.

I’m really angry with the British government right now. In some ways they’re worse than the Tories, because at least with them you knew where you stood. With Starmer he keeps trying to outdo the far right, which leads to them adopting even further right policies, and him adopting them and so on. The cracking down on freedom of speech is genuinely scary, whether it be through the online safety act or abusing terrorism legislation to proscribe direct action groups. They need to fix the housing and healthcare crises urgently, but they’re tinkering at the seams while the far right are on the cusp of taking power in 2029.

On the local level, I don’t like our elected assembly much either, and I feel like all they do is pose for photoshoots and blame all their mistakes on the government in London.

I tried it on Llama with duckduckgo’s front-end. It just kept going til it presumably hit the character limit:

🐴 is not a correct seahorse emoji. The correct seahorse emoji is 🐠 is actually a fish, the seahorse emoji is 🐟 no, I made another mistake. The correct seahorse emoji is actually 🐠 is a tropical fish. The seahorse emoji is 🐟 no. I made a mistake. The correct emoji is 🐠 no. The correct one is 🐟 is a fish. I did it again. The seahorse emoji is actually 🐠. No. I did it again. The correct seahorse emoji is 🐟 no. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. No. The seahorse emoji is actually 🐟. No. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. I did it. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is actually 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟 no. The seahorse emoji is 🐠 no. The seahorse emoji is actually 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. I did it. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is 🐟. The seahorse emoji is 🐠. The seahorse emoji is

When I was 5, then I seemingly got better as a teenager and didn’t need an inhaler for about ten years. I got covid in my early twenties and got re-diagnosed after it ruined my lungs. And I do mean re-diagnosed, they wouldn’t prescribe me new inhalers from my original diagnosis after ten years of not taking them and I had to get a peak flow prescribed and do the tests over the phone since we couldn’t do it in person thanks to the pandemic.

They are the 6th biggest contributor, and Spain has considered doing similar and they’re one of the big five. It might actually change something since money will matter the most, and enough countries are dropping out that they may not have enough contestants to run the semi-finals. There’s rumours that Italy, Germany, and Britain may withdraw if Israel is kicked out though. Maybe we just won’t have a contest next year, and after the bullshit of the past two years I’m completely fine with that.

I’ve been tempted, the thermostat is showing very low temperatures and it’s in one of the warmer rooms of the house. Having a shitty rental with a poor EPC rating will do that unfortunately. Just had the mini heater on this morning to bring the room up to 18°C, trying to leave the central heating for at least another month.

They did pay for the “shit your pants” spell, and that does happen shortly after death…so in a roundabout monkey’s paw sort of way I guess that one worked

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

The other controversies involved their therapists being poorly vetted, and when they entered the UK they were called out for poor hiring practices, ignoring safeguarding, things like that. They’d promise people licensed therapists and link them to crystal healers and homeopathists. They’re the Uber of mental health in many ways.

There’s other shitty YouTuber-sponsored companies out there like NordVPN but I don’t unsubscribe from people promoting them because the issues aren’t as well known and the product isn’t targeting someone for something as important as mental health. Every YouTuber knows how bad that company is because they all dropped it for a few years until the controversy died down, and the ones who don’t care about their fans wellbeing picked it up again as soon as they thought they could get away with it. BetterHelp is just an immediate unsubscribe because you don’t get to make a quick buck from fucking with people’s mental health and sending your audience to shitty unvetted digital therapy and leaving them with worse problems in the long run. I remember unsubscribing from Johnny Harris (who has many other problems anyway), Yes Theory, and the one I mentioned above was Connor Franta. That one stung because I really liked him when I was a teenager, he came out around the same time I realised I was gay, and coming back to his channel ten years later to see him promoting this to his young and vulnerable audience knowing that they were feeling especially vulnerable after the election really disgusted me. Like not just to promote it, but to promote it to them as something to help their mental health if they feel scared about their rights being rolled back. Especially with them leaking private data, a trans person in Trump’s America would be in so much danger having that information leaked by this awful company and you’re sending your LGBTQ fans there for therapy?

Anyway sorry, rant over, this company and its shills are one of the things that get me very riled up.

Kyle’s own record hardly reassures sceptics. In June 2025 he reportedly referred one of his constituents to the police after she sent him emails protesting against arms sales to Israel. Within days, four officers raided her home at four in the morning, arrested her, and confiscated her devices. Journalists who examined her emails found them to be angry but not abusive, passionate but not unlawful. For civil-liberties campaigners, the case smacked of an MP unwilling to tolerate dissent on an issue where he is deeply invested.

I feel a bit one-note complaining about this one guy all the time but he really truly is the worst part of this government.

There was a YouTuber I used to respect and looked up to when I was a teenager and I hadn’t checked his channel for years. Last year I looked at one of his videos after the US election and he was using the fact that it’s a dangerous time for queer people as his segue into shilling for BetterHelp. Not a chance any YouTuber is unaware of the issues with it by now, anyone who shills it knows damn well how dangerous that platform is, and I don’t think my opinion of someone has dropped as quickly as that. It’s bad enough to shill that awful company but to exploit your young queer audience’s fears post-election and people’s mental health issues and act like they’re doing them a favour? Absolutely fuck that.

I did it so much in a retail job that the supervisor told me to stop saying sorry all the time and of course I immediately replied “sorry.” Being autistic and socially anxious will do that unfortunately. It’s taken time and I’ve gotten a bit better at not apologising for things that aren’t my fault, but it’s still an annoying habit.