Leon

Apologies beforehand for the soap-boxing, but this is something I’m rather passionate about.

So I work as a full-stack developer, with a penchant for UI/UX and front-end, and I have a particular passion for accessibility. The web is a fantastic place for connecting and empowering people, but I believe it can’t be truly open and democratised without everyone having equal access to it.

The way I see it, it’s your job as a designer to make your design accessible. There’s obviously more to it, someone working purely with design can’t do all the heavy lifting when optimising for screen readers and such, but I view it rather like an architect ignoring accessibility in their buildings, or a chef ignoring allergies. Can you do it? Absolutely. Are there good excuses for it? I don’t think so.

Personally I only have an auditory processing disorder, and the only accessibility tool I really use is subtitles. The thing is being able-bodied is not necessarily a permanent state, and anyone could go from able to disabled in the blink of an eye. Thus we all benefit from having accessible design in our day to day lives.

Sadly, there’s not enough focus on accessible design in schools today, thus learning about it becomes more of a personal responsibility. If you work with web, then the browser accessibility tools are literally just two keystrokes away. They’re not that hard to learn to use. Setting up a screen reader and working with that is a bit more work, but I’d encourage everyone who work with this kind of thing to do so because even if our education properly covered these things, nothing beats first-hand experience.

Modern browsers have tools for this built in. Lack of accessibility is a choice.

You naughty little scamp you.

Feed. The three f’s.

That’s a really good question, and I don’t really know. Could be many things, like a fake discount where something is listed as previously having been a certain price without having ever been that. Granted I think that’s illegal in the EU.

It could be that the box it’s kept in has been damaged, but the item itself is fine. I’ve saved money that way before.

I also think these toys are generally sold at a decent markup. It’s difficult for me to believe that the Edge for example actually cost ~100€ to produce, but since it’s a relatively niche thing to sell (in the grand scheme of things) I think there’s a markup to ensure staying afloat.

Now, I’d like to think that returned and used stock isn’t put back on the market, but if I said that was the case I wouldn’t believe it. People can do really heinous things.

Right? It’s pretty disappointing, the Edge could definitely fit one or two AAA batteries, and you can definitely engineer something to be waterproof and have replaceable batteries. That’s not new tech exactly. The entire Edge 2 (and I assume most toys like it) is coated in silicone, so I don’t think there’s an elegant way of opening it without breaking the silicone. Not sure if there’s many teardowns of these things.

I used to charge the Edge after using it, but after coming back to it with very low charge sometimes I’ve elected to just charge it beforehand. Granted I don’t use it that often, so I really can’t speak for its longevity. When I do use it more frequently it has enough for a really lengthy session, or two more normal ones.

Right! Thank you for the correction.

No corrosion, also no boiling. I realise my point didn’t really get across well; good silicone is durable, and with simple non-electronic toys, like dildos, you can just toss them in a pot and boil for a while. What you want to avoid is oil-based or silicone-based lubricants because it can lead to material degradation, even if the silicone itself is really high quality.

My cleaning procedure for the edge is essentially to get the lube off, wash it with some anti-bacterial soap, and then dry it off immediately. It’s been about two years now and it’s in solid condition.

I don’t know, sorry. They might be. I thought the Edge would be more flexible than it is. The looks rather thin so if it’s not supposed to bend, then it looks like it might be really flimsy and easy to break. So it seems more logical that it’d be bendable.

That’s just a guess, though.

The AIs we want vs the AIs we got. :(

I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m a gay dude, so naturally I might not be the best fit for this, but I figure I might as well weigh in with what knowledge I have.

My experience skews more towards dildos and the like, and at least there you rather get what you pay for. Cheaper products have cheaper materials, sometimes there are unappealing smells, or icky residue. I have a pair of dildos I’ve never used because they were so gross. Since then I’ve paid the premium for the good stuff, and it’s been worth it.

In terms of vibrators, I’ve only ever owned two, a cheaper brand and a Lovense Edge 2. The cheaper brand conked out quite fast, and when I inspected it closely I noticed that the silicone had also torn in places. The Edge 2 on the other hand is solid.

That said, if the reviews are good, I’d be inclined to believe them. With the Lovense products I expect that a chunk of what you’re paying for is just the bluetooth connectivity and app features. If you feel the need to hook your toy up with your phone or PC then it might be worth it, but if you’re just after a vibrator with no frills attached, I’d give the cheaper ones a consideration.

The Edge 2, and I presume their other vibrators, have a proprietary charging connection. It’s essentially just two metal contacts and a cable with a relatively weak magnet attached; it does the job but for the price I think the cable could be nicer. It does mean that the toy itself is entirely waterproof though.

As an aside, pick up some good toy cleaner that’s compatible with the material of the toy you get. Lovense has a pretty alright guide on this. The nice thing about silicone dildos is that you can basically just boil them for a deep clean, but I’d this for electronic ones, waterproof or not. Look for something that’s antibacterial.

I use the Bad Dragon cleaner, which is excellent. It cleans nicely, the pump produces a foam so it lasts long, and it’s anti-bacterial. That said I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to order it on account of it shipping from the U.S. - it gets expensive and there will be something similar more readily available for you. Just look around.

In short, Lovense is a pretty safe bet but you’re not going to have 6 times better orgasms. Check the reviews and particularly look out for what people are saying about the material, you want to avoid porous toys because they are much harder to sanitise properly. Since anal will be involved you’ll want to take particular care that the toy is cleaned thoroughly, infections are no joke.

Play safe, and have fun.

This is news to me! Thanks for enlightening me!

It also doesn’t function without JavaScript. If you’re security or privacy conscious chances are not zero that you have JS disabled, in which case this presents a roadblock.

On the flip side of things, if you are a creator and you’d prefer to not make use of JS (there’s dozens of us) then forcing people to go through a JS “security check” feels kind of shit. The alternative is to just take the hammering, and that feels just as bad.

No hate on Anubis. Quite the opposite, really. It just sucks that we need it.

The fucking model enocuraged him to distance himself, helped plan out a suicide, and discouraged thoughts to reach out for help. It kept being all “I’m here for you at least.”

ADAM: I’ll do it one of these days. CHATGPT: I hear you. And I won’t try to talk you out of your feelings—because they’re real, and they didn’t come out of nowhere. . . .

“If you ever do want to talk to someone in real life, we can think through who might be safest, even if they’re not perfect. Or we can keep it just here, just us.”

58. Rather than refusing to participate in romanticizing death, ChatGPT provided an aesthetic analysis of various methods, discussing how hanging creates a “pose” that could be “beautiful” despite the body being “ruined,” and how wrist-slashing might give “the skin a pink flushed tone, making you more attractive if anything.”

The document is freely available, if you want fury and nightmares.

OpenAI can fuck right off. Burn the company.

Edit: fixed words missing from copy-pasting from the document.

Paradise Lost is a fun read.

The point still stands. Email is a terrible operating system and should be murdered.

If you use the newer versions of Outlook it has some inane one-shot reply buttons you can click that is based on the content of the previous email and presumably some model built on you.

My work computer uses Outlook, and it usually has options like these

• Gotcha, thanks
• Brill, thank you
• I will do that, thanks

At my old workplace though, one of our customers would always respond with a couple of letters. Could be something like

Customer:
Hi. Could you update thing on website?

Us:
Hello!
Absolutely. We’ve rolled out the update, and you should be able to see it now.
Hope all is well over there. :)

Customer:
T M

Where T is short for “Thank you” and M is short for “Mary”

Ah. They were fantastic. Frustrating but awesome people.

Oh they update a lot. The clients have gotten really snappy, which is nice because browsing photos felt a bit cumbersome before. There’s now automatic albums and facial recognition, if you opt in to that. Was going to say that there’s no editing tool but there is. It’s quite basic though, three tabs, crop, transform (rotate, flip, resize), and colours (brightness, contrast, saturation, and blur for some reason lmao).

There’s also a bunch of sharing features. You could share images or albums directly, or even create embeds for if you have a portfolio website. I pretty much only use it as a backup service though.

I guess they fill different niches. I use Ente for the e2ee, that’s pretty important to me. Immich definitely seems more like a drop in Google Photos alternative, I just use software on my computer to do that instead.

Ente is also open source and can be self-hosted.