lilitufire

1. I took the German or Autistic diagnostic and I'm apparently just German.

(tags:autism germany funny rules )

2. Just how versatile is milk?

(tags:milk )

1. If you're wondering when the oil shortages are going to bite, ths map on this page is very helpful

(tags:oil trade shipping iran doom )

2. German rollout of renewables is decoupling the price from that of gas.

(tags:germany renewables GoodNews )

3. Record wind and solar saved UK from gas imports worth £1bn in March 2026

(tags:uk renewables GoodNews solarpower windpower electricity )

4. Native Americans had dice and games of probability before other cultures (about 12,000 years ago)

(tags:dice America prehistory )

5. Longwell Green Women's Institute closes after 62 years because of transgender ban

(tags:LGBT transgender bigotry OhForFucksSake women UK )

6. The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki

(tags:ghibli art history )

7. Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

(tags:Intelligence )

Sophia, looking at her phone: "My battery is at 67%! Six sehvern!"
Gideon: "That's old, nobody says that any more"
Sophia: "Yeah, and school banned it"
Gideon: "Yeah, they abandoned it"

1. Consultation on the Proposed Edinburgh Safer Drug Consumption Facility

(tags:Edinburgh drugs Scotland safety )

In the UK most people can claim Tax-free Childcare from the government. Which tops up your childcare payments by 25%, up to a quarterly limit of £500.

The process/website for dealing with it is, frankly, rubbish. And, in a moment of frustration, I've written up why:

Current process:

1. I look at the amount I have to pay to the provider
2. I do a calculation (based on that amount, how much top-up remains, etc)
3. I transfer money to them (using different details per child)
4. I wait two hours
5. I come back and check to see if the money has been transferred and topped up. If not, return to (4).
6. I tell them to transfer it to the provider
7. They pay it to the provider.

Proposed process:

1. once only - I give them my bank details and direct debit permissions. As I do with multiple other sites.
2. I Tell them to pay X to the provider.
3. They do the maths for how much of my money to transfer, and confirm that with me.
4. They transfer it, top it up, and pay it to the provider, letting me know if there was a problem.

This means I have to make 1 visit to 1 website, rather than multiple trips to two websites (them and the bank), I don't have to do any maths, and I don't have to check back in after two hours to see if the transfer has happened yet.

And then multiply up my monthly frustration across all of the hundreds of thousands of people using this every month.

Oh, and yes, I sent them a shorter version of this.

1. New UK visa rules -> foreign students down 10% -> universities cutting staff & not enough graduates in vital fields

(tags:university migration uk doom )

2. Spain closes airspace to aircraft involved in Iran war

(tags:spain war iran usa airplanes )

3. Even Trump Unsure How Rambling Speech On Iran Veered Off Into Ranking The 'Pirates Of The Caribbean' Films

(tags:pirates Caribbean movies politics USA satire )

4. 85% of S&P 500 Decline this year is from 8 tech stocks based around AI

(tags:ai technology investment doom )

5. Huge surge in AI misconduct cases recorded at Edinburgh University

(tags:university cheating AI Edinburgh Scotland )

Sophia has spent the last several weeks being very excited that she will, at some point in the near future, get to have her own bed in her own room.

This evening she suddenly realised that she would no longer be in her current bed and had a massive meltdown.

So we're currently reassuring her that she won't be rushed into anything. Fingers crossed for a better mood tomorrow.

Triptych (IKEA)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

As far as I know Gideon has seen neither anything with Guardians of the Galaxy's Yondu or an Alabama Sheriff, but when we're heading into combat in Zelda he does an amazing impression while yelling his battle cry of "C'mere Boy!"

Edit: Aha! Turns out it's from a school friend!

I've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.

This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.

Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.

The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.

British weather tends to be more chaotic than the weather north or south of us. This is because Spain (for instance) is fairly reliably in the warm weather caused by the heating tropics. And Norway is fairly reliably cold, due to proximity to the North Pole. But Britain can be part of either weather system, as the "barrier" between them is pulled North or South by a few hundred miles depending on the movement of the high pressure areas in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, either funnelling the warm air up to us or channeling the cool air down to us.

You can see that at the moment the warm weather is being slowly blown North-East, now that the cold weather isn't pushing its way down to us:


So, next time we get a period of warm weather at the end of Winter/start of Spring followed by a sudden burst of freezing weather for a few days, that's the polar vortex collapsing. And if we suddenly go from warm weather to cold (or vice versa)  it's because we've switched weather system.

If you'd like to read more, then this is quite good.

(And apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about the weather for any appalling mistakes I've made.)