Avris

Politics sucks. Even people who are honestly interested in all the political games often admit: it’s shit.

I would compare it to the Scrum methodology – it might be a useful tool to get your team to get the shit done, but it often ends up resulting in more meetings about what to do than actually doing it.

What if instead of elections we just had a draw?

For whatever reason, many monotheists seem proud of believing in just one god as opposed to those “pagans” who believe in many. They consider it some kind of a “progress” (well, one is closer to the actual number of gods – zero – so technically it might be correct). But are they really monotheistic?

When you walk into the church I used to attend as a child, what do you see in the very center? Yes, the tabernacle, allegedly containing god himself. But what’s way way above it? What’s surrounded by golden ornaments and votive offerings? A figurine of Mary.

Platforma Obywatelska obiecała, że wprowadzą głosowanie elektroniczne. Ta partia nie jest znana z realizowania obietnic, więc nie boję się zbytnio, że ten okropny, okropny pomysł wejdzie dzięki nim w życie. Ale temat mnie poruszył, bo widzę, jak bardzo ludzie są zafascynowani taką opcją i jak bezkrytycznie ją popierają, myśląc, że skoro wszystko inne jest lepsze dzięki komputerom, to głosowanie też musi.

Otóż wcale nie musi.

I just had a chance to watch a prerelease showing of “Blinded by the Light”.

I started crying during one of the first scenes and I couldn’t stop till the end.

Homophobes get offended when I compare their anti-LGBTQ bigotry to racism.

Good.

An image search brought be to Pinterest, which automatically… logged me in to an old account, I didn’t even remember I had. I definitely never logged in on this browser.

They just logged me in without asking. WTF?!

Ostatnio widzę, że wiele osób robi dobrze Kościołowi katolickiemu, publicznie namawiając ludzi, by nie dokonywali formalnej apostazji.

Twierdzą, że to “upokarzające”, że Kk i tak nie usunie twoich danych, i że wciąż będzie uznawał cię za katolika (tylko ekskomunikowanego), więc w sumie to po co się fatygować?

No właśnie, po co?

I know, I know, all this will be pure speculation. But does it not sound really likely?

Imagine that you have a partner of opposite sex, but you don’t really have the greatest relationship... And your conservative parents or grandparents are constantly nagging you: “when is the wedding?”, “when will we get grandchildren?”, blah blah blah... Then you turn on TV and you see people there who cannot get married or have children, but they would very much want to. How would you feel about it?

Niektórzy twierdzą, że problem pedofilii w Kościele katolickim wynika wprost z celibatu – skoro nie mogą z kobietami, to z jakiegoś powodu biorą się za dzieci. Może i po części coś w tym jest, ale upraszczanie całej sprawy do tak prostej zależności nie jest wcale solidniejszą logiką niż zrzucanie całej winy na homoseksualistów, jak to oficjalnie robi Kk.

It might be obvious for most people, (you know, those who know the meaning of words), but apparently, judging from the tweet above and the answers to it, (where Polish right-wingers show WNBR as an example of how the LGBTQ community has “deprived” the West), some people still confuse naturism with exhibitionism and they think that it’s gay...

Well, here’s why it’s neither of those things:

Who killed Dumbledore? It was Snape, right? We’ve all read the book, we saw Snape cast the spell... But Dumbledore kinda killed himself, right...? And it wouldn’t have happened without Malfoy, right? And what about the role of Voldemort in that death?

Dyskusja dyskusją, ale co mnie w powyższym tweecie najbardziej zaciekawiło, to homofobia kryjąca się aż na trzy różne sposoby w samym tylko pierwszym zdaniu:

Did anyone receive a message recently that contained a video of me watching porn?

Because apparently I was being blackmailed that all my contacts would receive it, if I don’t pay 202€ in BTC. Alas, I didn’t check the spam folder, so I’d missed the deadline a week ago ‍

PinkNews has just shown an example of “great” journalism by reporting about the list of Hollywood’s smallest penises. An inclusive LGBTQ news portal taking part in body shaming? What a disgrace!

Also: someone seriously still gives a fuck about someone else’s cock size? You probably won’t even sleep with any of those celebrities anyway. Just stop invading their privacy already...

Anyways... maybe it’s time for me to weigh in a bit on the subject of cock sizes?

Depending on one company with all of your data is pretty risky. Even if we ignore the obvious privacy concerns of when some corporation knows everything about you... Just imagine what would happen to you personally, if one day that corporation would just... disappear for whatever reason. Say, Google gets a huge fine from the European Commission for one of their monopolistic practices or shitting on their users’ privacy, and turns out they don’t recover from that. How screwed are you?

One day you lose your emails, photos, passwords, documents, notes, calendar, what else?

So, recently I decided to diversify my technical dependencies. Not to boycott Google completely, but to at least use it less.

Pan Dziewiecki zasłynął ostatnio tym, jak z ambony ogłosił, że osoby niewierzące w boga nie są zdolne do miłości. Jest to wierutną bzdurą, co dla większości jest zapewnie oczywiste. Pozostałym służę krótkim wypunktowaniem.

To fascynujące, że choć “prof. dr hab.” przed nazwiskiem świadczy o imponującym dorobku naukowym, to wystarczy dodać “ks.”, żeby tytuł “ks. prof. dr hab.” nie świadczył zupełnie o niczym.

I’ve finally seen “Spotlight”. And then, for the first time in my life, I grabbed the first object around and angrily threw it on the floor. And, of course, I burst into tears out of helplessness.

Przez kilka dni obserwowałem, jak wygląda świat z perspektywy twitterowego prawicowca. Zobaczyłem świat tak przeżarty nienawiścią, że aż chce mi się ryczeć.

Well, why not both?

I know, I know, it doesn’t sound like a question with two possible answers that are not mutually exclusive, but let me rephrase it first.

The PHP ecosystem is full of frameworks: Symfony, Laravel, Yii, Zend, Phalcon, and so many, many, many more... All of them built by professionals and supported by big communities. So why on earth would a junior developer, who has just started his first job, try his hand in building yet another one?

Well, here’s why:

Ever wondered, why does the biblical arch-enemy have such cool names? “Satan” means “the accuser”. Is he accusing the God Almighty himself? What could he possibly have on that omnipotent, benevolent guy? “Lucifer” means “light-bringing”. Does it mean he brings the humanity the knowledge, the enlightenment?

Could it be, that Satan is the good guy?

Today I realised how two completelly opposite techniques can be used together to manipulate people in a really consistent way. That’s what the Catholic Church (and religions in general) do: they make complex issues look simple, but they digress for ages about really simple stuff – overall turning the reality upside-down.

One Galleon is 17 Sickles and one Sickle is 29 Knuts... The wizarding currency isn’t too simple or practical, is it? Muggles also have struggled for ages with overcomplicated, inconsistent systems of units. But then we adapted the SI – and since then we got used to using this simple, decimal system.

There is one thing though that we still measure in strange units. 60 seconds go in a minute, 60 minutes go in an hour, 24 hours go in a day. There’s 365 days in a year, except when it’s 366, and they can be divided into 52 weeks of 7 days, with some days left over, or alternatively into 12 months of 28, 29, 30 or 31 days each, depending on... reasons.

Could we simplify all that mess?

Religious people often threaten atheists with what will happen to them after death, if they don’t convert. Yeah, cause out of all the different made-up stories about what happens after death, it’s specifically yours that’s gonna be the right one. Right...

Let’s revert that question into “what if you’re wasting your life on religious bullshit”. It’s not as scary, because if it’s the case, you won’t notice you were wrong (that’s how being dead works). Still, your current life is the only one that you know for sure you’re gonna get. Are you really willing to waste it?

I’ve lived in three countries so far, and for me it’s really interesting to see how differently they do some things that I’ve never even thought could be done differently. Today: addresses.

Almost everyone knows that in Japan you use blocks instead of street names and that buildings within a block are numbered chronologically, not geographically. But that’s Asia, right? How much can one European country be different from another?

15 września ulicami mojego rodzinnego Szczecina przejdzie pierwszy w historii Marsz Równości. Trzymam kciuki za Lambdę, by wreszcie się to udało!

Tymczasem “środowisko patriotyczne i kombatanckie” śle do prezydenta Krzystka list, który jest tak absurdalny, że aż nie wiem, czy się z niego śmiać, czy położyć się i czekać na śmierć z zażenowania.

I’ve lived in three countries so far, and I got some official documents from all of them (Germans definitely spam way more than the others). I think it’s interesting to compare, how different approaches they have to the design of those documents.

I baked a cake. It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t impressive, I don’t have a picture to share, I’m not planning to use this recipe ever again or even to eat it whole.

But still, it was quite an important cake for me.

There is a website I’ve created many years ago, Stosłowia (Polish only), which collects stories of up to a hundred words. It never got any users, but I didn’t really care to promote it in any way either.

Last week I’ve decided to rewrite it from scratch, because so many things were wrong about it – from an ancient backend in plain PHP with hardcoded credentials and no separation of concerns, to login with Facebook (and only Facebook) that stopped working... Now it’s a fresh Symfony 4.1 with Encore with some new features (like automatic screenshot generation, seen for instance on Twitter).

But what I’d like to show you, is how a couple of pretty small design changes have made the whole website way nicer visually (IMHO).

There is a song by Faun (“Tanz mit mir”) in which a girl agrees to dance with a guy and then spend the night with him, but only if he is “faithful” and “doesn’t kiss any other girl”.

It got me thinking... From a perspective of a non-monogramist that sounds like an extremely low bar for cheating. Really, a kiss is too much already? Maybe he can’t even check out a girl? Oh, right, he probably can’t.

If we counted how many kisses or hugs me and my husband have given out to other guys, we’d have to get divorced repeatedly... Does it mean people in open relationships have no bar whatsoever? Hell no! We can feel cheated too!

Pope Francis wrote a letter to all Catholics, in which he vows no more sexual abuse cover-ups. Cool... So when pope does it, it’s called “a Letter to the People of God”? If I vowed not to cover for criminals, it would be called “basic human decency”.

It’s honestly diffucult being a webdeveloper in the world of shitty websites. I guess that’s how hairdressers feel when they see my pathetic hair after it’s been a while since my last visit...

But the thing is, even though it’s technically easy to use scissors and clippers, I don’t do that on my own hair, I leave that to the professionals.

Jak już chyba wszyscy w polskich internetach wiedzą, redaktor Frondy, wstydzący się podpisać nazwiskiem pod swoim tekstem, trzęsie portami przed “szatanem” kryjącym się w autobusie linii 666 na Hel i żąda od “świeckiego” państwa interwencji ze względu na swoją mitologię.

Mam do niego parę (retorycznych) pytań, bo chyba nie przemyślał za dobrze swoich żądań...

I’m sick and tired of biggots treating me hatefully because of my sexual orientation.

Especially, if they are catholic. Why? Because they have even less of a moral highground than the other biggots. Here’s the logic: