Day 309

I have spent all day moving my office back into the bedroom. I ended up building and unbuilding a set of shelves when it became obvious that there wasn’t really enough space to bring the studio in here with me, too, so I’ll be going back to the old way of broadcasting for the duration (ie using software instead of a manual mixer and a separate broadcast machine. Did a test transmission, and that was a disaster, until, in a classic example of role reversal, A came in here and told me I was using the microphone the wrong way round. And that moment was kind of heartening.

I’ve briefly complained of the lack of NHS dentists previously. Of course, a filling fell out of one of my teeth last night, and I think a bit of the tooth broke off. My NHS dentist is still in Diss, and they don’t do emergency stuff on Saturdays. So I called a surgery just ten minutes’ walk from here. Get this – no emergency appointments until December! It’s madness. All of it. I’m lucky – I can afford to think to myself that if it costs me a hundred pounds to get this tooth fixed, that’s doable (especially with our heating turned down, as it is). There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who are self-medicating wth super glue, booze, blutak, God knows what, because they haven’t got access to a dentist. I am going to try some other dentists tomorrow (even though it’s Sunday), but the office was the priority for today (as will the garage be tomorrow). If the remaining tooth wasn’t ripping my tongue to shreds, I would wait till Monday (but even then I know that the demand at my dentist will be so huge that I’ll probably have to wait another week). Yet another example of how the Tories have run down the National Health Service so they can privatise it. Added to the cost-of-living crisis, almost entirely caused by Brexit and entirely by the Tories, the nation’s health, never mind its economy, is in rapid decline.

I joined Mastodon earlier today – in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a service similar to twitter, except it’s not owned by any one single person, and is run on a distributed model (in other words, there is no central server, in simple terms – if I wanted, I could start a server, but I’m not about to do so). The entry point isn’t very clear, because it asks you to choose a server without making it clear that whichever server you do choose, you’ll be able to see the whole of Mastodon (the Fediverse as it’s called). It’s actually a better idea to choose a server that doesn’t have many users because they tend to be quicker. I didn’t know that, so, media whore that I am, I chose one with lots of users which is correspondingly slow (also due to the fact that a) it’s just upgrading, and b) that there’s a veritable flood of people setting up Mastodon accounts whilst still keeping their twitter accounts for the time being). On that note, Musk is acting like the right-wing apologist that he is – class action law suits already filed against him by a group of people he just sacked without due process (and this will be replicated globally, I think – the law suits; the sackings already are).

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 241