Author | Lightnews

Hannah Dawson

@fairlysadpanda.bsky.social

520 followers 40 following 860 posts

Senior backend engineer, CCP Games London. VR games developer and artist. Sometimes do politics, mental health and north London permitting. Liberal Democrat, somewhat hawkish, very pro-Europe. I use she/her pronouns, and I hope you have a lovely day.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · Oct 21

Hey! I'm Hannah, a trans games developer (specializing in gameplay<->server engineering), a hobbyist artist and game designer, a VR enthusiast and sometimes a Liberal Democrat political activist.

If you follow this account, expect a smorgasboard of the above topics and some bad puns.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

Wes Streeting

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

Whiplash from "a columnist I've followed for years said a nice thing about my skeet" to "oh god my mentions"

Uhhhh read this guy's newsletter and pick up the FT sometimes, it's like a normal newspaper but all the celebrity gossip is about company mergers

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 2d

Always enjoy talking to Hannah on here, but this observation in particular is a real missing tooth of a “I really wish I’d thought of this and written it”, on how Brexit accelerated so many parliamentary careers.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 5d

Wheras for Badenoch ten more years would have either put paid to her via a dumb scandal or have seen here consigned to the fringe, and Starmer would have never risen beyond cabinet minister.

This is all still the echoing consequences of one bad vote in 2016.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

OK, Labour's problem starts with not recognizing the party mood and allowing one of the worst possible choices from the SGC to get onto the ballot in 2015, but without Brexit you don't get May's 2017 gamble which artificially extended his shelf-life by two years.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

When a political party ends up realizing it's done something so cataclysmic that "invent time travel" becomes step 1 of the recovery strategy, that is very bad. But the real cost is if that situation drags out for years. The LDs made bad pledges in 2009. The Tories and Labour had Brexit.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

To me the important view is that for every Macron, you have ten Swinsons and Sunaks. If chaos means you run out of Mays, Cables, Swinneys, you end up with novices and firebrands in charge, and suddenly the smarter party staff are working for charities, and the assumption of competency fails.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

Thanks for the compliment. It can be a bit fan-fiction-y to guess at stuff like this, but it can come up with interesting stuff. But e.g. Johnson _was_ inevitably going to make a PM run. Corbyn was going to implode. Covid was going to happen. That SNP scandal. Farron's religion. All somewhat fixed.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

In short: obliterated in Scotland by the SNP, oblitated in Wales by Reform with some Plaid pickups, a lot of Green noise and thunder in London that probably results in lots of Lab 40 Grn 35 losses, LDs eat every nice town in southern England, massive Farage majority.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

This handy map demonstrates how Labour loses the next election and to who, in what seat, based on Labour deciding that they'll be saved by tactical voting. (It also demonstrates why the Greens have decided to Camden-ize)

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 2d

Anyone on Labour's right thinking "tactical voting will keep Reform out" and "this means we can hold seats due to tactical voting!" need to consider unhooking themselves off the hopium gas line. The LDs had the same mantra about localism and their reward was 8 seats in 2015.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 3d

You CAN do end-to-end video game development on Ubuntu at the moment, but if you're not taking a use-Blender-for-literally-everything approach, God help you

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 3d

The actual actual answer is SteamOS if Valve were not glacially slow at everything

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 3d

Was asked my take on best Linux distro for VRChatters at the weekend, and the answer is Ubuntu 24.04, as that is the one Unity officially states their Editor supports.

The actual answer is Bazzite atm

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

(The sim, if it's dead, is not gonna be much help. If you want to be a trooper, grab one with a few free gigs of data on it, which should allow it to get onto 4G wifi and ergo ping to Google's servers, without exposing a weird phone to your own local network.)

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

Otherwise, if someone's lost the phone and reported it stolen, the phone's IMEI (serial number, think car parts) is public knowledge, grabbable from the vic's Google account, and the police _should_ have gotten it in the report. In a sane country they can ergo get the item back to its owner.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

Get it charged and able to call home to Google. If it's not been wiped, it should ping with its location to Google's Find My Device service. Otherwise you'd have to responsibly get onto the phone's internal storage via USB, and that's a crapshoot on Android depending on vendor security choices.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

Horrendous idea: set up a public option for private healthcare and return the profits to the NHS

Everyone on the funny fat jabs could be paying for your nan's hip joints

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

I picked the one I could find with the highest amount of money paid per stream :)

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 4d

Finally got annoyed enough at Spotify to switch to a less algorithm-driven app, which had the happy consequence of also not having Spotify's historically-crap compression. Nice to be able to listen to a couple of albums that had their mastering butchered and actually be able to hear the lyrics.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 5d

Moto Razr Ultra series (and the non-Ultra for midrange). 4" front screen that makes opening it for basic phone stuff pointless. Extremely holdable AND a better pocketable form-factor than a 16:9 or 21:9 phone!

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 5d

I mean everyone likes David Lammy so it could be worse

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 5d

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 5d

Sunak was a dire PM, but you can imagine the same man with 10 years more Westminster experience and not immediately following Liz Truss having done far better. There is an element of sympathising with lost causes though that helps him (see also May).

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 8d

This is set in the Space Station 14 universe. Name of the comic would be Between Uncertain Stars.

Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 8d

Quite happy with this rough given I am still really rusty. Still not sure if I want to take on a comic project.

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Hannah Dawson @fairlysadpanda.bsky.social · 10d

As a computer programmer it kinda drives me mad that the programming languages we use to talk to humans can't evolve ever, but we throw out the ones we use to talk to computers every decade or so because we learned to do it better.

Thru > through. Kinda > kind of!