Category: Fediverse

China Miéville described “mainstream” literature as a genre with a successful multi-decade campaign to convince people that it wasn’t a genre.

@bridgebury @auntiekiki @rhiannonrevolts I was at a Comic-Con panel once on which China Miéville described “mainstream” literature as a genre with a successful multi-decade campaign to convince people that it wasn’t a genre. I thought it was a good description.

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Link: Biosphere 2: A Once Troubled Social Experiment is Transformed

Biosphere 2: A Once Troubled Social Experiment is Transformed

That means researchers from the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada don’t have to worry about harming the environment while studying how plants in the tiny rainforest adjust their water consumption.

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Heatsink inside!

Heatsink inside! A photo I originally took to try to get some idea of what the power supply was in this particular computer without pulling things out, so I could figure out what limitations I was working with for upgrading. I think it looks interesting.

I’ve since upgraded every component I *can* in it: CPU, RAM, SDD, graphics…but it still can’t handle The Bard’s Tale IV, which is really disappointing, since I’ve been looking forward to it since the start of the Kickstarter campaign.

Sunset lighting up the clouds before tonight’s rainstorm.

Sunset lighting up the clouds before tonight’s rainstorm. It was one of those moments when you just stop wherever you can because you know that if you try to get to a good spot, the light will have changed and the moment will be gone. So there are power lines and telephone poles, but at least I captured the light.

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Rain! I was literally about to hit the send button on this when it started: …

Rain! I was literally about to hit the send button on this when it started: No rain here, unless you count a smattering of drops that have already evaporated from the windshield, but clouds in the distance are lighting up with occasional flashes of lightning.

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Downside: I’m in the laundry room, starting a load of laundry.

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Kiddo came out with an umbrella. Then wanted to walk in the rain. (It’s southern California, we haven’t had any rain since spring.) The lighting was far enough away that I agreed, and as it turned out the rain stopped by the time we reached the corner.

But we were able to find a halfway decent vantage point to watch the lightning off in the hills.

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Using the Google+ news to make a point about attack surface: Your old online accounts …

Using the Google+ news to make a point about attack surface: Your old online accounts can put you at risk even if you’re not using them anymore.

Laughing at Google+ bug? You’re making a big mistake.

The popularity of Google+ is a distraction when you’re thinking about Google+ as part of a consumer’s broader “attack surface”…The more accounts you have, the bigger your digital footprint and the wider your attack surface.

Taking it a bit further:

Does the account still have access to anything else? Unlink it!

Do you use the same password anywhere else? Change those passwords!

Does it have private information on it that could be used to impersonate you on another account? Think about whether you still want to keep it around.

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LIDAR survey reveals ancient Maya civilization had much bigger cities than we once thought.

LIDAR survey reveals ancient Maya civilization had much bigger cities than we once thought.

This major discovery upends long-held theories about the Maya civilization

In the autumn of 1929, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and her husband Charles flew across the Yucatán Peninsula. With Charles at the controls, Anne snapped photographs of the jungles just below. She wrote in her journal of Maya structures obscured by large humps of vegetation.

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Boosting brion@mastodon.technology: Found them! Five photos, taken in fading dusk light after panickingly searching for my camera …

Found them! Five photos, taken in fading dusk light after panickingly searching for my camera during what I sincerely hoped was a _test_ missile. 😉

Missile5

This was the October 3, 1999 antiballistic missile system test described here http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/03/news/mn-18259

Files scanned October 14, 1999, and sat around for aaaaages. 🙂

Exhaust and exploding missile debris

KelsonV shared a status by brion:

The milky-way-like blob from exhaust and exploding missile debris makes for lovely formations in the fading high-altitude sunlight, which were quite the rorschach test for my friends.

I recall I thought one photo looked like the starship Enterprise; the lady at the photo shop (before good digital cameras!) said it looked like an angel; my classmate said it looked like a dog. 🙂

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I might actually have a copy of at least one of those pictures. I’ll take a look.

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I found this one. No EXIF, and the text file only notes that you took it, but the files are timestamped Oct. 4, 2003.

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And now it’s even more distributed!

I’ll email you the original(?) file, since Mastodon seems to have resampled it even though it didn’t need to resize it.

Finally got around to curating my photos from an August hike at Madrona Marsh in …

Finally got around to curating my photos from an August hike at Madrona Marsh in Torrance, California. This was the first time I’d ever been to the marsh that there was *no standing water left*. Usually the lowest part of the preserve still has some ponds even into fall, but this summer, it had all dried up.

Full album (12 items) on Flickr

#photography #marsh #summer #dry #nature #flowers #fungus #spiderwebs

On Photog.Social

And I just know half of them are going to be “So and so looked …

And I just know half of them are going to be “So and so looked at one of the posts on this page, you should ask them to subscribe!” and “We have a new friend suggestion for you!” (Who I’ve never heard of) and things like that. And I’ll have to go through all of those in a dropdown to find the 2 people who responded to something I cross-posted from Instagram last week.

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