Merged – Page 2 – KelsonV Social Posts

Over on birdsite, I just read a thread about people not bothering to look outside …

Over on birdsite, I just read a thread about people not bothering to look outside their bubble to see the general discourse* that the OP was complaining about.

Over here, I’ve seen a few complaints over the last day or so about *something* in the general discourse here…but because of the way Mastodon is structured, I don’t know *how* to look for it other than to ask.

(*Also, I’m not sure I’m using the term “discourse” right here. I mean the overall conversation on each platform.)

On Wandering.shop

I mean, I get that the point of a subtoot is to *not* call attention to something specific when you feel you just have to say something, and figure those who know about it will understand.

But when it’s clearly commenting on a problem with the platform or community, I kind of struggle with:
– Is this something I should be aware of?
– Is this none of my business?

On Wandering.shop

Flickr Hot Take

When Yahoo realized they’d missed the smartphone shift, they tried to make Flickr something it wasn’t suited for (Instagram! Look, filters!) & couldn’t sustain (cloud storage for ALL your photos, just like FB!) Maybe chasing FB kept them alive for a while, but it put them in a bind down the road.

It sucks that SmugMug is deleting pics, but taking it back to basics might make it more viable long-term.

Maybe they can become a 1st-rate Flickr instead of a 3rd-rate Instagram or FB.

On Wandering.shop

Expanded on my blog:

https://hyperborea.org/journal/2019/02/flickr-purge/

On Wandering.shop

It’s like…Sauron ran a Palantir botnet…

@hummingrain IIRC the palantir weren’t intrinsically evil either, it was just that Sauron was on the network and was really good at manipulating people by figuring out how to exploit their psychology.

On Wandering.shop

@hummingrain It’s like…Sauron ran a Palantir botnet that spewed out propaganda to convince Saruman and Denethor that his victory was absolutely certain, and Saruman decided to join the winning team while Denethor lost all hope.

On Wandering.shop

Vaccinate. Your. Kids.

“After smallpox was eradicated in 1980, measles became the leading killer of children globally”

Measles outbreak hits children in Portland due to low vaccination rate.

Vaccinate. Your. Kids.

Vaccinating your kids won’t make them autistic. That’s been tested over and over again, and there’s no link.

It will protect them, their classmates & their friends from potentially deadly diseases.

And honestly…even if there was a tiny chance that vaccines caused autism (again, all the research shows that they don’t)… Wouldn’t you rather your child be autistic than dead?

Comparing Voldemort and Grindelwald

Voldemort’s basically about power: people follow him because they see they’ll gain in the power structure he’s setting up, or figure that if they get on his good side, he’ll protect them.

Grindelwald is a demagogue, telling people what they want to hear in order to get them to support him. He still wants to oppress people, but his power base is built on persuasion rather than intimidation.

#HarryPotter #FantasticBeasts

On Wandering.shop

But since both villains draw on WW2 parallels, both wizarding wars have a strong element of metaphoric racism. Grindelvald’s followers & Voldemort’s both believe their genetic group is superior and should be in charge.

And having said that, now I’m reminded of the line in Catherynne Valente’s “Space Opera” about how *all* wars are about deciding who counts as a person, and who’s just meat.

It tracks.

#HarryPotter #FantasticBeasts #SpaceOpera

On Wandering.shop

I’ve been at home, sick, for the last 2 days, which means when the SSD …

I’ve been at home, sick, for the last 2 days, which means when the SSD for the new computer FINALLY arrived, I spent the afternoon installing the drive, Windows, all the drivers, and key applications, including a game the kiddo has been wanting to play for ages (but couldn’t due to hardware specs on the old PC).

And coughing and sneezing a lot.

This afternoon, after school, he finally got to play it!

For 10 minutes, before the power went out.

On Wandering.shop

To my amazement and relief, he took it in stride, even as the power kept fluctuating for the next hour.

On Wandering.shop

@FiXato The weird thing is, he usually isn’t. I think maybe he’d gotten used to waiting for the specific thing, so it didn’t bother him so much. 🤷‍♂️

But yeah, the first time your kid gets sick can be nerve-wracking.

On Wandering.shop

@sohkamyung Thanks.

The power did eventually stabilize, and he got to spend some time seriously playing.

Then I went to lie down for the rest of the afternoon. @&*$! cold.

On Wandering.shop

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.

On Wandering.shop

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

On Wandering.shop

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.

On Wandering.shop

The GOP keeps saying they aren’t anti-woman. They could show that by putting this nomination on hold and let the FBI investigate the sexual assault claims before they vote on confirmation, instead of pushing ahead over objections.

The GOP keeps saying they aren’t anti-woman. They could show that by putting this nomination on hold and let the FBI investigate the sexual assault claims before they vote on confirmation, instead of pushing ahead over objections.

I mean, it’s not like there’s a deadline for Supreme Court confirmations that they’re up against. They held a seat open for almost a year in 2016. They can hold off for the results of an investigation.

But of course they won’t, because this is the party of “fuck you, I do what I want.”

Sometimes literally.

There’s some manipulation inherent in any structured interaction

@Satsuma Of course – that’s a large part of why a lot of us are here on Mastodon, after all.

But there’s some manipulation inherent in any structured interaction.

The fact that we can boost, favorite or reply, but not quote, is a deliberate choice on Gargron’s part.

The character limits, the number of images, visibility of CWs, the size of the edit box, column width, all of these things influence how people use the app.

On Wandering.shop

@Satsuma I remember @anildash mentioning changing the size of the text box on (presumably) Movable Type & finding that people would write longer or shorter posts based on that, even though the length limit itself hadn’t changed. The UI influenced people’s choices.

On Wandering.shop

The monster/human relationship in Monsters, Inc. is upended when it’s discovered that laughter produces more power…

The monster/human relationship in Monsters, Inc. is upended when it’s discovered that laughter produces more power than screams of fear.

It’s like the opposite of social media discovering that anger produces more engagement than cat pictures.

On Wandering.shop

Imagine if social media discovered something *positive* that drove more engagement than anger?

On Wandering.shop

@Virelai I believe it searches posts that the instance you’re on knows about already, without …

@Virelai I believe it searches posts that the instance you’re on knows about already, without calling out to other instances. So it’ll show you hashtagged posts from:
– the local timeline
– remote users that local users are following.
– remote toots that have been boosted or searched by URL on this instance.

On Wandering.shop

@VirelaiI’ve found that searching on a small instance like booktoot.club turns up fewer results than searching wandering.shop or mastodon.social, but if I search for a hashtag on a bigger instance, then copy the URL of a toot over to the search box on the smaller instance, the smaller instance will find it the next time I search for that hashtag.

On Wandering.shop

Some of the comics I’ve read on that list…

Daytripper is amazing.

I quite liked the original Elfquest.

Fun Home is really good.

Planetary is a fascinating exploration of superhero/scifi tropes, but works best if you know the references.

Transmetropolitan is really good, but not everyone’s cup of tea.

Sandman is epic, but start w/the 2nd collection & go back for part 1 if you like it. It took 8 issues for the series to find its voice. So while the first collection establishes the setting and characters, it’s a very different tone from the rest of the series.

Astro City is a great reimagining of superheroes, hopeful & standing on its own.

Oh, and Hark! A Vagrant! is a lot of fun also, especially if you like literary and historical humor. It’s a collection of unrelated comic strips rather than an ongoing story.

I installed Instagram on a Chromebook to see if I could.

I can.

Um, now what?

When I first used Instagram, I really wanted to be able to upload photos from my camera & type captions with a real keyboard. But it’s been built around uploading from phones since the beginning, and it just doesn’t lend itself to any other use case, even when you can get it to run on another form factor.

Plus phone photos are a lot better now, & it’s just as easy to transfer pics from the camera to the phone.

On Wandering.shop

In the specific case of Instagram, the website doesn’t offer full functionality: you can browse & update your bio, but you can’t add new photos.

I haven’t tried any game apps yet, partly because I just got an underpowered one to use as a second laptop. (I figure if I get nice hardware, I want a real OS.) It’ll be interesting to use touch apps w/a trackpad…

But I’ve had success with utility apps for Dropbox, KeePass & a VPN.

I was surprised that the Android layer was thorough enough for a VPN app to work, but after looking around the Chrome app store a bit, I think Google decided it was better to leverage the more mature ecosystem than try to push something that never really took off.

Surely a coincidence this is increasing under the administration of a man who launched his political career by accusing the President of falsifying his natural-born citizenship.

Surely a coincidence this is increasing under the administration of a man who launched his political career by accusing the President of falsifying his natural-born citizenship.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html

It’s never been only about hardened criminals or “illegal immigration.” They’re deporting undocumented people w/no criminal record & legal immigrants w/past misdemeanors. They’re revoking naturalized citizenship & deporting natural-born citizens, claiming fraudulent birth certs.

They’re not even claiming the certs are forgeries. They’re real, official birth certificates. The claim is that the midwives or OBs put false information about which side of the border the baby was born on.

The people caught in this have lived their ENTIRE LIVES as US citizens.

Even if they’re not deported, this rejection of their citizenship status puts them in a legal limbo, and of course disenfranchises them from voting.

And you know how much the GOP loves to stop people from voting.

I do think the push for HTTPS is the way to go, but as this article points out, it’s not without cost…

I do think the push for HTTPS is the way to go, but as this article points out, it’s not without cost – especially for those with limited bandwidth, high latency & high packet loss, like rural users on satellite internet who can no longer cache locally.

https://thenextweb.com/news/securing-web-sites-with-https-made-them-less-accessible

#https #accessibility #internet #web

On Wandering.shop

But it does mean we need to find another solution for spotty connections (you can’t change the speed of light!) that *does* work with HTTPS.

On Wandering.shop

I caught up on Flash War and its aftermath. I feel like it could have …

I caught up on Flash War and its aftermath. I feel like it could have been epic, but ultimately was just a way to break up the Flash family and set up the new Forces.

That’s a problem I’m having with DC Comics lately: Stories don’t feel like they start from the characters and new threats picking up where the previous story left off, they feel like they’re working backward from where everything needs to be to set up the next story and finding a way to get there.

It’s been like that for a while. It was a problem with Flash: Rebirth, with Countdown, with Full Throttle. I sort of feel like the early New 52 escaped the problem and built more organically, at least some of the books I was reading. But those kept getting cancelled.

If you compare Final Crisis to Metal, they’re both similar in structure: cosmic threat turns earth into a nightmare between panels, the heroes seek help from the multiverse to restore the world. But Final Crisis *finishes.* Metal sets up the alloys, the Challengers & Hawks, the crack in the Source Wall. It’s more like COIE in the way it works hard to set things up for the coming year(s) of stories.

We have book clubs at booktoot.club!

@stefanhayden @andeluuu @Mastodon We have book clubs at https://booktoot.club ! #sffbookclub, #nfbookclub, #storyclub & a few others.

On Wandering.shop

@andeluuu @stefanhayden @Mastodon Just check out the hashtags to see what people are reading. There’s a master list at https://fediverse-reads.dreamwidth.org

Joining the specific instance isn’t required, since hashtag columns will federate.

On Wandering.shop

@andeluuu @stefanhayden @Mastodon I mean each server will be able to see tagged posts from others, so you don’t have to move to a specific one to participate in a conversation around a hashtag.

On Wandering.shop

I’ve made a point from time to time of linking to Mastodon posts…

@stefanhayden @Mastodon

I’ve made a point from time to time of linking to Mastodon posts from birdsite & FB. Not sure how many people followed.

That said, I’m not a huge fan of the “screenshot of text” phenomenon. IMO text should be quoted so it’s accessible & searchable, not photographed…but based on my experience trying to share *just* links, screenshots might be more effective. Even if it seems backwards to me.

On Wandering.shop

@stefanhayden @Mastodon Just links & descriptions, I mean. Not URLs by themselves.

On Wandering.shop

Morbid wondering: food allergy death stats

An article on a recent incident where a college student died from peanut allergy got me thinking: most news stories about people dying from #anaphylaxis are about kids or teens. You rarely hear about a 40-year old or even 30-year-old dying from a #foodallergy. It happens (which is why I still carry an EpiPen everywhere), just not as often.

I couldn’t find any solid numbers, but wrote up some speculation in my blog: https://hyperborea.org/journal/2018/07/age-food-allergy-death/

On Wandering.shop

It occurs to me that the impending start of #SDCC is probably another factor in why I started thinking about this, as it’s coming up on 5 years since my “adventure” leaving Comic Con in an ambulance due to a peanut-laced mocha from a nearby cafe. I could’ve been one of those rare cases in my late 30s.

On Wandering.shop