I find myself thinking about Sam’s speech a lot. About how in the stories that really matter, people faced overwhelming darkness, and had a lot of chances to stop, but they kept going.
A Reminder About Story Middles
Tag: TODO: Consolidate
Clouds flow over the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains
Clouds flow over the snow-covered #SanGabrielMountains above #LosAngeles this morning. We've had a decent amount of rain this December, and snow in the mountains, leading to hopes for a wet winter and enough water to store for next summer.
Oh, and skiing for those who are into that sort of thing 😁
I need to start collecting screenshots of ghost Pokestops…
I need to start collecting screenshots of ghost Pokestops. Not ghost-type nests, but the stops that highlight something that isn’t there anymore.
In my area there are several murals that have been painted over, fountains that have been converted to planters, a park pond that’s become a splash pad, a sculpture in a store that’s been bulldozed…
It’s like a digital afterlife for landmarks.
#PokemonGo
Fox Squirrel (posing at Wilson Park)
Most of the squirrels I see are really skittish around people. This one, in a city park, walked up to me and posed. I think it was expecting me to feed it.
Gotta squeeze every last drop of “monetization” outta those profiles!
Reply to @dansup’s link to Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
@dansup Gotta squeeze every last drop of “monetization” outta those profiles!
@dansup Seriously, though, I’ve been slowly moving away from Instagram all year. The more control FB exerts on it, the less it feels like a place I want to be.
I’m not at the point of deleting my account yet, but I’m not posting there anymore & I’m seriously considering dropping all the accounts I follow except for people I actually know, and paring down my archive.
Um, I’ll be sure to keep that in mind… 😬 #Beedril
Christmas already? Spotted last night, a full week before Halloween. #holidaycreep
Christmas already? Spotted last night, a full week before Halloween.
Oh, come on. It’s still September. #HolidayCreep is getting ridiculous. Sorry, I mean *more* ridiculous.
Oh, come on. It's still September. #HolidayCreep is getting ridiculous.
Sorry, I mean *more* ridiculous.
Grey Goose
Literally confusing hawks and doves.
Usually #iNaturalist’s AI is pretty good at narrowing down to a genus, but sometimes it can get confused. Like this #pigeon sitting on a silk floss tree branch. It was “pretty sure” it was a *hawk*.
Um, nope!
I can sort of see that with the first image, but the second one makes it blindingly obvious!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/30408488
@KelsonV I just realized it’s literally confusing hawks and doves.
Not sure if this sign is in Qbert-ese or represents a store that’s named for a swear word…
Not sure if this #sign is in Qbert-ese or represents a store that’s named for a swear word…
rambling thoughts on self hosting
Thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that.
I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server on a Lollipop or FreedomBox, but it’s more self-hosted than someone using WordPress.com. It’s also more self-hosted than someone using the managed WordPress hosting at the same web host.
The key advantages of self-hosting are privacy and control. Unless a service uses end-to-end encryption, the admins at each level can probably read your stuff – you have to trust that they won’t do it unless they have to.
And of course when you run your own service, you don’t have to fear losing control when Google Plus shuts down, or Flickr changes their pricing structure, or Tumblr changes their TOS, or MySpace botches a server migration.
The obvious disadvantage of self-hosting, of course, is that you’re on the hook for all the maintenance. Spam filtering, moderation, security updates, server migrations – those are all on you.
And unless you’re using your own software, even on your own box there’s still the risk that a project is going to shut down & leave you without security fixes, or pivot to a new direction that no longer fits what you want. (So glad WP’s block editor is still optional!)
@iona Yeah, that’s sort of the balance I’ve settled on, too. I manage the top-level web apps, but my webhost handles the hardware, the virtualization and the LAMP stack.
(And email. Ugh, I’d forgotten how much of a pain a mailserver can be to handle until I tried to set one up on a Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago.)
I guess I’m kind of splitting the difference.
Critical Infrastructure.
Just a few Flashes (and a Rainbow Raider) who I saw at WonderCon this year
Just a few Flashes (and a Rainbow Raider) who I saw at WonderCon this year. There were a bunch more, including a TV Barry/Iris couple, a Jedi Flash, and more.
These are just the ones who slowed down long enough for me to take a photo! 🙂 Check out my full cosplay gallery on Flickr:
#Cosplay #WonderCon #WonderCon2019 #TheFlash #KidFlash #RainbowRaider #BlackFlash
Took the new camera to WonderCon for cosplay photography
Took the new camera to #WonderCon for #cosplay #photography.
1. I finally have a camera that can really handle inside lighting at a convention center!
2. I’ve gotten too used to just capturing costumes, instead of composing interesting shots.
2a. My 8YO took 1 photo all weekend (#InsideOut) & it ended up being the best that day. I took the lesson & improved my shots the next day, including the other 3 here.
#HarryPotter #BeautyAndTheBeast #LittleShopOfHorrors
There was a lot of Harry Potter cosplay at WonderCon…
There was a lot of #HarryPotter #cosplay at #WonderCon this past weekend! Here are some of my photos. There are a lot more that I missed – people dressed as the Malfoys, students of course, other professors and so on.
My full gallery for the convention is on Flickr at
#Voldemort #BellatrixLestrange #Hagrid #ProfessorTrelawney #Dumbledore #ArthurWeasley #RitaSkeeter #ProfessorUmbridge #GilderoyLockhart
I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes
I took this with my phone to use as a reference for a photo I took with another camera. I wasn’t intending to do anything with it, but I find it *fascinating* that the phone’s digital zoom function makes it look like it’s made up of brushstrokes instead of pixels.
(Though personally, I’ve never understood why digital zoom is implemented as a resize instead of just cropping to a lower resolution.)
Back up your accounts!
In the last few months:
– Tumblr purged adult content (and a bunch of stuff it misindentified).
– Flickr purged free storage above a limit of 1000 photos/account.
– Myspace deleted 12 years’ worth of music.
And Google+ only has two weeks left before Google pulls its plug.
Back up your accounts!
And if you can, consider donating to the Internet Archive. https://archive.org
On Wandering.shop
Expanded on K2R: Year of the Social Media Purge
I realize I didn’t make this clear, but I mean back up ALL your social media accounts. Mastodon too.
I’m not trying to say that these four services are doomed and you should bail. I actually have more confidence in Flickr than I did a year ago!
It’s that if you’re not running the site yourself, you can’t be sure they won’t change business models, shut down, have their servers washed away in a flood, or lose everything to massive database corruption.
Request archives from all your accounts.
@kline suggests helping ArchiveTeam crawl sites for those who can’t donate to the Internet Archive
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, …
Tonight’s waxing crescent moon. It’s passing in front of the Hyades star cluster right now, which I’d love to get a photo of, but the moon’s just waaay too bright to capture the background stars!
#photography #moon #night #stargazing
Downloaded MCEdit so the 8YO can edit Minecraft world’s. He used it to fill 10 …
Downloaded MCEdit so the 8YO can edit Minecraft world’s. He used it to fill 10 entire chunks with TNT. Then lit one of the edges. The chain reaction has been going for at least 10 minutes, punctuated by periods of major lag.