Here are some pictures of my cat sleeping like a weirdo. 🐱
Newsletter
My biggest complaint about the slow, excruciating car crash of Twitter/X is that all of my journalist friends moved to Bsky and all my geek friends moved to Mastodon.
One of the stranger parts of watching Golden Bachelor, which otherwise mimics the shiny gloss of the rest of the franchise, is how much they openly discuss death, grief and dying. www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2…
More human and humane
Wednesday, October 25, 2023 • 1
Hilariously (sadly? regretfully?), since I’ve been writing online for public audiences since about 1997, I’ve been thinking about the art of posting, community building, and who benefits and how, for a very long time. All of this (https://blog.ayjay.org/the-three-paths-of-micro-blog/) sounds about right, specifically: “…it will — by design — never be a place for you to monetize your brand, troll, shitpost, or become an influencer. But hey, there are plenty of other platforms better suited for that kind of thing.
Very excited for the movie
Wednesday, October 25, 2023 • 1
Finished reading: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann 📚 “For years after the American Revolution, the public opposed the creation of police departments, fearing that they would become forces of repression. “Only in the mid-nineteenth century, after the growth of industrial cities and a rash of urban riots—after dread of the so-called dangerous classes surpassed dread of the state—did police departments emerge in the United States.”
I’m a dummy, but I can’t log into mastodon.social since connecting with micro.blog. What am I doing wrong? Or do I need to log in elsewhere?
Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog
My phone camera has been busted for most of the summer, but tonight I have an appointment to get it fixed. When it is, it’s all over for you suckers (I’m going to post a lot of photos).
While noodling around on other things, I ran across the omg.lol domain (https://home.omg.lol/), clicked around, found Neatnik (https://neatnik.net/), and this fun PHP project where he created a year-long calendar that automatically resizes to fit a single page.
See the whole year on one sheet of paper. Any sheet of paper: neatnik.net/calendar/
This is one to watch: www.theverge.com/2023/10/2…
Finished reading: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin 📚
When I realized I’ve read more about him than by him, I had to rectify that problem. So many of the geopolitical problems he discusses are still relevant, and Baldwin’s voice is as clear and urgent as ever.
Finished reading: Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 📚
It holds up.
Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚
I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. After I finished this one on a road trip, I turned around and reread Poisonwood Bible on a camping trip.
🐱 Testing video. This is a zine I started doodling, depicting my cat’s favorite things.
As a professional poster (derogatory), this is exactly the kind of posting stream I’m interested in supporting for institutional communications. When you speak on behalf of a company or institution, you need the power to own your own platforms and content, the agility of posting to multiple channels from one platform/location, and it needs to be user friendly. We need support and ease of use, and since I’m also in public education, it would be great if we could do some of that for free or close to it.
I’m here after listening to this podcast yesterday, after a months-long conversation about abandoning social media in my department (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon). With the move to algorithmic CPC taking priority over newsworthiness across most platforms, we saw a major drop in engagement. That was after the ridiculous “pivot to video” disaster, though departments like mine nonetheless consider video production in a real way every few months. We decided to call it after Twitter, the final app that answered our need for just-in-time communication, decided to become a walled garden with bad SEO. We’re going to let those channels go dark and focus on talking to our stakeholders in more effective ways.
I’ve been playing with Bluesky and Mastodon on my own, and in many ways, this micro.blog communication channel fits what we need. It doesn’t hurt that I like an indie model with a friendly vibe (micro.blog functionality reminds me a little of early self-hosted blogging and this site feels a little like early Tumblr). The problem: our audiences are not here. We still need to be able to post to myriad platforms, including the big baddies that we’d rather ignore.
My daughter is into block printing at the moment, so I am too. I started carving this shrimp past weekend without a plan, and now I wish I had some background to it, so I’m going to play with making a second stamp that implies water. A shrimp’s gotta shkrimp. 🎨
My ultra rural friend wants to use the Libby app to listen to and read library books but can’t get a library card in her county without playing an exorbitant fee. She lives in an area of the Midwest that is mostly farmland, depopulated by age and brain drain and the death of family farming, and her district does not pay into the county library system.
Maddened by this, I found this list of inexpensive libraries that allow for annual out-of-state memberships.
One of my toxic traits is that I think I can make everyone love beets. Another is that I think I can make everyone love beans.
I’m a new poster posting.
