Flutterby™!

Blast from the past! For years I've had an "if anyone uses webmentions, contact me" on my web page, and someone just did. And the code still works. A little susceptible to spam, but daaang.

And as I looked through the code to try to figure out what this was all about, I'm starting to think okay, maybe ActivityPub after all.

Dear freakin' every vendor: I am happiest when I have to put the least effort into completing the transaction. Asking me for my feedback and to complete a questionnaire after every single purchase makes me less happy. Thank you.

So all of the anti-drag rhetoric from right-wing politicians finally paid off for them. Stochastic terrorism is a thing, and any of the slimeballs playing the drag card right now are culpable in the murders Club Q in Colorado Springs this weekend. But apparently it takes a good guy with his bare hands to stop a bad guy with a gun: Army veteran recounts subduing gunman at Colorado LGBTQ club.

Just putting things away in the shop and... Wow that's a flashback to many years ago...

This article on the impacts of ranching on Point Reyes National Seashore is why I pay for local journalism. And why we in Sonoma County need to take a good long look at local agriculture. https://bohemian.com/the-befou...f-point-reyes-national-seashore/

Well, just got confirmation from Apple that something is a known bug with no known fix. I liked computing better when we could go all the way down to applying solder to the motherboard if we wanted to fix things.

Oooh, stickers for when I finally get that new laptop: Unsafe Warnings, might have to get the "magic smoke cannot be reinserted once released" one, and the OwO hazard diamond.

Today in signs that feel like they should be redundant: "do not enter" at the end of a dock.

Huh. Thought I had "warn me about posting dups" features in my content management. Guess that's broken. Sorry about that...

The great thing about listening to podcast fiction set in a dystopian future (Moonbase Theta, Out) is that sometimes I can't tell if the ads for Peloton are part of the story, or actual sponsorship...

The great thing about listening to podcast fiction set in a dystopian future (Moonbase Theta, Out) is that sometimes I can't tell if the ads for Peloton are part of the story, or actual sponsorship...

So, yeah, wherever you are on Mastodon, whoever's running the https://brands.town/explore instance is masterfully satirizing corporate social media engagement. It is a thing of beauty.

Mad props to Renee and the Amor Para Todos folks for repairing the vandalism damage on the Pride crosswalk. #Petaluma

Nothing makes me shake my head more at the kids these days who are horning in on my profession than typos propagated through autocomplete fairly widely throughout the project. When I was a kid we typed out our function and variable names completely, and we liked it.

By DM from Max of Fucking Inappropriate comes A Dangerous Game Over Taiwan — For decades, China has coveted its island neighbor. Is Xi Jinping ready to seize it?

Written for Facebook, whence the more background than I'd usually write here:

So: Mastodon. I've been involved in online community for 4 decades or so. My main blog (they weren't called that when I started) is coming up on 25 years, and though nobody follows the personal one I've been trying (and mostly failing) to do more personal journalling on another one. Grad students have contacted me to chat with me about the history of social media and blogging. I'm pretty active in looking at where trends are going, even if I've never really gotten some of them (MySpace, Instagram, TikTok).

And since the rise of FaceTwitSpace I've been looking for something that takes our media back away from "the algorithm", back to seeing material from people we follow.

When Mastodon first fired up, I created accounts on a couple of servers, didn't get the UI, didn't find the critical mass of people there, and ignored it. But the recent Twitter implosion has driven a lot of people over there, and I've been spending time on Mastodon.

Mastodon has evolved some interesting culture around "Content Warnings", which means that a lot of the re-posting of news articles and such end up behind an additional click. It has an option to display those articles without the click, and I thought "I'm a tough hearty guy, I'll do that."

Yesterday, a particularly egregious, but almost believable, bit of propaganda from Newsweek floated across my feed, and I realized why that culture has evolved. I could feel the adrenaline rise, the outrage, the feeling of ineffectual hopelessness. And I got it.

I want to connect with *people*. Often times that's done under the guise of exchanging bits of mass media, but splattering our political leanings across the space for those dopamine isn't really doing that. I've complained before that Facebook shows us all of someone, so we discover that the person we've enjoyed dancing with is also a QAnon spouting insurrection apologist, but it's worse than that: It amplifies the trivial about people.

And the lack of advertising on Mastodon (I upped my Patreon contributions to the person who hosts my Mastodon server) has made it even more apparent that on Facebook and Twitter I'm the product, not the customer.

Anyway, it's made me conscious of making sure that my Facebook feed is even more about me, rather than about the media (news or otherwise) that I consume, and it's making me think a lot about how I use my primary blog (that's long been a "this news article is interesting and I'll want to refer back to it" sort of resource).

After scrubbing and rinsing the crosswalk wandered around a bit, listening to The Beat Masters.

Went downtown (Petaluma) to scrub the pride crosswalk in preparation for repairing the vandalism tomorrow.

Oh cool. on Mastodon, Simon Willison mentions the trend of pushing scraped data to github with the tag "git-scraping" topic.

So you can see trends over time, but also just a way to discover cool data repos.

Gotta admit I've got a little schadenfreude here: Cop Nails Unmodified 2022 Hyundai Elantra N for Loud Exhaust. Dude was in "track mode", got a noise citation, the Smog Referee tested the car in track mode, now there's a whole legal struggle over whether that's the right mode to test the car in, it's not the mode the car starts in, but it'd cost about $4,000 to somehow remove that mode.

Since it isn't the mode the car starts in, but is the loud mode, I'm gonna side with the police officer on this one...

Like a movie that's so bad that the reviews of the badness are entertaining, cryptocurrency does offer us something of value: Matt Levine on Bloomberg: FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad

$16 billion of dollar liabilities and assets consisting mostly of some magic beans that you invented yourself and acquired for zero dollars? WHAT? Never mind the valuation of the beans; where did the money go? What happened to the $16 billion? Spending $5 billion of customer money on Serum would have been horrible, but FTX didn’t do that, and couldn’t have, because there wasn’t $5 billion of Serum available to buy. FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t!

Backlash to racial justice movements may boost risk of high BMI, obesity

Hyun Joon Park, a recent Penn State graduate student in psychology and now an assistant professor of psychology at Connecticut College, said the findings suggest that being exposed to negative sentiments toward race-related issues doesn’t affect just mental health but physical health, as well.

Exposure to anti-Black Lives Matter movement and obesity of the Black population

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114265

Two decades ago I delicately and carefully wrote a high performance threaded database core using pthreads. Now I spend a lot of time debugging race conditions because people just throw queues and timers around without engineering in threads from the start. Sigh.

For the last coat I hand sanded so that I didn't go too deep. 25 doors. My arms are physically tired, but I've milled all the retaining strips too and am getting close....