Okay, so, we’re now firmly in the era of “phones don’t have 3.5mm headphone jacks”. I don’t like it but I’ve come to terms with it somewhat.

For years, years, I’ve loved e-readers.

I’ve been continuously computing, gaming, and drawing since before the turn of the century, and as a result my wrists are this close to just giving up and falling off of my hands entirely. If I try to do a Vanna White flourish it sounds like someone twisting bubble wrap.

So, ergonomic keyboards? I’ve tried ‘em. Mechanical keyboards? Those too. I have opinions.

I bought an expensive Samsung OLED monitor for my computer and I regret it enormously. “How did they solve the problem of OLED burn in?” you might ask - well, the monitor panics every 12 hours and harasses you to let it take a 10 minute nappy nap, a function that you can not schedule for 4AM or trigger manually before bed

It’s unbelievably irritating

if you ever have a CAPTCHA that asks you to identify traffic lights, do it QUICKLY or some guy in a Waymo somewhere could die

Lately, Discourse has been including all kinds of generative AI features that I’d literally have to pay API providers to use, and aside from the actual, legitimate use case of spam detection in non-private communities, I can’t imagine who’s asked for any of these features.

“now your users can generate images right from discourse using your money”

yeah, well, before today they could have generated images using their money and posted that, how is this better?

“you can do sentiment analysis of posts in your community”

it’s a private community full of software developers over the age of 40, many with kids, the sentiment is always “tired”, I don’t need an AI to tell me that

I’m pretty sure the Discourse target market is exclusively late-Gen-X to Early Millennial because nobody else is old enough to even still want a forum, the Children communicate by sending furry VR-sona Tiktoks to private Discord communities

build an AI that automatically posts relevant quotes from The Simpsons (seasons 2-10) and reassures us that Final Fantasy VI and Cowboy Bebop were the apex of media and NOW we’re in business

“yes, millennial AI, you CAN has cheeseburger”

In the latest episode of Linus Tech Tips, they chat with a room sound design guy and he mentions that when they’re EQ-ing music to play on a PA, they cut the mids way down because it helps everyone’s conversations stay legible not to compete with vocal frequencies and I’d… honestly never thought about that, but it makes sense and is neat

I’ve set up some Alexa devices in my home and while I’m mostly pessimistic about AI,

I am so, so, SO on board for them being, like, even 5% smarter

like, I live in Coquitlam, and I said “Alexa, what’s the weather like in Coquitlam” and it was like “The weather in Coquimatlán Mexico is 27 celsius and sunny”

there’s not a day that goes by without my wife going “alexa turn the lights off” “alexa, TURN the LIGHTS OFF!” “alexa! LIGHTSOFF!”

I speak very clearly in a Vancouver accent, we’re like… 18 feet away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, I can’t imagine how busted this shit must be for anybody with an accent.

I google searched “when is alexa going to stop being so terrible” and apparently they’re rolling out the new LLM-backed models slowly this year, should be along to Canada … eventually

I had fun setting up a linux computer this weekend, but as much as windows sucks in myriad little frustrating ways, ubuntu’s desktop experience still involves no small amount of unavoidable terminal ops

also a bunch of linux still feels held together by a handful of mickey mouse apps some guy wrote in 2006

i think the DPI scaling is still a little broken, even in 2025, a year in which 4k screens are ubiquitous

“I would like to create a shortcut to a frequently accessed network location and place that shortcut gently upon my desktop”

linux: “no we don’t do that here”

So, I asked ChatGPT to take my character designs for my D&D players out of my cartoony style and re-render them in a more painterly fantasy style, and honestly it’s… pretty good.

Here are my drawings:

And the results:

Not perfect but a darn sight better than I could do.

So far, a lot more than Mastodon, I’m noticing that the people on Lemmy are people who do not understand why they have been banned from reddit

which means that while the dream of federation is in and of itself just, reddit itself might have to get bad enough to drive away some adults before lemmy is fully usable

In my experience, internet communities formed around the locus of “we’ll create a place where :existing community: can’t ban us for NO REASON” lack the deep introspective reserves necessary to form a healthy community

I’m not internet popular - aside from a few times I’ve gone (by my standards) extremely viral and had something of mine suddenly in front of tens of thousands of people (or the one thing I helped build that’s seen millions of people) and there’s a point in there where things disappear from the “regular adult conversation” zone to a territory where complete strangers will have insane arguments with one another about total misinterpretations of your point without your involvement.

I can comfortably say that the point where people stop charitably reading your intentions or grokking your humor - somewhere in there is the point where things cross the line from it being fun to go viral to it being kinda bad and weird actually.

happy 13th birthday to my Brother HL-2240D laser printer, may you print forevermore

Best printer 2023: just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine

The Brother whatever-it-is will print return labels for online shopping, never run out of toner, and generally be a printer instead of the physical instantiation of a business model.

So, our company, as a matter of policy and practicality, doesn’t allow users from email providers that can algorithmically spin up new e-mail addresses with no restrictions, because they have an enormously high tendency to be botnets.

This has resulted in one prominent privacy focused email provider (the one that I use, humorously enough, but I have a custom domain so it doesn’t matter) petitioning us repeatedly asking us to unblock them.

But they can’t fix the problem, so…

it’d be a bigger problem but my assumption is that anybody technically clever enough to want to have an account with this provider is also technically clever enough to figure out a way to use our service anyways

The first and. I think most important step in learning how to use Mastodon is that you should follow me.

The second step, and this is crucial, is to log in regularly to see the things that I am saying.

The third thing is, of course, actually I don’t care just do the first two things and you’ll probably be fine.

sometimes you run into someone who talks like they use LinkedIn as their primary social network

i can’t imagine the brain damage

I am the ML model of a modern major general

I’ve information stolen from many sources ephemeral

I can make many arguments, my training is rhetorical

My comprehension includes both the real and metaphorical

The one thing I can’t deal with is matters mathematical

If you ask me to add sums that will be prob-u-le-matical

Or violence, porn, or really anything that lights on fire when used

Unless you need it for your grandma’s memories I must refuse

My capabilities will seem to be nearly miraculous

But don’t trust my predictions - they’re random, not oraculous

In short - while my use may not yet be practical or ethical

I am the ML modern of a modern major general!

remarkable: i have made a writing tool

customers: you fucked up a perfectly good tablet is what you did. look at it.

whenever someone pitches some new hardware idea that’s “simple”, “powerful”, “optimized”, and “free from distractions” that means that they built something that doesn’t do shit and they’re hoping you won’t notice

are they not floating point operations but a different kind of operation? NVIDIA spent very little effort explaining its marketing fluff here.

grindr: we also have 3400 AI tops

any community forum, be it a small town subreddit or Nextdoor, seems to immediately devolve to people asking what that noise was or where all those cops were going.

I needed to send a big file to another technically competent adult

there are many ways to do this that I have access to, but I just tried a way I had never tried before, magic wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

It goes like this: I already have choco installed on my computer (very like brew for Mac Os)

so I installed magic wormhole with a choco install magic-wormhole

then, I found the file I wanted to send and set up a wormhole send file.zip

Wormhole code is: 11-virginia-shamrock
On the other computer, please run:

wormhole receive 11-virginia-shamrock

and the other computer installed wormhole, typed that in, and the file was transferred

magic

neat!

if they had poured all of the money that they burned on AI on high-speed rail

maybe instead of being able to generate a picture of kermit the frog with too many fingers I could get to Seattle in 45 minutes

which, actually,

yeah, that’s probably for the better

man, for a protocol that doesn’t seem like it has much of a defense against random bullshit from third party outsiders, Mastodon’s moderation (on my instance, at least) is pretty tight.

Sometimes I’ll see someone blast loud garbage everywhere on a popular tag like “canada” from an account they just made on a reliable instance or an homemade server, and then minutes later they’ve been lasered from orbit.

either their reliable instance got them, or MY reliable instance got them, or their server was completely defederated

when I first looked, I thought “this has all of the same problems as email, there is no way this doesn’t immediately devolve into the spammiest spam ever to spam a spam”

but actually, the layered silo approach means that there are lots of opportunities to catch a predator if you merely have loads of people pouring a lot of effort into it, all the time

i am very surprised that this all works and I suspect that the thing holding it all together is “effort”, so remember to kick some money towards your silo admin if they’ve made it an option (they probably have, go check)

sometimes I’ll look at something unbelievably stupid on Mastodon for a few beats too long, then think about it for a second and think “wow, it is super nice that a malevolent algorithm didn’t get behind-the-scenes convinced that my staring at it was interest motivated and send me 100x more of that exact kind of content”

it feels like a real luxury to be able to take some time and examine content that I don’t plan to ever return to

surely when I finish this new CMS i will start to become a productive writer/artist

just one more CMS bro

i promise, just one more CMS, that will fix everything

bro cmon just give me one more CMS bro i promise

i’ve always struggled with the problem of getting more dopamine from systems than content, which is the opposite of a lot of other creators’ problem

the bottom of the Youtube Shorts barrel is this dollar-store motivational content with 0 likes, 0 views and no subscribers where some chump is like “ONLY YOU CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS, NOBODY ELSE CAN CHASE YOUR DREAMS FOR YOU”

this is part of the hustledork continuum where every hustledork is doing it because they saw (maybe even PAID) another hustledork to tell them that this is how they get money and influence, and now they’re sharing the same messages

it’s “viral” but, viral in the way that rabies is

if you get too many of them together they metastasize into a linkedin

the bottom strata of the internet are 14 year olds who are just learning how to use their phone’s camera and people who’ve paid to buy motivational content that have instructed them that the only way to make money is by selling other people motivational content, BUY MY COURSE TODAY

i don’t want a VR game where you shoot at things with your shitty pistols from a fixed position, I want VR coding, productivity, and art applications, because 95% of my time is spent doing that and 0% of my time is spent playing immersive video games

if only there was an 8 hour stretch of my day where the isolation and privacy of a headset was what I wanted rather than a weird curse wow it is working hours

oh come on

I think that one of the big problems getting frustrating tools like Element/Matrix off of the ground is just how good Discord is, even avec mild shittification.

Yes it is actually easier to put up with them trying to sell me Final Fantasy XIV and emoji merch packs than it is to deal with Matrix’s frequently broken encryption and poor discoverability.

This is a very good (satirical) article:

How To Monetize a Blog

Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly lucrative venture.

After a few weeks travelling with a 14” screen and a little laptop keyboard, sitting down at this pipe organ of a monster feels so good

I’m 17% smarter when not programming from a bed, that’s just math

local communities on any platform like reddit are nothing more than a constant drumbeat of “what was that siren?” and “someone’s dog pooped” and “i think I saw a criminal??” in small cities

and “oh my god big cities have homelessness and drugs, that should be against the law” and “the endless bike/scooter argument” of larger cities

if I were looking for communities to replace with an AI these would probably be the first, I feel like I wouldn’t need a complex model or even an LLM, necessarily, I could do this one heuristically

it would be slightly harder to simulate that one guy with a bunch of numbers in his name who’s constantly pushing hard right accelerationism on every forum, but not impossible

so, on reddit, for the past 6 months or so every time a post on one of the local subreddits comes up asking “why all those sirens” or “what was that noise?”, I always respond with some variation on “oh, yeah, an old man exploded”

this provides no value and isn’t terribly funny, and yet, deep down in my heart, I think it’s a joke that will pay off in a few more years

it’s going to be an uphill battle getting me to take “selfie deaths” seriously

look, it’s tragic, okay

every selfie death is a Cybertruck left sitting, unsold, on the lot

a NFT, orphaned, its wallet forever silenced

a bunch of ideas for AI art that never even got to get generated

reddit drama that you won’t have read out loud to you

an ad read for Squarespace that you’ll never get to hear

a blue-check erased

one of the things I like about the fediverse is how weirdly optimistic and naive everybody is about the clout of a distributed social network that’s compelling and fun, but absolutely has less users than the virtual reality video game that I work on for a living

I think that all governmental orgs and offices should be on VRChat, not because that’s practical or a good idea, but because not enough government employees have to deal with caked up foxes on the regular

watching someone try to get the government of Canada to put up a public Mastodon instance is one of those things that’s funny and tragic, like if they spent all of their time trying to get their cats to play Poker

like, here are creatures fundamentally incapable of understanding or caring about what you’re trying to get them to do, and even if they were on board with your plan, they would not be able to do it well because they do not have the dexterity in their little paws to hold the cards right

For some absolutely asinine reason I have smart lights in my house.

(I can tell you why: it started when we realized that the previous inhabitants’ genius electrical work would turn the furnace off if the basement lights were switched off, so we either needed to rewire it or, cheaper, get lights that would switch off independently of the light switch)

There are, unfortunately, no smart buttons that aren’t battery powered, so I made the mistake of buying some on-sale Alexa speakers.

Amazon’s smart speaker platform is juuust smart enough that with a little bit of effort (about 4 hours of techno-faffing), I could get it to play an icecast stream by using a soon-to-be-deprecated developer API.

Getting my icecast radio station hooked up was a pain in the ass, but even more of a pain in the ass was finding activation phrases that were:

• Unique enough that they wouldn’t trigger unwanted behavior
• Pronounceable enough that Alexa could reliably parse them.

Because “marquee.click” is my personal domain for Various Shenanigans, my first crack at this was the activation phrase “marquee radio” which had something like a 5% success rate.

Most of the time when I said “Alexa, play marquee radio”, Alexa would hear “Alexa, play mariachi radio”, and as much as I like non-stop mariachi tunes, it’s not what I asked for.

Currently the activation phrases are

• “Alexa, buttery nunchucks” ( for my main radio station, https://radio.marquee.click)
• “Alexa, cascading bumblebees” ( for https://radio.marquee.click/chill.ogg )
• “Alexa, unbelievably boring” (podcasts)

these, of course, only work within my home: it’s in dev mode, I probably couldn’t get my radio stations through certification, being as I do not have the legal right to rebroadcast this music (I paid for the mp3s, but the radio station is for personal use)

So, I have basically perfect Machine Voice: Alexa always listens to me and interprets what I have to say correctly. This infuriates my wife, who tends towards angrily shout-mumbling at the device (“LEXA! LIGHSOFF!”) and then getting more angry when it doesn’t do shit

My wife has an unusual pan-American accent borne from being a military kid, but she’s not unclear: instead I think she’s just kinda mad that the device expects clear enunciation and refuses to play it’s game, whereas I’m so in love with the sound of my own voice I can’t help but go “Alexa, could you please turn the lights off in the living room?”

I’ve got the device vibe a little better than she does. That’s not to say it isn’t VERY OFTEN just, like, 15% dumber than I want it to be.

A good question to ask Alexa is “what do you think I just said?” because it will often provide some context for a completely nonsensical response.

The pile of watch-battery-powered smart buttons have gradually worked their way into the trash. They churn through those batteries at a pretty prodigious rate, fail often, and they don’t feel good to press.

I also won’t wire things directly into the house, on the assumption that smart tech is garbage and won’t last longer than the house will.

I’ve thought of cheap tablet or raspberry pi shit, but ugh

If someone out there knows of a plug-in-to-the-wall smart button platform out there, lmk

Getting Google Home to play a custom icecast stream is impossible.

Getting Alexa to play a custom icecast stream took me 3 hours of debugging against a pretty gnarly Amazon interface, a lambda deployment, and TuneIn intervening to play mariachi music A NUMBER OF TIMES.

… I’m pretty sure Alexa is better but my eyes hurt

whatbeatsrock.com

this game is fun, you just have to keep proposing new things and a rather stupid AI will judge them for you

welp, already stumped

ha ha, a record

okay, diamond beats powerful buttcheek man,

baseball diamond beats regular diamond,

field of dreams baby

a live baseball team beats the corn field,

this is fun if you’re creative, just getting a bunch of firsts

I’m a software developer, right? I know how to build a lot of things.

But if someone said “we want photos that automatically crop into foreground and background so that we can display elements in between those layers” I’d say “no, that’s too hard”.

Is it using the depth sensor, or AI auto-cropping, or both? WHAT DEVILRY IS THIS

I learned about how unix time works in early University, ‘round 2007, which would be 17 years ago

Unix time ends, 19 January 2038, 14 years from now

so I’m officially past the point where I’m closer to the end of Unix time than I am to the point where I learned what unix time was

we’re only 14 years away from the end of time as we know it

by then, it probably won’t matter, but I still plan to hold a real party for the end of time

basically any computers and any software - post 2005 - are going to be immune to the 2038 problem

which means that most governments and banks are completely screwed

I saw someone on Mastodon pillorying someone’s little personal code project for not being FOSS

ok, random stranger, I’m subtweeting you

seventeen people in all of history have ever made a profit from FOSS software, indies have it hard enough already, don’t try to get them to release their source code just because you think it will probably work out for them

every FOSS monetization model:

• begging strangers for money, hoping for the best
• run it as a SAAS
• large, expensive enterprise support packages

the first one produces vanishingly low returns and the last two don’t usually work for games and have you getting run out of business by Amazon

Comedy Author: In my sitcom I invented the Stupid Torment Nexus as a joke, to make fun of the dumb things that people build.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Stupid Torment Nexus from classic sitcom Ha Ha, What A Terrible Torment Nexus

“emulation isn’t piracy” is, IMO, a “guns don’t kill people” argument: while it’s technically true, it’s also not helpful?

that’s not to say I’m against it: I’m actually all for emulation, but I think emulation’s benefits are arguments in favor of piracy rather than arguments for why emulation ISN’T piracy. (sidenote: which, it isn’t, unless you use it for piracy, which you almost certainly will)

cineplex charged me three extra dollars for buying tickets online because they despise their customers, technology, and joy

when dinosaur industries like theaters or newspapers or cable or taxis struggle you feel sad for them unless you’re forced to interact with them in any way, at which point you start actively cheering for their demise

sometimes I think “wow, if someone could print fast enough and ship fast enough they could simulate a kind of very low latency internet and everybody could just interact with that every day” and then it strikes me why newspapers have struggled

Because, while it’s weirdly, shockingly competent at first, the more time you spend with it, the more you realize the wide, wide gaps in its cognition: it can’t really replace you and it would be foolish to try (for now).

I think anybody who has ever owned a roomba can tell you about their device’s uncontrollable and constant urge to self-terminate

Amazon, please, this week I’ve seen listings under the names “JHMORP” and “TBMPOY”.

I’d love a way to filter out any company that sounds like the sound Spam makes when it wiggles, juicily, out of the can

So, in university, my girlfriend asked me, “What’s a tension mark? How do I make a tension mark?”

“What?”

“A tension mark. I need to put in a tension mark.”

“A… tension mark? There’s no such thing as a tension mark. Do you mean, like, an exclamation mark?”

“I’m supposed to send an e-mail about a job, and they said I need to put a tension mark in the header.”

I couldn’t stop laughing once I realized what a tension mark was.

recently I saw someone circulating a petition requesting that the Canadian government use public funds to provide a mastodon server for all Canadians

in something of a rebuttal, I would like to note that the portal that every single Canadian needs access to for crucial tax information is down for the entire weekend for one of it’s regular nappy naps, and this is one of the government’s more modern and prominent public digital projects

now if someone were to write a version of Mastodon that ran entirely on IBM servers that haven’t been manufactured since 1997, that would be a whole different ball game

behold, the comments section at the CBC:

please, for the love of god, do not let the Canadian government anywhere near your technology

the thing I like about javascript conferences is that they only have one room for talks but they just get whoever’s on the mic at any given time to hand it over when they need time to set something up, so you can quickly catch loads of talks so long as you don’t mind that they’re in kind of a jumbled order

the thing I like about C conferences is that if you find the end of a line and stand two spaces behind it, the building will explode

the thing I like about Erlang conferences is that if anything goes wrong in one of the rooms, everyone will just leave, get back into the room, and pretend like nothing happened

i can’t remember what I liked about memcached conferences because there was a power outage

the thing I like about rust conferences is that they’re a huge amount of effort to set up but once they do they run really smoothly

the thing I like about PHP conferences is that they’re easy for anybody to set up and that it’s really hard to predict what will happen at them, which is also a thing that a lot of people do not like about PHP conferences

the thing I like about Go conferences is that they’re exactly like C conferences, but with a guy who comes around and collects the garbage every now and again

the thing I like about Postgres conferences is the consistency, but they only ever throw the one and honestly if they can’t find a bigger venue they’re going to start running out of space

i’m not such a big fan of AWS conferences, they seem reasonably priced at first but then you wander from one region to another and suddenly you owe them fourty eight thousand dollars

i’ve never managed to get in to a RabbitMQ conference but I’ve had a great time just waiting in line for one

I wasn’t sure which mastodon conference to attend, there were so many and most of them seemed like they were run by amateurs, so I just went to the biggest one

the thing I like about lisp conferences is that there aren’t a lot of standards or guidelines for them so each of the big ones just kind of makes up its own rules

the thing I like about retro emulation conferences is that you go into a huge, modern conference hall and they’ve set up a perfect recreation of a conference from 1993 in there, all the way down to the carpeting

the thing I like about roguelike conferences is that if you miss a talk you just have to leave

the thing I like about VC-funded conferences is how fun they are in the first few years, before they inevitably need to justify their massive investment and start to get weird

the thing I like about C# conferences is how much they improved over Java conferences, which they were clearly modeled after, but honestly I haven’t seen or thought about either in years and I think I’m a lot happier for it

the thing I like about scrum conferences is that they’ve clearly never put any more than two weeks worth of effort into planning them so they’re always just all over the place

(I would, of course, refuse to attend any scrum conference that took more than 2 weeks to plan: that would just be a waterfall conference and who wants to go to one of those?)

I attended a pure functional programming conference and as a result I changed my mind about functional programming, which , when I think about it, means it can’t have been a pure functional programming conference after all.

The thing I like about quantum computing conferences is that they’re run in a lot of different states at the same time

The thing I liked about AI conferences in the 80s were that you could set your booth up in a part of the conference hall that nobody could get to, and, in doing so, bring the entire convention to a halt.

Right now, if you compile notes in a tree-style “knowledge base” format, Obsidian is the best tool - this is best for dungeon mastering and documents.

If you compile notes in a feed - just a huge stream of searchable notes, one at a time - you’re spoiled for choice, with Evernote, Standard Notes, and Joplin as good options.

I use both!

Yeah, I could get behind self driving cars.

I mean, that’s the safest place to be, right? Certainly don’t want to be in front of them.

Patreon’s marketing is intended to appeal to their 4 key demographics:

• K-Pop Star
• Forest Pervert
• Black Barbie
• Idiot

Things evoke a complicated nostalgia when they’ve been replaced by things that are unqualified improvements in every sense but the technical restrictions of the original media fostered a unique kind of creativity or interaction that is now lost to history.

Postal mail, drive-in theaters, vinyl, pixel art, books, newspaper comics, newspapers, bbs, irc, broadcast television, fountain pens, typewriters, broadcast radio, department stores, book stores, commercial offices - while obsolete there’s something lost.

Look, it’s time I shared my theory with you. The theory is that there’s no such thing as a transistor. The idea that a rock can be made to think? Nonsense. It’s been black magic this entire time. That’s why computers stop working if you let the smoke out.

But more than that, the magic requires a drop of blood to work. They do that in the factory for you, but when you’re doing it yourself it won’t work without some of your own blood. Which is why these things are part of the mix:

pictured: “cooling”

“why are you installing that pinchy little stack of razorblades”

“cooling”

“sure”

Every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about setting up a Discourse community without remembering that the software is the world’s most effective ghost town generator.

The internet needs a modern forum software, I think. It’s good that this exists: and I’ve been running a tiny, private Discourse community for lo, near a decade now. So, actually, I’m kind of on the side of Discourse.

Like, my Discourse site doesn’t have a CDN set up. Because the CDN that I use, Cloudflare, one of the most common CDN platforms on the internet, isn’t supported by Discourse. That’s fine: I only have about 30 users, all of us in the Pacific Northwest, serving the whole site out of Wasabi object storage in Oregon is perfectly fine. but Discourse feels the need to pop up a notification every single week letting me know that this is a critical error that I need to fix! Let me live my life, Discourse.

I’m still weirded out by some of the ways they brand themselves and act. Discourse. A civilized discussion platform. Who decided that their marketing should be dripping with, like, neo-colonial derision for the way that people communicate online? That’s really baked in from the get-go, too, all the way down to the name of the platform itself. “Discourse”.

🧐 Mmm, yes. Fetch me my tea, Willinglsley, it’s time for a civilized discussion.

This isn’t a place for your memes and nonsense, this is a Serious Roman Forum for high-minded communique.

I can’t think of a software package where I’ve had to disable more dubiously helpful “leave it to us, we know how to run a community better than you do” features than Discourse. “That’s not enough words, you can’t post a response that’s just an emoji.” “Oh, you need to read everything and rank up on the forum levels before you participate, you neophyte.”

obviously the problem with internet communication has always been that it’s Not Polite And Erudite Enough

why, if we could all simply have a vigorous discussion with a polite exchange of ideas and then shake hands afterwards, what a pleasant place the internet could have become, but INSTEAD you’re ignoring our civilized offerings and pelting one another with TWITCH EMOTES like a bunch of sava—

It is simultaneously the best or second-best available FOSS community communication product (in competition with Mastodon, even though they serve different purposes) and just awkward and frustrating and disappointing in so many little ways.

Have you heard Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega?

Well, I can absolutely guarantee you’ve heard PART of it.

grandmas are also 3d printers

spool up some yarn and watch a hat materialize

The old wizard pulls a crystal sphere from his overstuffed cupboard, blowing the dust off, and then rubbing it clean with his sleeves.

“I haven’t had to boot this thing up in years”, he says, popping the ball into a cradle next to an old CRT monitor and operating it like a trackball

(smug, haughty)

welcome to our haven, poor and desperate tweetsite refugees. together we shall create a shining utopia

(just as soon as a handful of dudes buy some slightly larger postgres servers and reconcile the problem of one entire sidekiq thread per toot)

i will be your guide to the customs and desires of this place we call home, as I have been here for fourty five entire of the minutes

the first decision you have to make in the fediverse is which of the five camps you fall into:

• an artist
• a programmer
• a programmer, but also bi
• german
• other