December was full of strikes, and of starting delivery of the Kickstarter rewards, and of Christmas and New Year.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:
The Kickstarter ended, but the money finally landed in my accounts so I had to learn more about the Kickstarter process and get the money and designs to the printers etc.
Everyone’s still talking about Joining Mastodon. The nine-million account mark passed early in the new year and due to popular demand I wrote a click-by-click how-to which is long because of the detail people seemed to want.
It was the month in which some journalist mistook the website “Join Mastodon” for a name “John Mastodon” and assumed that person must be the inventor of the whole network. Among many others doing it better I mocked this with stories of John Mastodon’s true nature.
I made more progress on the Car-Chase animation, fixing doppler and other soundtrack problems and improving the sky and lights and models.
I repaired my robot vacuum cleaner. which means it could clean up after the operation.
I accidentally ordered too many Raspberries so left them out for squirrels and filmed them in slow-mo
I realized early that the strikes would inconvenience me but blame the bosses not the government in fact mocking the government’s idea of “independent” review. I even ended up in a expensive Christmas inter-city taxi-ride due to failures on my part and engineering and strikes.
I made some observations about Jack Dorsey’s plans to re-decentralize contrasting them as Jack and Nostr types want censorship-resistance, but Activitypub and the Fediverse want community moderation.
Some thoughts on John Carmack leaving Facebook/Meta/VR I still think VR will be a thing, and hope Facebook/Meta have no part in it. I wish their company doom, and their shareholders bankruptcy, but want VR to be a thing. Just not theirs.
Then there was christmas and new year .
Releases
A new cartoon, in a month about strikes how could we not do an Observers Cartoon about Strikes?
View here: https://dalliance.network/w/njFHyLRQUAes61hMgKcwkv
Reading
Klara And The Sun
Klara And The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is a story about an Artificial Friend, an AI doll bought for a sick child, and the doll’s growing understanding of the world and it’s condition in it and the fate of it’s companion.
Simple language for a simple AI machine, as it grows an understanding of the world. Hard to say much without spoilers, but each new chapter has the doll understand more and yet also invent it’s own misunderstandings and religious symbology.
Nice work.
Watching
Mostly still DS9, but that’ll end soon and over Xmas with the family I watched
Enola Holmes
Two movies about Sherlock’s Sister. She’s a good hard-fighting hard-thinking feminists. Yay for her.
Knives Out
So strange seeing Bond (Daniel Craig) doing an American accent, but the story of the murder gone wrong/right/wrong is pretty good fun. Innocent and yet covering up for herself.
Watched it mostly coz everyone is saying how good the sequel Glass Onion is but haven’t gotten around to that one yet.
Links
* Scott Alexander is less than infinitely hostile to Crypto He takes you though the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, explains what might be good and bad. Yes. There are both good and bad.
* Johnathan Pie ranting about the Strikes Strikes everywhere this month. And likely more to come. Is everyone striking at once because the government is so great?
* Media Lens on every war being because of Media lies They string together the things the media say and damn them with their own noose.
* New Blender Open movie Blender is one of my favorite bits of software. It’s about making video, so they make open videos to demonstrate and push the engine. This one they wanted to get better at fight scenes I guess!
* Kruzgesagt on Black Hole Stars What if you had a star so big it had a black hole in the middle? They might have existed in the early universe. Probably did.
* Catlin Johnstone on Western Values She, like Ghandi, thinks they would be a great idea if only the west would actually have them.
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, remember you can always see my full public bookmarks at my website and/or follow
my link-bot on the fediverse (NOTE: New address for the link-bot!) or
my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
Notable Newbies:
* Cmdr Taco started Slashdot in the 90s.
* Rupert Read is a green campaigner
Interesting Stuff:
* @pfadintegral notes that there are many reasons to track Elon’s jet Like for instance to offer him adverts more relevant to his interests.
* @bylinesNetwork asks for advice. Twitter is deteriorating fast, the Byline Times is among the first to the Fedi, but what should they do now?
* @Stavvers@masto.ai tells us about how Journalists about Quote-Boosts You can’t imagine how much people argue about quote-boosts. When journalists demand it though, be cause of why they might use it.
* @Evan talks about his poll-response rates Ten times more replies-per-follower than on Twitter.
* @ct_bergstrom tells us how to train a crow army If you feed them regularly, they will come to recognize you. They’re remarkably good at recognizing faces, gaits, and even the sound of a particular car’s engine. In the rain wearing a new jacket with the hood up? They recognize him.
* @ajroach has a crowded-source sci-fi radio show It’s improv, more or less. In space.
* @dangillmor is a journalist telling journalists why they must leave Twitter, More and more people realize it every day.
* @thegibson reminds us who owns your data. You came here and asked to sell us things, then tracked us with the things you sold us. You came here and begged for trust, which many gave you, then betrayed it by selling our secrets.
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