This month an unelected leader took over and made massive stupid changes which risked the future of the whole thing.
But is that Truss’s governance of Britain, or Musk’s governance of Twitter?
Meanwhile, my new kickstarter is live!
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:
My kickstarter for my new tarot deck went live. Wrote a thread about the things I have learned about Kickstarter, and a lovely review from InBetweenTarot.
Liz Truss was elected and she says we are going for growth though that seems to be incoherent with staying out of the common market and restricting immigration etc.
And then she resigned, so in the future everyone will be prime minister for 15 minutes and all the new potentials are terrible.
Soon, Sunak is announced new leader and announced his intent to drive the country into the ground through austerity. He said he wasn’t going to the climate conference but that isn’t the thing he’s not doing that makes me angry at him and in the end he u-turned and said he’d go after all.
Rumours are that Sunak likes “Central Bank Digital Currencies”, so I looked into what that is and wrote a blog post about CBDCs and money and the king’s face.
Meanwhile the bank of england is deliberately trying to scuttle the economy and businesses and housing and lives. They are doing it on purpose. In fact that’s WHY they are doing it.
I joined TikTok. Reluctantly on a burner phone. some notes on what its like.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and as a result 200,000 users fled to the Fediverse, and 500 new instances sprung up in a week. Welcome to all of those newbies and a blog post explaining how Mastodon and the Fediverse work Also added a long thread to my twitter about how Elon can now read all your private DM messages and we can all move to networks without owners that capitalists can’t just buy and ruin.
Some pipelines got blown up. who did it? Are we really believing Russia blew up their own infrastructure?
I got a new steamdeck portable games machine and it’s lovely.
I caught a video of a squirrel doing a massive long jump
Releases
My newest tarot deck is available now Check Out The Kickstarter Page you can support us and get the deck in various boxes, or posters, or stickers, or the book.
The kick-start is running all through November and has raised just over 5 grand so far.
Reading
Corruptable – Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us
You’ve heard that power corrupts, and absolute power does so absolutely. How true is that? Are there ways we can try and ensure power is given to less corruptible people? Brian Klaas looks into it in depth finding many interesting corrupt or incorrupted leaders to speak to and studies to cite. It may not be as bad as we fear, but our systems for distributing power could use some reform.
Watching
Doctor Who
Farewell then Thirteen. You were good fun and a female Doctor was a nice thing to have had. Shame the writers tried to turn the show into some kind family/team thing while you were there. Too many companions!
Enjoyed the last show. The Master was a nicely madly evil Rasputin. It was a shame how he carried on. Weird bringing Ten back at the end.
Looking forward to RTD turning the show back into a show about a mad old alien in a box instead of happy clappy family teamwork stuff.
Deep Space Nine
Wasn’t sure how much of Deep Space Nine I’d seen before. First watched it on old fashioned TV where if you’re out that week then tough. You’ve missed that one. seems like I’ve seen about half as far as I can tell.
Square-frame TV is weird now.
Links
Labour Files
Some articles about the way the media hides things by studiously ignoring them
* Media Lens – Burying The Labour Files
* Media Lens – How The Media Quarantines Evidence Pt1
* Media Lens – How The Media Quarantines Evidence Pt2
* Jonathan Cook – Westerners live in denial
Conciousness and the brain
Some articles about how brains make consciousness:
* Aeon – How blindsight answers the hard problem of consiousness
* Scott Alexander reviews Rhythms Of The Brain about brain-waves
* Erik Hoel – Exit the supersensorium, The neuroscientific case for art in the age of Netflix
The continuing collapse
Some articles about how it’s all falling apart
* How the UK became one of the poorest countries in Europe
* Sam Kriss – The Internet Is Already Over
* George Monbiot on the last time a mass extinction was caused by burning fossil fuels.
“By 251.9m years ago, so much solidified rock had accumulated on the surface of the Siberian Traps that the lava could no longer escape. Instead, it was forced to spread underground, along horizontal fissures, into rocks that were rich in coal and other hydrocarbons. The heat from the magma (underground lava) cooked the hydrocarbons, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. In other words, though there were no humans on the planet, this disaster seems to have been caused by fossil fuel burning”
Science and Maths videos
* Veritasim on the Fast Fourier Transform Could it have prevented the nuclear arms build up if it had been discovered earlier?
* Sabine Hossenfelder has a new science new show on youtube Why is there a phone on the desk in act one? You can be sure it’ll be ringing in act three. I like the excuse for a couple of gags.
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 or my RSS feed of interesting links
Around The Fediverse
With Musk taking over twitter and apparently doing a Truss to it, the Fediverse was flooded with new users.
* Eugen tells us 199430 new users and 437 new instances
* @Elilla@transmom.love has a really good detailed guide on how federation works
* he also tells us about the media response to the Fediverse
* and on his own instance, exposes journalists ragging on it who never even posted anything
* @graue@social.coop has a good blog post about how Twitter and Mastodon differ
* @aral@mastodon.ar.al reminds us Musk can now read your DMs
* @mxtthxw@mxtthxw.art has some bandcamp projects
The fediverse is growing because it can’t be owned, you can’t find yourself suddenly sold to a billionaire and you can’t find yourself locked out of access if you offend the owner. There is no algorithm written by advertisers replacing your friends posts with adverts and influencers and people trying to make you angry.
It’s just people talking, without the corporations in the way. Like the web used to be.
If you join us, then my friends can use our boing server if you want, but if you’d sooner be more professional elsewhere or I have no idea who you are there’s many other servers. Here’s a few new ones this month:
* Astrodon.social – Astronomy folks
* ioc.exchange – Infosec Folks “Indicators Of Compromise”
* infosec.exchange – another infosec instance. There’s two.
* writing.exchagnge – Writers supporting each other
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