@esther Great, now I have to worry about sharks collapsing into black holes. The ultimate predator.

@esther "When i was young, we didn't have this Polaris and we did perfectly fine without it"

@esther

who knew?? 😲
thanks for sharing this!

here's a screenshot of this excellent post, if anyone wants to memorialize it
(Esther, let me know if for any reason you'd like me to delete this post and I will do it immediately.)

@esther yeah, the whole idea of "body odor" was an invention of deoderant companies in the 1970s -- I guess the same companies now trying to make me think my whole body stinks? who can keep up.

@esther These days they are also keen on triggering the re-orienting response on TV by using bright flashes of light or fast camera panning. The idea is the people are more suggestible during these moments.

My defense is I use the TV's P-in-P feature which shrinks the picture down to thumbnail size, in addition to muting audio. It is such a relief.

@esther
Literally black magic.

This is not an anti-queer conspiracy. It's just boring old whiteness receiving the deserved response and even more boring statistics with the Fediverse being largely run by queer nerds (of which again most are white and have learning to do, including myself).

None of this is an excuse to hide behind your queerness or even weaponising it when confronted with your own racism. I know that confrontation is uncomfortable and can really scratch your self-image as "one of the good ones". But it's necessary.

@esther

Just because one belongs to an oppressed minority, that doesn't mean them can't belong to _another_ oppressing majority.

@esther I enjoy Ghost. It also has paid subscription features like substack (which I don't use), but it doesn't take a penny from those subscriptions.

@esther

What do you not like about medium.com ?

@esther Joomla.com is free hosting and fully open source CMS as well. Joomla.org you can download free to host wherever you want as well.

@esther, thanks for the advice, bookmarked in my folder "Sites to avoid" among other communist sites, like 12feet dot io and demo dot thisischip dot com 😏

@esther OMG thankyou so much
...

@esther I will definitely not bookmark it.

@esther
Damn it!
Now in need to enter news websites to be updated on news??
This is so 2009!

@esther if ppl want "everyone" on the same platform:

start with fedi.

then bolt on multihoming and an effective way to hide it from admins. (let's call this "opaque federation".)

(but you know nobody wants this because nobody has made it happen.)

@esther everything else would be rather creepy

Trans Pride Berlin last year: “we promise to take more care in creating inclusive and accessible events”

Trans Pride Berlin this year: “if you don’t check Instagram everg day you’ll miss every announcement because we post everything as stories that disappear after 24h”

An open and accessible way to distribute announcements should be the default: website, RSS, email newsletter. Anything else is a bonus on top.

And it doesn’t matter that much if you have a dedicated domain or if your page is part of a latger website. The important thing is that it can be accessed with a web browser and linked to.

(This appies to organizing that is supposed to be openly visible. If you’re doing covert action or organizing, very different strategies apply)

@esther
So how do you feel about Facebook using HTTP? TLS? TCP/IP?

@tinker

@esther I work for a tech company who bases a solid 90% of their software on FOSS. They manage to legally repackage and sell the software apple style, by up charging massively for a proprietary OS built on the backs of the open source software. They get away with it because they don’t directly charge for the FOSS components. Corporations will always try to profit off of absolutely everything like the leeches they are.

Imagine Mastodon gGmbH (the organization running mastodon.social) threatening our instance with replacing the admins if we don't open up our sign-ups or sth.

It's impossible and a completely nonsensical idea, and that's the power of a federated system.

@esther it's not an exeption for sure, but it treats me and my girlfriend (who also work there) better than my previous jobs, so that's something.

They still steal my wages, because I gain only 20% of what the company that employs me gets for me.

@esther

My grandfather was once told, "your employer doesn't pay you what you're worth!"

He responded "of course he doesn't, how else would he stay in business?"

He also became a rifle instructor in the US Army, after enlisting in 1939, because on the range one day another recruit asked if something about the M-1 Garand was a certain way, the instructor replied "naturally", and he objected "nothing natural about it, someone designed it that way".

A senior officer happened to be passing…

Ok, a lot of you have sent me photos of your adorable plushies and some asked for pictures of mine so here they are

🦈 Kenneth
🐋 Edgar
🐙 Emily
and the companion cube doesn’t have a name.

If nobody gets the joke, I'll be really disappointed tbh