Today's... "what?!" Wikipedia post:
> In 2007, Steenburgen underwent minor surgery on her arm, which required a general anaesthetic; shortly thereafter, she began experiencing "music (...) playing in her head day and night". She subsequently took music lessons so that she could write down what she was hearing, and by 2013 had almost 50 songwriting credits.
@guayabito Thank you! 🙏
There are so many things wrong with the model under which scholarly publishing is running — or trying to run — today. Not least: I received a request from a press today, the 26th of December, asking me to review a book proposal, with a deadline of the 7th of January.
I believe in peer review, and in paying forward the generosity that reviewers have shown my work. And I believe in university presses and the crucial work they do to support the circulation of knowledge. And I know how tough an environment editors are working in today.
But at the end of This Particular Year, with all one might imagine has been required of an associate dean for research and graduate studies in an underfunded arts and humanities college, the only words I have left run along the lines of are you even fucking kidding me with this.
I’ve been researching #Italian #immigration to the #US for my #novel and every other primary source I open from 1890-1915 gives me major Déjà vu to how the #Republicans talk about immigration today.
“They aren’t white enough”, “they are a drain on our resources”, “deported because they would be a public charge”, “uneducated”, “barbaric”, “increasing crime”.
All the arguments are the same. Some of the laws are the same. And yet people in 1890 were arguing about the lack of race purity and “dirty blood” of people from Europe who the current conservatives would wholeheartedly consider white Christians and part of the great West or whatever.
Really makes you see as clear as day how BS and arbitrary all of this racist and anti-immigration rhetoric is. It’s nonsense. Always was. Always will be.
People deserve dignity and respect. Immigrants deserve to be welcomed in and accommodated.
On a related note, if you learn better by building things, @fedify has a step-by-step tutorial where you create a federated microblog from scratch—implementing actors, inbox/outbox, following, and posts along the way:
Found this helpful resource by Ben Boyter ( @boyter): a collection of sequence diagrams explaining how #ActivityPub/ #WebFinger works in practice—covering post creation, follows, boosts, deletions, and user migration.
If you're trying to implement ActivityPub, the spec can be frustratingly vague, and different servers do things differently. This aims to be a “clean room” reference for getting federation right.
@KevBot Oh, shoot. Shoulda googled DJ White Chocolate. Honestly, that guy was pretty close.
I seriously just thought it was a funny spontaneous nickname for a white person.
Kind of like when I was in a gas station while it was being robbed and one of the robbers called me "'Nilla" and told me not to worry and that I'd be okay.
@dysfun yep this is definitely a thing. They usually take care of places that are too difficult to mow by machine. This includes eg small spaces next to highway off-ramps
In S01E14, you learn that you've been tricked into becoming a system administrator and now you need to care about things like backups and (more importantly) restores:
RE: https://tiny.tilde.website/@colocataires/115788672896033701
i've got restic snapshots nightly since 2018 of my most important documents backed up to backblaze, it is a great and comparatively inexpensive combo for off-site incremental backups
i've also got restic backups of my colocataires vm being saved to my home server. restic supports sftp as a backend, and uses my existing wireguard-based vpn to transfer everything. i like this setup a lot and it costs $0
We report a few minutes before sunset: it seems to us the sun has been hovering there for a long time. We almost fall on our face several times for our staring at it to the side, but it is simply not moving. But then, of course, we look away for a moment, and it disappears.
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Mo wants to win the continent. King of Liverpool, Emperor of Africa.
Unknown type of activity/object
RE: https://press.invincible.ink/decemberween-shelf-2/
Here’s a writer I always stop for, even when it’s something so esoterically out of my reach about games that I just let the good words burble over me and at the end I’m none the wiser.
But this series from @Talen_Lee about friends and love is just what I need to be reading in the quiet end of year pause between one thing and the next.
"What's really fun is that people are excited about it — people well beyond our world of copyright lawyers — especially when they start recognizing these works."
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/26/nx-s1-5649395/public-domain-2026-copyright-betty-boop-pluto
@danlyke That's really fantastic. I wish I could muster the energy to host a sort of post-Christian community group that still looks at a lot of the traditional use cases for religious activity (food distribution, free services related to mental health, volunteerism, family activities, education, etc.) Y'know…all the actual stuff Jesus said to focus on most of the time… 😅
@jaredwhite yeah, there's a whole class of civic activity that isn't covered well, and interest focused groups like square dancing (that I'm deeply involved in) have physical ability as a filter, which is not a great way to build equitable community that sticks with people as they age or lose abilities.
Of course my experience with housing and mobility advocacy also leaves me thinking that most people don't actually give a shit... Sigh.
I made it to the Fediverse! (I think that's what it's called.)
You guessed it. I'm new here and have no idea what I'm doing. Hello to everyone!
I'm just me, typing out words to a bunch of random people, hoping they will read them. I don't know anyone yet, and it's tough being the new person. So please, take pity on me and say "hello"
I haven't written a profile description yet. I will, I was just very excited to finally be here and wanted to #introduce myself.
Tips and tricks are appreciated!
@Whimsy welcome 👋
"Maybe Steven Gerrard or something"
hahahaha
34 years ago today, the #SovietUnion officially ceased to exist. December 26, 1991
Apologies to #tankies (not really) but it was a very good thing
Not liking the #Soviet Union has nothing to do with loving #capitalism or loving the #West, it's about despising #imperialism
Anyone who has a problem with my sentiment:
Talk to someone who lived in #EasternEurope or under the Soviet umbrella
We must defeat #plutocracy in the West
The Soviet way is not the way
Happy #SovietUnionCollapseDay
@whitequark lol yeah - do you want to move from the middle of the footprint? Maybe the middle of that pad? Oh I get it, you actually wanted to move that reference and not the footprint! Oh wait your grid is too big to hit the middle of the footprint so I’ll grab the pad that’s closest to the grid point that’s closest to your mouse cursor (which may not be the closest pad to your mouse cursor, and certainly not the middle of the footprint)
@jpm infuriating
