OldBrushNewPaper @OldBrushNewPaper@wandering.shop

I had a short stint at a national lab during my first go at grad school. One time a scientist in a different group came by to tour the observatory and he randomly started telling us about how he studied bees and radioactivity. He’d accidentally let the hive get too big and the hive divided and half of his radioactive bees flew away never to be seen again. I think about those bees a lot. Like, how to you even begin to describe that in a paper? “Oops, lost my radioactive bees.”

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-rich-kids-are-so-good-at-the-marshmallow-test?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Kept seeing this in the Mozilla suggestion page and while I want to say "duh!" it would actually be pretty great if everyone read it.

Fedi devs: You can do whatever you want in federation! Nothing but options!

Us: Can we choose to personally tailor our experience in a way that you hadn’t considered, and will only impact ourselves?

Fedi devs: No.

*sigh* Current housing is over on Thursday. If I can raise about $340 between now and then I can rent a hotel room for a week until we can get our next housestay worked out. Otherwise may be sleeping in the back of the van for a few days.

Our printer has decided that it's to hot. In a fit of protest it's printing everything with 100% magenta now

I miss the early days of the web when it wasn’t an endless struggle against Nazis trying to convince everyone that genocide is a political opinion

That's no good and a reminder of how vital decentralized content is to the future https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1143378990826004480 #internetarchive #savetheweb #ipfs

first they came for the nazis, and i said "thanks for getting rid of the nazis"

Despite being free software, Mastodon as a project takes a hardline stance against nazis

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

The covenant has been added approx. one month ago so that for the first time in Mastodon's history, our project could make "no nazis" a part of our branding.

People are laughing at the steaming pile of shit that is Gab's new "platform", and rightfully so ..

However, let's keep in mind that Gandhi famously said:

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Don't belittle their efforts too much, don't give them space because they appear to be going nowhere.

Stay vigilant, stay alert, support the attacked and vilified.
Don't underestimate them.
They have nothing to lose.
We have everything to lose. ✊

"Explore Fushimi Inari" is an explorable environment, a painstakingly well-executed recreation of a real shrine in Japan. The 3D work here is professional quality; I'm not sure what combination of photogrammetry (if any) and conventional modeling and texturing went into it but it's very impressive as a small project by one person.
https://cavesrd.itch.io/kyoto

The reason why many people are taught to assume that everyone in the past was racist was because we aren't taught any older antiracist writers, which is an interesting thing to think about, that that's the way we're taught to think about the past. Really makes you wonder

As most of you already know, Gab is coming to Fedi soon.

We consider the only sensible move is to block them preventively anywhere we can.

As such, we are strongly supporting all fedi admins, members and software developers who are working to do so.

We want it to be loud and clear that we won’t tolerate nazis, fascists or “free speech” advocates in our spaces.

We also won’t accept harassment against our moderators. Ginny is one of them, and we’ve had enough of your constant threats, discourse, subtoots and attacks.

Also: this is a statement, not an invitation to debate any of the points mentioned above.

so, yesterday, i put together a list of nazi instances i had blocked. that post has been boosted over 60 times. that's cool, i'm glad i did something useful.

but i can't do that kind of thing if i can't eat. my post about needing money for food has been boosted ten times.

if you appreciate and value the work i put into notifying everyone about where the fash are and you have some money to spare, please pay me.

if you can't give, please always boost.

paypal.me/lexiwisteria

Was talking about Mastodon with an old-school sysadmin guy. We reached the realization that defederating from instances with no/bad moderation is essentially the same thing as blocking open relays back when you ran your own email server: open relays always end up getting used for spam, you block 'em to protect your users.

Email was and still is the first federated social network, so it already faced a lot of the same problems; we should study its solutions (and its failures).

Today, we had to help our beloved cat, Miko, end her suffering and die. She was 12 years old. She had a long, interesting life for a cat and came with us to Germany all the way from America. She was our emotional support animal and we will miss her dearly.

She had a major infection in a milk duct, which eventually spread and left her unable to walk. We did our best to treat the infection, but she was quite old and unresponsive to treatment. Unfortunately, she accrued significant vet bills which I'm unable to pay off at this time.

The total bills come to 311 euros (351 USD). If anybody has anything they can spare to help, the best way is through paypal at paypal dot me / arrix Any additional funds we receive will be put towards adopting a new emotional support animal from a local, reputable shelter and related expenses.

Goodbye, Miko. You were the best.

Fundraiser for a protest of the holding of migrant children at Fort Sill (previously used as a Japanese-American concentration/internment camp during WWII)

Protest is tomorrow.

gf.me/tmjipu

#uspol #fundraiser #immigrant #gofundme #immigration #ConcentrationCamps

Interesting read: Misinformation & propaganda are guaranteed to spring up around pandemics, but they won't have quite the same political baggage as elections. Any solutions & mitigations for pandemics should help against political disinformation too.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/06/fake_news_and_p.html