my least favorite thing about all my friends' BearBlogs is the total lack of avatars. if I don't have a fursona or selfie or silly little guy next to a post who I can imagine reading it to me, what's even the point
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ancient vampire who lives a lazy, stress-free undeath by giving historians miscellaneous daily knowledge of bygone eras in exchange for their blood
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posted on moonbase.lgbt In early 2024, I spent a couple of afternoons digging up old code, putting together a new renderer, and getting everything in place. Rust code would extract the game’s drawings, render them as SVGs, and produce a JSON manifest file, while posting to Cohost would be handled in Python using valknight’s Cohost.py. I teased the bot’s existence with a screenshot of the game’s infamous DRAINPIPE glitch puzzle, and a day later on February 14th, it went live.
I’d also snuck a few custom-made easter eggs into the pool of drawings — I had to include a few renditions of eggbug, the Cohost mascot, after all.
EGGBUG by @lunasorcery Luna wrote up a really nice post about her NES Pictionary bot that covers both the implementation and the place it held in Cohost's heart. I never engaged with the bot much, but I enjoyed seeing it reblogged onto my feed with funny captions, so it's lovely to hear a more thorough account of its history and see some of the most impressive user submissions.
I think Luna made the right choice letting the bot end with the site. It was part of the fabric there in a way it couldn't be elsewhere. Good night, sweet robo-prince.
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Brendan McLeod asked: Cohost grid generator!
Hey, just wanted to thank you for making cohost grid generator, and hoping that you will keep it up online! It works great with bearblog and it makes my media posts look nice!
Yeah, I plan to keep all my generators online more or less indefinitely (except maybe letterboxd which does cost a bit of money to host a proxy). I might actually rework the grid generator a bit to be more explicitly targeted at general websites rather than just Cohost. Maybe add a mode where it provides you a simple stylesheet so it can use fewer inline classes and actually make the text properly responsive so captions look better on phones.
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posted on topposts.net something I will say that has been very nice about using RSS again... going back to reading "oldest first" and having read/unread status. fight me
I've been surprised how many people I've seen posting about how they're using RSS again. I guess even when talking about "the heyday of RSS" I was assuming that it was mostly more people joining and not using it than people stopping that caused its decline. I for one have been using RSS pretty much daily since the early 00s. My biggest complaint with Cohost was not having a notion of a post being "read"!
I guess I can grow and change but at my core there's still that fourteen-year-old who's determined never to miss a Dinosaur Comics.
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posted on emilysdupree.substack.com The Invention of Memory
I think most people stabilized their warped sense of time by other means. Instead of accepting that the pandemic continued on, that we failed to contain it and so would need to incorporate its ongoing reality into the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives, they instead transformed the fantasy of after into their reality. After the pandemic, after the lockdowns, after our world ruptured. They were able to interrupt the prolonged uncertainty that the pandemic had brought to all of our lives by erecting a finish line just in time for them to run through it. And as they ran through it, celebrating the fictional end of an arduous journey, they simultaneously invented a new before. This is the invention of memory.
The Pandemic became something temporally contained, its crisp boundaries providing a psychic safeguard to any lingering anxieties around the vulnerability and interdependence of our bodies that only a virus could show us. No longer did it threaten to erupt in their everyday lives, forcing cancellations and illnesses and deaths. It was, officially, part of The Past. And from the safety of hindsight (even if only an illusion), people began telling and re-telling the story of The Pandemic in ways that strayed from how it all actually went down. It was a way to use memory as self-soothing.
This is an intense, touching piece on the way people's minds have been shaped by the pandemic, and the way that shape is in turn determined by their—our—failure en masse to handle the reality of the pandemic. It's another way of looking at the same issues I was driving at in COVID Denialism and Disability Justice, and I similarly found it helpful to bring myself some calm (if not closure) to the pain of seeing people act so heartlessly.
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posted doing my level best to replace my "click over to Cohost" instinct with "click over to my RSS reader" instead of "click over to Mastodon"
it's actually really nice to take the time I'd normally spend purposelessly[1] browsing social media and spend it reading a blog post instead. I read pretty slowly so it always takes some dedicated time to get through anything longer than a few paragraphs, and it feels good to actually dedicate that time intentionally
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I actually think that taking a few minutes to totally context-switch your brain to something low-key and fun before context-switching back to more serious work is really valuable, at least for the way I work. It's like giving my brain a quick rinse. ↩︎
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doing my level best to replace my "click over to Cohost" instinct with "click over to my RSS reader" instead of "click over to Mastodon"
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The film sets up a dichotomy between the inorganic—the ship and its reactor filled with ornamentation we are to assume is all for the realization of profit, contrasted with its intensely human (and feline) crew. The gorgeously-rendered hull of the ship acts as a prison and its corridors restrict the possibilities of its inhabitants. And yet, among the first thing we hear from this crew is the seeds of organization, of raging against their imprisonment.
But as soon as the film establishes this dichotomy, it begins to play with it. The titular alien's nest is an organic mockery of the ship, and once the xenomorph is aboard the Nostromo it begins to cut (literally) through the metal and plastic bonds, the hyperorganic coming to dominate the machine. Eventually, the crew itself begins taking action against the machine in self-defense but from it and from their pursuer.
Ripley as a character becomes elaborated along with this dichotomy. Although she's quiet at first, not one of the crew who draws attention in the first few scenes, the more we see from her the clearer her values become. She holds life in the highest esteem, even that of Jones the cat. In doing so, she stands in opposition to the "purity" of force represented by both the Nostromo and the xenomorph. In her, we see that purity is intrinsically a false goal—the true value is always in the impurities that make us people.
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posted on entangled.one however. please 😮💨 at me if i am only ever posting about computer or website. to lightly paraphrase something a friend pointed out… the real tragedy of october 1 is that a lot more of the people who i will be seeing online in this way will be… computer touchers. programmers. (although now that i say this: it would be interesting to do a little audit of my actual blogroll. because i can think of Several who are not this.)
I'm really happy to see a bunch of the less-technical people I followed on Cohost setting up blogs with Bear or Ghost or WordPress. It's been fun for me to set this site up as a playground for what could be possible as far as bringing the aspects of social media I value to the web, but truly one of the biggest virtues of social media sites is making it so so easy to get set up and start posting. At the same time, it's also one of its biggest downfalls, because it's the same thing that makes it so easy to get sucked into the quicksand of corporate lock-in.
