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
@c_rakestraw@nex3
Saw your posts about avatars and Bear blog. Just
wanted to let you know that you can with the Bearming
theme I’ve created. See live example and code here:
birming.com/bearming/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
#rss
#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
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.
↩︎
