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"
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
Máxima asked: Have you tried using serializd for reviewing and logging TV Shows?
I actually do log what I watch there kind of sporadically. It's all right! I wish it had a better app and were a bit more like Letterboxd in general, but it's certainly better than Trakt, its most direct competitor.
Part of the reason I don't use it is the lack of the app, but part of it is also that it's a lot of effort to log every single episode of anything I watch, but if I only log season-by-season I'll often forget to log at all when it comes to the finale.
The final nail in the coffin of using it the same way I do other review apps is that I just don't have that much to say about a single season of a television show. (I find I have similar issues when I try to write reviews for manga volumes.) There's often not that much different from the season before or the season after, and I'll usually express everything I have to say about the show in the first review or two and then run out of steam.
-
Seattle Cohost Wake
As soon as it was announced that Cohost was shutting down, I knew I at least needed some way to grieve it in community. I'm not a particularly observant Jew, but I do take to heart the idea that grief is a community experience. Cohost was never an experience of any individual in isolation, so its loss shouldn't be experienced in isolation either.
I talked to my wife and Xandra who had also made some rumblings about some sort of meet-up, we decided on a place and time, and I sent out an open invitation[1]. We knew Seattle was a pretty big Cohost city, but based on the Philly and Boston turnouts we expected maybe thirty to forty people.
detailed image description
A large group of masked people in a park posing together, many holding Eggbug plushes.
The last dedicated count we got was fifty-eight, but people kept showing up after that so I believe in the end we had more than sixty attendees. Lydia even came up from the Bay Area, shocking everyone there who knew her! I was completely blown away by this incredible outpouring of love for Cohost.
It was an intensely emotional mix of mourning and joy. We had a moment of silence for the loss of Cohost, we came together in a cheer of "Eggbug Forever!", but most of all people just hung out and chatted. We even had our very own rainbow:
detailed image description
A photo of me, wearing a brown, navy, and tan knit dress, posing jauntily while standing on a concrete rise in Capitol Hill. A rainbow is visible over my shoulder. Photo by rilight.
detailed image description
A blurry eggbug in the foreground gazes at a rainbow as the sky darkens. Photo by Alyx.
Rose and I also came up with an idea for a little local mailing list for COVID-safe events. To help spread the word, we made a zine. I only printed fifty copies, which I thought would be plenty, so for anyone who showed up after all the zines were gone or who couldn't make it at all, I've reproduced it below:
detailed image description
emerald city eggbugs
A community mailing list for local events.
(Between the text is a drawing of Eggbug resting happily in the shade of a fern.)
detailed image description
join at
https://gaggle.email/join/emerald-city-eggbugs@gaggle.email
follow the link! or type it in
(Sparkles are drawn around the link, and a cursor is drawn as though it's about to click on it.)
detailed image description
What? -An email list for organizing events and staying in touch locally.
Why? -Digital community is great, but local community is wonderful too!
Who? -You! Your friends! Anyone in and around Puget Sound.
detailed image description
How does it work?
Hosting an event? Want people to show up? Send the details to emerald-city-eggbugs@gaggle.email!
Want more opportunities for COVID-safe ways to meet people and hang out? Join the list!
(Swirly drawings adorn the top and bottom…
-
posted on topposts.net guy who just happens to get really into blogging on October 1, 2024, without understanding what compels him
-
one of my dear pleasures is seeing a person whom I'm not particularly attracted to, but whom I can just tell would make friends with different tastes absolutely gnaw on the furniture with lust
-
posted I was all set to set up a custom Tumblr scraper so I could reblog art and stuff on here, but it turns out Tumblr already uses the h-entry microformat out of the box! I don't have to do anything special at all! Except maybe to handle reblog chains, but that's something I should really do anyway.
oops I lied
Actually it's just the theme Taylor Titmouse was using that has the right metadata. There's no way to get it for any arbitrary tumblr post. I'll have to write that custom scraper after all 😩
At least this post motivated me to come up with some sort of a story for reposts!
-
RECCANTI asked: RSS feeds for embeds
I was trying to parse the content field of your RSS (Atom?) feed, and I noticed I get a sort of flat structure for embedded posts like this:
<img src="..." width="64" style=" float: left; width: auto; max-width: 64x; margin-top: 1rem; margin-right: 1rem; border-radius: 32px; ">
<div class="npf_row">
<div class="npf_col">
<figure class="tmblr-full">
<a class="post_media_photo_anchor" data-big-photo="..." data-big-photo-height="680" data-big-photo-width="669">
<img class="post_media_photo image" src="..." srcset="..." sizes="..." alt="image">
</a>
</figure>
</div>
</div>
<p> have you heard about the <b><a href="https://itch.io/b/2672/sickos-selection-1">Sicko’s Selection</a></b>? me and 14 other adult artists/authors put together a bundle of artbooks, novellas, and comics for you to enjoy! there’s over $75 worth of our hot hot smut in here, and you get it for just $15! </p>
<p> i, for one, have offered up Poker Night with the Arizona Dogs, AND if it reaches its stretch goal of $5000, i’ll be premiering another new artbook a few weeks ahead of its planned release! </p>
<p> <b><a href="https://itch.io/b/2672/sickos-selection-1">so what are you waiting for, sicko?? go get your porn!</a></b> </p>I'm having a hard time figuring out how to render this out as an embed with the current markup and was wondering if you had any ideas?
Also, I think the max-width on the avatar is incorrect. It's currently 64x, not 64px
Anyway, I'm really excited about all the stuff you're doing with h-entry, webmentions, and things like that. I hope I can integrate some of that stuff into my blog eventually!
Thank you for giving me a reason to make an ask component. 🙂
When I include a repost like this in my Atom feed, I treat it as though the post I'm reblogging is itself in the feed, rather than a wrapper that contains that post. Generally speaking, As such, most of the metadata (author name, link, title if it has one) is in the rest of the feed entry rather than in the HTML contents. I don't create embeds directly from feeds—I always go to the source web page and create the embed from that—but if I were to do so, I'd treat all that metadata the same way I treat h-entry metadata for sites.
I also always wrap the things I'm embedding in some extra markup to get the nice little boxes…
-
one last selfie for the road
Solid chance this is my last selfie to go out on "social media" as such, and so I hope you'll forgive a bit of nostalgia. Posting selfies, especially early in transition, was hugely important for me. For most of my life up to that point I had regarded my looks with suspicion if not outright hostility, and the selfie became the medium through which I began to take ownership of my appearance and develop a sense of style. The first time I looked at a picture I'd taken of myself and realized "oh. I'm hot" was a huge milestone for me.
Posting selfies to social media was an inseparable part of this. As my style became something I actively put effort and care into, having people appreciate it became a reminder that that work was doing something. It wasn't the dreaded numbers, it was the people: people whose taste and style I also saw and appreciated, people who I was friends with and people I just saw around.
When COVID began, I went from taking and posting selfies almost on a weekly basis to nearly not taking them at all. I no longer felt I had any reason to dress up. Wearing lipstick felt foolish when it would just get ruined by a mask. I wasn't getting any new clothes, because I hate having to remember to send back online orders I don't like. My trademark blue hair was growing out, because even after the vaccine made it feasible to be masked indoors with strangers I couldn't bear the pain of trying to find a salon that still required them. I didn't realize until my roots had overtaken me how much the blue had become a part of my self-image, how much it hurt to look in the mirror and not see the self in my heart.
Little by little, I pulled myself out of that hole. Although the pandemic is very much still present and I am very much still taking precautions, I found ways to allow my sense of style to flourish in between those precautions. I'll put on lipstick just because I feel like it. Liz took careful measurements so I could do online shopping with minimal risk of send-backs. Every now and then I'll even strap on a P100 respirator and go to a physical store. I asked around and found a local salon that not only still requires masks, but is queer- and disabled-owned.
And I started taking selfies again. I took selfies to give myself a reason to care about my appearance again. I took selfies as a reward for putting in the work to make myself look and feel good. I took selfies to send to friends, I took selfies to flirt, I took selfies with pals, I took selfies at beaches and forests and birthdays and the precious few weddings that were safe enough for me to attend. I took selfies to remind the world that I existed, and to…
