posted on shelraphen.com Cohost Eulogy & Retrospective
Part Two: Cohost Was Good For Me
A common sentiment expressed since the announcement that Cohost is closing down has been "Cohost fixed me after Twitter broke me." I will echo this sentiment. Twitter gave me mental illnesses I didn't have before. Cohost felt like waking up from a dream. It is difficult to even remember all of the wild things I used to perceive as being of incredible importance. Anarchists versus Marxist-Leninists? Bisexual Lesbian Discourse? While these conversations aren't completely without merit, they are not worth receiving death threats over, nor losing sleep. Hypothetical intellectual conversations on Twitter felt like battles for your life and it gave me incredible anxiety. Being wrong could cost you your following, your sense of community, and whatever sense of power or safety they brought you. It did not matter what you were wrong about. When I moved over to Cohost, and stopped using Twitter, all of that dissipated rapidly. Who cares if somebody has an opinion that is wrong?
Something else happened when I switched to Cohost. I stopped merely posting and started writing. I never saw my twitter threads as substantial meaningful writing. They were tweets. There was a character limit I flaunted by going on and on. People replied before they finished reading. Every tweet had to be a fully self-contained paragraph. There was no room for hedging your sentences or adding nuance. The composer did not lend itself to going back over what you wrote and editing it.
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Reblogging posts with h-entry
posted Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
Thrilled to announce that I now have this up and running, at least in its most basic aspect. The embed above is automatically generated and pulled down directly from the source post. Nothing in this is specific to my blog; I can also do it with someone else's. By way of example, please enjoy this post from my beautiful wife:
posted on seaslug.garden there is a very specific feeling of relief upon realizing I don’t need to hurry to finish a library book before it’s due, because I definitely will want to buy a copy for future reference and cross-checking.
(the book in question is Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation by Christopher M. Elias)
Injecting embeds
Here's what the embed looks like in my blog source right now:
{% genericPost "https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/", time: "2024-09-20T07:06:00Z", tags: "#meta", author: "Natalie", authorUrl: "/", authorAvatar: "/assets/avatar.webp" %} <p> Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads. </p> {% endgenericPost %}
I have a template for the embed, some CSS to style it, and a little custom Liquid tag to bring it all together. But the real magic is in how I generate the
genericPost
in the first place. Here's what the original source looks like before… -
COVID Denialism and Disability Justice
This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.
In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.
COVID in the Social Model of Disability
The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.
This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations…
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This film is doing something interesting in presenting Max as an almost unbearable human being—someone who marries total earnestness with total pretension, self-aware enough to put on airs but not quite enough to realize how obvious it is that he's putting on airs, who once heard the phrase "fake it 'til you make it" and decided to make that his entire personality—and then tries to inspire in the viewer an affection for him. He mellows out over the course of the film, but only moderately. He's still essentially manipulative and overbearing, and one gets the sense that the only reason Margaret is even able to cope with him is a tremendous stubbornness in her own right.
The film's real argument is that Max's sheer intensity, whatever his motivations, creates a more vibrant world around him. He's responsible for everything interesting we ever see at either school, he literally speaks Guggenheim back to life, and in particular he brings color into Herman's dull world. This film is an argument for vivacity no matter the cost, for action-in-itself as an antidote to emptiness.
There's even a kind of desperation in it, just under the surface, a terror of what might happen if even for a moment you stop moving. You could even read this as a tragedy of alienation, in which a man and a boy claw feverishly at some kind of real connection only to get subsumed under an endless tide of aesthetics and activities. Are Max's plays an expression of himself, or are they just another thrashing hand seeking something real but grabbing only empty air?
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Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
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I love that people are thinking about how to make chunks of the web reusable in standalone contexts, but I really truly deeply with that all the solutions like htmx and web components weren't so hopelessly intrinsically tied to JavaScript. I cut my teeth on the ideals of the semantic web and I strongly believe that a web page should be fundamentally usable with JavaScript disabled. For highly interactive applications I concede this as a lost cause, but it breaks my heart to think that personal websites and blogs, which are essentially plain hypertext, are being built on technologies that simply can't work without scripting.
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A triumph of anti-fascist filmmaking that never allows itself to become complacent or moralistic. Although the film is structured around the personal failings of Clerici, it's not a pillory. It's deeply interested in his own battle with himself, between the part of him that longs to be normal and the part which the Quadris catch glimpses of that aspires to be a whole person. It is the tragedy of a man who has choices and chooses wrong again and again.
Despite this tragic bent, it's also dryly humorous. The set design, particularly in the scenes set in fascist Italy, is quietly but deeply satirical: huge useless empty spaces, people shuffling around lugging gargantuan fascist statues, marble so pervasive it becomes a parody of elegance. Tacky prints mounted like fine art. A room drenched in walnuts. The film is clear: fascism is deadly but it's also ridiculous. For all its supposed grandeur, it was only ever a bully dressing like a Roman to make himself feel big.
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I added the ability to automatically pull down and embed Cohost posts. I just paste the URL on its own line and my automation takes care of the rest (checking it in so it doesn't need to make a separate request each time the build runs). Hopefully this will be the first of many sites I do that with: I want to see if I can integrate the notion of the Tumblr-style "reblog" with a more traditional site-specific blog structure.
In celebration, please enjoy a post I still think back on and chuckle:
Breaking: In an effort to push video game enthusiasts to take graphical fidelity less seriously, the Academy of the English Language issued a ruling today that the term "4K" will be officially pronounced "forkie". This ruling is effective immediately for governmental sources, but non-government entities have until the third of February to update their materials before facing fines from the FCC, CRTC, Ofcom, or other relevant regulatory body.
Immediately afterwards, California-based studio 2K Games issued a press release saying "Fuck dude we really dodged a bullet there. Goddamn can you imagine"
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Cohost in memoriam: the friends and family beta
Look, I know only a handful of people actually experienced this first-hand[1]. But I think it's worth remembering anyway, because it set the stage for everything that came after. We[2] joined because we wanted to support our pals and we hoped this could one day really become our fourth website. But we quickly realized that we were actually using Cohost as social media. Most of us came from Twitter—it was still Twitter at the time!—and it was immediately viscerally clear that Cohost was better.
It had so few features at the time, no one had made any tools for it, and the stylesheets would just refuse to load with distressing frequency. But the posts kept rolling in, jokes and essays and so so much marveling at the unforseen positive effects of not having numbers anymore. I really think this early era both established the culture of the site and helped people understand how and why to spread the word among those who would appreciate it.
You might say "there weren't enough of those in the end", but I didn't think that's right. I really think given another five years of runway and maybe a payment processor with its head less to its ass, Cohost could have become sustainable. It's not for everyone, but the people it's for love it with a burning passion. These past few weeks have demonstrated that in spades.
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I've finally become sick enough of Firefox's horseshit that I've begun using LibreWolf. turns out it's pretty nice! you can even set it up to sync with your Firefox settings without much trouble