@staringatclouds @RickGaehl @pluralistic

“During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris.”

• On the Concept of History | Walter Benjamin

@jupiter_rowland > “tech-savvy geeks… were its initial target audience”

is that true? i’m more of an artist /musician if anything (moderately tech literate generally, but not up to snuff in the context of fedi instances like this one that tolerate my presence 😂), and i had an identica account over a decade ago. my impression was that it just trended toward “tech-savvy geeks” because that’s who would be most likely to notice / experiment with a niche (at the time) open source social media protocol, but that the target audience was kinda everyone.

i might have a mistaken impression!

that unflattering angle on Robert Pattinson waking up hungover in The Lighthouse is just such a beautifully contrived shot.

Welcome to the public domain, STEAMBOAT WILLIE (1928)! https://archive.org/details/SteamboatWillie

Short term pessimism aside, I don’t actually think it will be forever fashionable among the mainstream right to be a total fucking crank who prides himself on having zero social graces; but–godwilling–they’ll always have receipts like these to remind them of their brutally embarrassing origin & return-trajectory.

@randomxusr @jerry tyvm, and likewise

@randomxusr @jerry an interesting characteristic of many current ideas!

#silentSunday

@jackbrewster also, happy 20231231 day (to those who like chronological order in name sorting)

i’m really not into doomerism, but realistically, i am the opposite of optimistic about the fairly short-term future of the US, which is still a very very powerful force in the world.

@jerry same, but tbh might prefer to skip straight to 2025.

@shoq @Tengrain i’m unwilling to ignore the fact that trump is unusually dangerous; i oppose him and will be casting a Biden vote. i also think it doesn’t help us to ignore or downplay the particularity of this moment. sure there’s always bad things happening in the world, but there isn’t always the deadliest conflict for (just for instance) journalists in 30 years, enabled by the progressive candidate. i’m not sure flattening it is useful.

we can call ppl who’ve lost (multiple) loved ones in recent months un-nuanced or tell them they’re enabling bad politics, or “voting for Trump” (instead of the lesser evil guy who provided the weapons to slaughter their loved ones in an open air prison); i just don’t think it will be persuasive, and it seems likely to scan as callous to the ppl around them too.

i’m not a purist. i litter my vote on lesser evil shitheads all the time. i also think Biden has a real problem here.

I am on a crab drawing binge and want to point out that this is an amazing resource and a place of astonishing beauty: https://www.crabdatabase.info/vedecka-galerie

@Tengrain @shoq i get the point re institutional slowness. also the other week i had lunch with a friend who is grieving the loss of a loved one killed in Palestine. he certainly isn’t gonna vote for Trump, but he bitterly curses Biden & swears he will never vote for him.

the sheer number of people being killed there (dozens within single families) means there are a lot of people in that boat, and a lot of people who care about those grieving people as well.

one can appeal to lesser evils or strategic consideration, but grief isn’t generally the most rational or calculating state of mind.

it’s realistic to compare the awfulness of trump to the less-awfulness of Biden; but imo it’s also realistic to assess the many levels of catastrophe here; and the abject grief behind a certain amount of Biden abstention.

imagine losing multiple loved ones within days, who might very well still be alive if it weren’t for the Biden administration; and then being told to hold your nose and vote for him. maybe a hard sell.

anyway, not a very novel insight, but it’s a thought that’s been haunting me since that lunch.

babe, you good? you haven't touched your lorem ipsum dolor & cheddar wrap

seems like some very shitty cold/flu bug is going around - lots of friends testing negative for #COVID, but feeling about as sick as they can ever recall feeling

everybody is sick.

#pdx #portland

@MsDropbear425 oh interesting it’s a fork of firefox? had not heard of this browser

@MsDropbear425 is that the result of an extension / addon?

anyhow, just recently switched back to #firefox after a stint using #vivaldi - and I do prefer it - it seems to hog less CPU, not to mention being open source.

vivaldi’s customization options are really nice, and I can’t quite match them all with firefox, but been getting somewhere with it nonetheless. I do really wish firefox would bring back RSS feed reader capabilities.