I don’t know if you can predict the winter by woolly bears but I do love seeing them. Also, I would be part of any club called “The Original Society of the Friends of the Woolly Bear.”
[Glen Campbell’s] father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.
The essay I promised back in May. A history of public-access Unix from Dennis Ritchie's 'fellowship' and Grex's potluck dinners to Paul Ford's drunken tilde.club and ~vilmibm's birthday gift to themself; a tour of the seven tildes I call home (including the starship I captain on cosmic.voyage); what kernel exploits and an rm -rf / taught the tildeverse about fragility; and how to move in yourself.
App development is clearly accelerating. There are so many new apps being developed and shipped that before wouldn't have existed or would've stayed hobby projects.
It's cool! There are fewer barriers. But it's also noisy and will require new ways of thinking about competition and getting noticed.
I took out a six-month subscription to The Budget, a weekly newspaper by and for plain Anabaptists (to quote the wiki). I probably won't subscribe to it long term but I'm really interested in the scribe letters.
Here's a quick video demo of the new version of Micro.blog for Mac that we released a couple days ago. It shows the book calendar and note dictation. Enjoy!
This post is secret; you can only find it via my RSS feeds (and places which syndicate them). It's okay to talk about it or link to it, though. Thanks for being part of RSS Club!
234 days since we got flooded out of our house, and it sometimes feels like we'll never get to move back in. Delay after delay, problems with the construction, disputes over the quality of the repair work... and then yet more delays for good measure.
Last month, the insurers insisted that we give notice to leave our temporary accommodation by early December. Now they've agreed that we can retract that notice (which I'm sure must be annoying for our landlord and letting agents) because we (eventually) got them to agree that there's a fast-dwindling chance of any guarantee that their contractors can complete the work to a satisfactory standard by that point.
I want my home repaired. And I want to go home. And it feels like the insurance company think that those two requests are like wanting to have my cake and eat it too. Sigh.
And... it makes me sad and angry and tired to still be having the same arguments with them after so many months and still be getting nowhere.
</rant>
❤️🔥 You're reading this post via the RSS feed. You're on fire! 🔥
Over the coming weeks, we will introduce text watermarking to eligible ChatGPT and Codex users across all plans in the EU only. We are not making text watermarking a global default at launch. This regional approach gives us room to learn from real-world use and feedback.
I think this whole thing is largely misguided. Hope it is not expanded.
I’ve mentioned before that I would love to see some more photos on blogs. Even if text is the main thing on your blog, a photo every now and then is such a lovely bonus for me as a reader.
Maintaining a gallery is a bit of a hassle on most indie platforms. I’ve tried various ways of doing it, but it always ends up the same way: I forget to update it.
Therefore, I decided to create a /photo slash page. Like a /now page, but just for photography. One photo, swapped whenever I have a new pic I feel like sharing.
I checked the Slash Pages website and all I found when it comes to photos was “/pfp - a timeline of all your profile pictures”. So maybe there’s room for a fun little addition like this.
It would be wonderful to see more /photo pages. Totally up to each and every one what to share and how often. A little glimpse into your life at a level you feel comfortable with.
If you create such a page, please let me know and I will add your link to my /photo page.
Micro.blog has always been philosophically opposed to like counts and retweets. We think the dopamine hit of public likes tends to encourage performative behavior on the social web, leads to popularity contests and needless reloading of notifications that is mentally exhausting, and incentivizes platforms to build timeline algorithms around metrics.
None of that is changing in Micro.blog. But there is a long-standing hole created by this view of the social web: your followers on the fediverse and atmosphere don't know their likes are going into the void, and you can't discover new people to follow based purely on likes and reposts.
Over the next few months, I'm rolling out a new feature to fix this. Behind the scenes, Micro.blog is starting to note when one of the following happens:
Like, boost, or quote from Mastodon.
Like or repost from Bluesky.
Like from a blog via Webmention.
Instead of displaying them in a chronological list, there will be a new page that shows you a selection of other people who have liked or reposted your posts. This gives you a view to check occasionally to see who appreciates your blog. It's centered around people, not posts. People you might want to follow back within Micro.blog or elsewhere on the social web.
As I've been thinking about this, I also reviewed Glass's appreciations. They shipped this a few years ago. I think their implementation does solve some traditional problems of public likes, but it doesn't feel right for Micro.blog.
I'll share more when all of this is officially launched. I hope that it strikes the right balance of giving a little more information for discovery while preserving the quieter, slow nature of blogs and the IndieWeb.
