I was added to a moderation list on Bluesky for following someone on Twitter and subsequently muting them, and then forgetting I had followed them when I used a tool to migrate all of my follows to Bluesky. Which is just a stupid mistake, but what about people who are following notable bigots because they’re journalists and have to keep tabs on what they say?

Being banned for upvoting someone’s comment seems similarly tunnel-visioned. If you’re upvoting their pun about the moon or their helpful cooking suggestion or their computer build tip, getting banned because you didn’t check their entire post history before upvoting is absolutely insane to me.

Guilt by association is only a thing if it’s actually association.

Me too.

Do you remember how Trump tried to take control of the National Archives as, like, his first action in office? The idea that he just wanted to display the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office never seemed like enough to me. I think the files have already been copied, and there was a copy in Biden’s presidential records. Who knows where else they’ve been sent?

If they’re released in an edited or heavily redacted state, I bet we’ll get the real ones shortly thereafter.

This one has legs. They’re trying to quash it for some reason. I’m not saying it’ll bring down Trump, even though he’s obviously in there, but it’ll probably bring down at least a few senators.

And Trump’s base is breaking with him on this like they haven’t done in a decade. This is bigger and worse than I’ve ever seen. If it shifts the balance of power in Congress, I could see something happening to him too.

That’s the thing about Teflon. If you keep using it over and over, it eventually wears off. Given enough time, something will stick.

It is when her boss is almost certainly someone who deserves to have justice rain down on him.

Probably not if you lived on Pandora.

I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.

Honestly, for me, it’s the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device’s 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I’ve chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I’ve got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don’t need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can’t afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don’t think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I’d prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don’t really feel the need to.

The weird thing is that Windows 10 broke that model. It always used to be that the even-numbered Windows versions were worse (after, let’s say, Windows 2000): ME (#4)? Bad. XP (#5)? Good! Vista (#6)? Bad. 7? Good! 8? Bad. 8.1 (#9)? Good! But then Windows 10 came out and threw the whole rhythm off.

You could pretty reasonably argue that 8.1 wasn’t a true version, and thus Windows 10 was the 9th version of Windows, but that just means that 8 was the combo breaker by becoming good eventually. In either case, Windows 11 being bad restores the bad version/good version rhythm.

Li’l Donny just can’t feel strong if he doesn’t send the National Guard somewhere, and after getting kicked out of Chicago, he’s probably hoping for a warmer reception in a redder state.

Not on Mastodon. Some of the other fedi microblog platforms have had it, though.

They want us to upgrade to 11 so they can do that when they release Windows 12.

Great point. Their strategy at this point is holding a gun up to your hard drive and saying “upgrade now or your data gets it.”

You just described most of my post history.

✅ Colorado

✅ Connedicut

✅ Delaware

❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)

✅ Florida

But not

❌ I’aho

❌ Iniana

❌ Marylan

❌ Nevaa

❌ North Akota

❌ Rhoe Islan

❌ South Akota

I would assume it uses a different random seed for every query. Probably fixed sometimes, not fixed other times.

He didn’t deserve it, but I can still choose to be better than him and offer it anyway.

Yeah, every fascist regime in history fell or is in the process of falling, but this is the one that’s going to beat the odds and finally take. America is so exceptional that we’re the only ones who will never escape this downhill slide.

/s. Nah, man. Every slide has a bottom. Their game plan is misinformation (for the maga base), complacency (for the old school Republicans), or despair (for everyone on the left), and you’ve been hit by it. There’s no shame in that—they’ve literally spent billions of dollars trying to snag you. But it’s still just propaganda.

They have a weakness—in fact, they have tons of them—and the only way they get to keep on ruling is if we don’t take advantage of those weaknesses. I’m not saying it’s going to be fun. But they will fall; and based on Trump’s failing health and rapidly crumbling coalition, it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. At this point it’s just a matter of how many people get hurt or killed before he’s finally deposed.

Hold on tight. Only let go to reach down and pull up someone who needs help, or to punch a Nazi in the face. Immerse yourself in local action. Do what you can do— it’s more than you think.

Oh, this is great news. I have Nova tweaked to work almost exactly like this. Excellent, thank you.

Whoa. I’m American and I just discovered that I had been using that word…uh…wrong for my region but right for the rest of the world? I thought it was phonemes in general, and that the vowel thing was an archaic usage. Interesting.

I knew it wasn’t alliteration, since it isn’t all the first syllable sound. But it’s always fun to learn new stuff about the language I’ve been speaking for nearly forty years.