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Weekly Notes: Feb 24–Mar 2, 2025

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  • 🍃 Big storms hit the Seattle area on Monday and Tuesday, with lots of power outages. We didn’t lose power at home this time, which was nice. Work lost power early Tuesday morning, and though it was back by the time we got in, there were DNS issues that kept campus offline until almost 8:30. Not an auspicious start to the day.
  • 💸 Friday was the “don’t spend anything” economic blackout day. Honestly, this one was easy for me, as I rarely if ever buy anything on Fridays anyway (don’t get coffee or anything on the way to work, bring my own lunch, all household shopping is generally done on Saturday or Sunday, etc.). I have to admit, my cynical side doubts that enough people actually participated for any company to even notice, let alone for it to actually make an impression. But it’s a start, which is good, and hey, you never know — maybe my cynical side will be proven wrong?
  • 🚀 Saturday was this month’s Norwescon planning meeting, so I got to hang out with con friends for a while. This year, in addition to my usual behind-the-scenes duties (website admin, social media admin, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony coordinator, assistant historian) and visible duties (Thursday night DJ, Philip K. Dick Award ceremony emcee), I’ll also be paneling! I posted my tentative schedule earlier today.

📸 Photos

Panoramic view of trees and grass under a bright blue sunny sky with the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains in the distance.

The view from the balcony outside my office at work on our first really good (false) spring day this year.

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

  • Finished S19 of Project Runway, and though some contestants left earlier than we would have liked, we were not disappointed with the winner.

🔗 Linking

  • NYT (non-NYT link), The Man Behind the ‘Economic Blackout’ Served Time for Sex-Related Offense: “In 2007, Mr. Schwarz was sentenced by a Connecticut judge to 90 days in jail and five years’ probation for disseminating voyeuristic material, according to a representative from the Middlesex County criminal court clerk’s office who reviewed court records while speaking with The New York Times earlier this week.”

  • Marlies on Mastodon: “The vatican needed a latin word for tweet, because the pope tweets. Or tweeted, I suppose, given the whole dead or dying situation. Anyway, they call them breviloquia (s breviloquium) which is honestly a great word even tho it’s not very brief itself. Given its nature and etymology I think we should be able to use it platform-independently and apply it to toots, skeets and even Truths as well. Anyway thank you for reading this breviloquium.”

  • Joan Westenberg, Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever:

    The Internet used to be a connected web of message boards and personal websites. I’m talking 1995 to 2005, when being online meant owning your piece of the web, carving it out yourself, maintaining it, giving a damn about it. It was the age of truly sovereign digital identity and content, built on a direct connection between creators and audiences, who found and fell in love with each other on their terms.

    HTML was an almost democratizing force, giving a generation of people the tools they needed to stake their claim and plant their flag in the ground. The personal website was a statement of intent, a manifesto, a portfolio, a piece of digital architecture you could be damn proud of.

    And then something changed.

  • Apple has its issues, but at least this isn’t one of them. Shareholders voted against removing DEI policies; the board had already recommended this decision.

  • If (like me) you’re still using Facebook (or, unlike me, Instagram/Whatsapp/Meta services), you should follow these simple steps to minimize the amount of data you give Meta. (Also, since this is from John Oliver, the URL is great.)

  • Trivial Einstein on Mastodon: “We have a whole classic parable on the subject of not crying wolf, to the point where ‘crying wolf’ is something of a dead cliché. In the English-speaking world, pretty much everyone knows what ‘to cry wolf’ means, even if they’ve never actually heard the parable. We don’t think about the story. We make the semantic leap from the phrase to ‘false positive.’ And we are taught over and over that crying wolf is always bad. Which is why we find ourselves in situations like the one in which we currently find ourselves.”

Weekly Notes: Feb 10-16, 2025

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  • 🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)

  • 🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!

  • 🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?

📸 Photos

Framed by silhouetted tres, the full moon sets in a sky shading from light blue to pink over the pink-tinted snowcapped Olympic mountains across the water of the Puget sound.

The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.

A wooden bench in front of some winter vegetation. Graffiti sprayed on the backrest of the bench says 'me' on the left side and 'you' on the right side.

Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.

📚 Reading

Finished the last of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated works, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.

🎧 Listening

  • A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.

    Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.

  • Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.

🔗 Linking

  1. Marcin Wichary: The hardest working font in Manhattan

    A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.

    But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.

    Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.

  2. Ex Urbe: History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp

    Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.

  3. The Braille Institute has updated their excellent Atkinson Hyperlegible font to add two more versions.

  4. Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.

  5. Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.

  6. A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:

    1. FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.

    2. linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.

    3. Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).

    4. And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?

Facebook alternatives (an incomplete list)

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With a lot of people (including people I know) talking about leaving Facebook and other Meta properties, but also often expressing frustration with the most popular other options not having the same functionality, I started thinking about what could be done, where, and how. Here are my initial thoughts. This is not a complete or comprehensive list. It may not even be entirely accurate in all respects. There are generalizations in descriptions that may lead to “well, actually…” and “yes, but…” impulses in some readers. I’ll do my best, but corrections, suggestions, and other alternative options are appreciated.

Where are people going?

There’s no simple answer to this, because there is no single alternative site that offers Facebook’s entire feature set. Instead, I’ll look at some of the basic features that people use on Facebook and talking about some of the options for duplicating those features in other places.

Posting things for other people to read

Bluesky

Generally, most people seem to be migrating to Bluesky (I’m on Bluesky). However, Bluesky is much more of a pre-Elon-Musk-Twitter clone than a Facebook clone, so it doesn’t offer the same functionality.

Bluesky, like X/Twitter, lets you post short (300 character) posts that are publicly visible. While you can block other Bluesky users from seeing or interacting with your posts while they are logged in to Bluesky, since every Bluesky post is public, everything you post can still be seen (but not interacted with) by someone who isn’t logged in to Bluesky.

Bluesky is also another single-entity service. While they make a lot of noise about being open and federated, so far that’s nothing but noise, and you’re still moving from one monolithic silo to another monolithic silo (albeit one that’s newer and shinier and that is getting a lot of attention). If (when?) the Powers That Be at Bluesky eventually find themselves swayed by the hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars that are funding them and start doing Questionable Things, well, that’s just the way it goes, and don’t be surprised.

Mastodon

Some people are moving to Mastodon (I’m on Mastodon, and it’s my preferred choice). It’s also essentially a pre-Elon-Musk-Twitter clone, that allows you to post short (usually 500 characters, but this can vary) posts that are publicly visible. It allows you to set your post visibility to public, just people who follow you, or just the people who are mentioned, so it allows for a little more privacy than Bluesky does. However, it does not allow you to set up custom “only show this post to these specific people” lists, which is one of the Facebook features that many people are looking for.

Mastodon is a federated service (these are often referred to collectively as the Fediverse), which is both a strength and a weakness. It’s a strength because it’s not a monolithic silo: There’s no one single Mastodon server, and no single entity in control of all of Mastodon as a whole. If you join a Mastodon server that you find isn’t run in a way you like, you can move to a different Mastodon server (or even a Fediverse-connected server that doesn’t use the Mastodon software) and still interact with everyone you want to interact with. However, this does mean that Mastodon can feel fiddlier and more confusing when new people join: people don’t want to figure out what “joining a server” means, they just want to “join Mastodon”, and this can be and has been a barrier for many.

An imperfect analogy is email: when setting up an email account, you can’t just “join email”; instead, you have to pick which email provider you want to use (Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.), and which email provider you use affects your email address, how well spam is handled, how the user interface looks, and so on. Mastodon is similar: you don’t just “join Mastodon”, you join a Mastodon server, which affects your Mastodon address, how well spam and abuse is handled, how the user interface looks (to some extent), and so on. But just as you can send email to any other email user without worrying which email service they use, you can interact with other Mastodon users without worrying about which Mastodon server they use.

Blogs

Blogs are still a thing! You’re reading one right now! And they’re great: You control the content. You can say anything you want. You can make your posts as short or as long as you want. You can post photos or video. You can link to what other people or organizations post. You can allow comments or not. Depending on the blog service or software, you can make your posts public or restrict them with passwords or other access control methods. You can use different themes to change the way your blog looks. Some platforms are more extensible than others. Basically, it’s your space, and it’s up to you to do what you want with it.

And they’re not even difficult! There are a lot of ways how you can set up your own blog. Some are very simple, where you just sign up with a service and start writing; others are for the more technically-minded, where you install software on your own web host.

Some options:

  • WordPress is very popular, and is available in two flavors: WordPress.com, where they host your blog and take care of the backend maintenance, or WordPress.org, where you download the software and host it on your own web server. I use the self-hosted version, and it’s served me well for years.
  • Micro.blog is a “sign up and start writing” service. The standard version allows for easy cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, Nostr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pixelfed, and Flickr, and they just introduced a new, very low cost ($1/month) Micro.one option that connects to the Fediverse. I occasionally consider moving away from WordPress, and if I do, this is the most likely choice for where I’d go.
  • Other options exist as well, though I haven’t used these often or at all, so can’t say much more about them. These include Google’s Blogger, Tumblr, Dreamwidth (remember LiveJournal? Dreamwidth is a LiveJournal clone not owned by Russians), and probably many others.

Posting things for other people to see

Photos

Flickr is one of the largest and most long-lived photo sharing services (I’m on Flickr). You can upload photos, create albums, and share them out from there, allow people to comment and download them or not, and either retain your copyright or set them to use Creative Commons licensing to allow other people to legally reuse or remix them.

Pixelfed is a Fediverse clone of Instagram. As with Instagram, you can upload photos for other people to view and comment on, but as with Mastodon, there’s no one singular “Pixelfed” service. Instead, you pick a Pixelfed server to join, and then you can follow and interact with other Pixelfed users (or any other Fediverse user) without worrying about what server they are on. This has the same strengths and weaknesses as described for Mastodon above.

Video

While both of the above options for photos also support video to some extent, they are primarily focused on still photos. For video, especially longer form videos, the only two major players I’m currently aware of are YouTube and Vimeo. They’re very similar; YouTube, of course, is run by Google and is the metaphorical 800 pound gorilla.

The people behind Pixelfed are working on Loops for short-form videos on the Fediverse, but it’s currently still in very early stages.

Reading things that other people post

Okay, so there are all those options for putting your thoughts out on the wider internet…now how do you keep up with everything that the people you want to keep up with are posting, especially when they’re now scattered over so many different sites and services?

This is one that feels like a big barrier; one of the strengths of monolithic silos like Facebook is that everything is right there, and you don’t have to do anything to find it. It just lands in front of your face as the timeline (or the algorithms behind the timeline) decrees.

The good news? This is actually one of the easiest barriers to surmount. It’s extremely simple to build your own timeline, in chronological order, without mysterious algorithms deciding what you see, and without ads or “suggested posts” popping up in your feed, and you’ll be able to follow along with most virtually (and maybe entirely) all of the sites and services I’ve suggested above.

All you need is an RSS reader.

RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) is just a specially formatted text file (a “feed”) with the most recent posts someone has posted to their site. By adding RSS feeds to your RSS reader, you see whatever has been posted, all in one convenient place. And the best part is, RSS feeds have been around for years, are a big part of the underlying technology that makes much of the modern internet work, and are provided by nearly every website! Blogs like this one, news sites like CNN, Bluesky, Mastodon, and many, many others.

When you’re on a website that you want to keep up with, just add the website’s main address to your feed reader, and your feed reader should automatically find the RSS feed. If that doesn’t work, many websites will have a link to their RSS feed visible somewhere on the page so you can copy the address directly to add to your feed reader. And that’s it! Whenever you open your RSS reader, you’ll have a nice, simple, clean, chronological list of everything that the sites you follow have published since you last checked in.

You can also add your Bluesky and Mastodon friends to your RSS reader to see what they’ve posted without having to individually check in with Bluesky or Mastodon. I do this because I follow a lot of accounts on both services, and there’s just no way that I’ll be able to read everything that gets posted — but my putting the RSS feeds for my most important accounts (generally, friends I know in the real world) into my feed reader, I know that I’ll see their posts, even if I don’t happen to see it when I’m on Bluesky or Mastodon.

As an Apple user, my preferred and highly recommended RSS reader is NetNewsWire, which is available for the desktop/laptop, for iPhones, and for iPads. I’m afraid I don’t have my own recommendations for native Windows or Android readers, but I’m happy to add recommendations here if I get any suggestions.

There are also several web-based RSS readers so that you’re not dependent on an app on your computer or mobile device, and many of these can be accessed by on-device RSS reader apps. I use Feedbin and have it connected to NetNewsWire, which allows me to use NetNewsWire on my computers and mobile devices, log into the Feedbin website if I’m on another device, or even experiment with different RSS reader apps, and always have my reading list up to date.

This often seems like the most complicated part of keeping up with everyone you want to keep up with, but with RSS, it’s actually the easiest part of this whole thing.

Events

Unfortunately, this is an area that I don’t currently have any pointers for. I’m open to suggestions from others, though!

Private groups

This is another area where I don’t currently have good pointers. Discussion board and forums used to be really good at this sort of thing before Facebook and social media in general virtually killed them off. I know they’re still out there and being used, they’re just not as prevalent as they used to be, because Facebook offered everything in one single place. Once again, I’m open to suggestions!

Personally, I think a resurrection of private discussion boards and forums would be a great way to go, but I haven’t looked yet to check into the current state of things in this arena.

But what about Discord? Or Slack?

Though I use both, I’m not a big fan of Discord or Slack, because, like Facebook, they are monolithic silos. They don’t feel like it, because you’re logging into this Discord server or that Slack server, but they’re still all controlled by their parent entity. (Much like Facebook groups are seemingly private spaces within Facebook, every Discord or Slack is just a seemingly private space run by Discord or Slack).

They’re also quirky, often confusing for new users, and very difficult to search through. To me, they’ve managed to combine all the worst features of social media, chat, and discussion forums, making them a kludgy mess rather than a convenient solution. Your mileage may vary (YMMV), of course.

Final thoughts

The best thing about Facebook was that everyone was in one place, there were some pretty impressive granular control over who could see what you posted, events could be promoted and shared, groups could be built, and you didn’t need to go anywhere else to do it, and it was “free” (in scare quotes, since it was free because we were the products being sold, not the customers).

The worst thing about Facebook…well, there’s no single “worst thing”, but if you’re seriously considering getting away, you’re likely already quite familiar with all the smaller individual “worst things” that add up to it becoming an ever-worsening trash heap surfacing and promoting the worst impulses of humanity.

Moving away is possible! Because there is no one single place to move to that offers all of Facebook’s features (in my opinion, this is a good thing, as anytime there’s “one single place” for everything, the chances of that place eventually falling over and turning into what Facebook has turned into steadily increases with time), a little bit of work in learning new things will be necessary. But much of it is already out there and not that difficult to figure out. And the figuring out is worth doing.

All Your Images Are Belong to Zuck

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If you have what you consider to be a hard-line stance against AI-generated images, and you post your photos and/or artwork to Instagram, Threads, and/or Facebook, you should likely either rethink that hard-line stance or stop posting your images.

Zuckerberg’s Going to Use Your Instagram Photos to Train His AI Machines:

During his earnings call for Meta’s fourth quarter results yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear he will use images posted on Facebook and Instagram to train his generative AI tools with.

Last month, Meta announced a standalone AI image generator to compete with the likes of DALL-E and Midjourney.

Meta has already admitted that it has used what it calls “publicly available” data to train its AI tools with.

Essentially, if you have a public Facebook or Instagram profile where you post photographs, there is a strong chance that Meta is using your work to train its AI image generator tools.

Yeah, this sucks, though it’s not surprising. I’ve stopped posting to Instagram, but still post a lot on Facebook, because this is where most of my friends are. I wish Mastodon would get more traction (I’m not tempted by either Threads or Bluesky; Threads is just another arm of Meta, Bluesky is more Jack Dorsey, neither is actually federating yet despite a lot of lip service, and neither currently allows post schedulers to tie in, which keeps me from using them for Norwescon posts), or, even better, that there was more of a push back towards actual self-owned blogs (like this one!) that aren’t locked behind virtual walls. But I don’t want to lose track of all of my friends, so until something major shifts, I’ll stick around, which means I’m probably going to end up shrugging and resigning myself to feeding Zuck’s AI machines, which I have definite ethical issues with.