To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.

There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.

What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.

Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.

That’s a lot of phaelenopsis.

It looks utterly repulsive, but I kind of love the idea… the sheer convenience.

Dr*g?

So, I was at my pharmacy today getting my prescription dr*gs, and afterward stopped by my dealer to pick up some fucking heroin.

I agree; it probably didn’t occur to them. But it was a fairly common job in IT in the 90’s. Not a career or job description, maybe, but a duty you got saddled with.

What they really got wrong was the clothing: so much anime/hentai.

This is a techno-goth.

The power to choose, just before dying, to come back to life as a healthy 30 y/o.

But you probably meant only selfless acts allowed, hence the “sacrifice” verbiage. In that case, instantaneous worldwide post-scarcity society. That’d address most of the world’s ills, eventually. Being ultra-rich means nothing in post-scarcity; not needing Middle-East oil and African mineral resources would eliminate most international meddling in those locations. While it wouldn’t immediately address climate change or cure all diseases, it’d mean enough food and energy for everyone, and it’d give us the means to accomplish these.

If so many of us weren’t spending all our time working just to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, we could accomplish much as a species.

A studio should be able to afford a good LTO tape drive for at least one backup copy; LTO tapes last over 30 years and suffer less from random bitrot than spinning disks. Just pay someone to spend a month duplicating the entire archive every couple of decades. And every decade you can also consolidate a bunch of tapes since the capacity has kept increasing; 18TB tapes are now available: $/MB it’s always far cheaper to use tape.

They could have done that with the drives, but today you’d have to go find an ATA IDE or old SCSI card (of you’re lucky) that’ll work on a modern motherboard.

But I’d guess their problem is more not having a process for maintaining the archives than the technology. Duplicating and consolidating hard drives once a year would have been relatively cheap, and as long as they verified checksums and kept duplicates, HDs would have been fine too.

The assassination attempt on Reagan also failed, and was bigger news, for far longer. Not JF Kennedy level, but it was more enduring than the attempt on Trump.

The news cycle on the Trump attempt was astonishingly brief.

In Living Color; 1988.

Search for “Kennedy.” Long before Trump was a “thing” in the American zeitgeist.

I think John F. Kennedy qualified; he’s been practically deified since his assassination, and his supporters were MAGA-level enthusiasts. Just the sheer level of conspiracy theory around his assassination, missing from all other assassinations - successful or attempted - is a good indicator. Even the attempted Trump assassination, which generated considerable tin-hat response, is now almost completely forgotten; certainly, nobody’s talking about it in mainstream forums.

In my opinion, Kennedy was an incredible president and great statesman, but yeah, I think you could reasonably claim there was a cult of personality around him.

Github is full of lists of things. There are even several lists of “awesome lists”. Far more than I can list here, and it starts to get painfully recursive (an awesome list of awesome lists of awesome lists?). Just search for “awesome list” on github; some live outside of github, so you could search for “awesome list” in Ecosia, or DDG, or whatever you use.

• https://github.com/athityakumar/awesome-awesomes
• https://github.com/topics/awesome-list
• https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

A series is the only way to do Dark Tower. It’s too much to try to cram into a movie; there’s just about a season’s worth in most of the books, and if 8 seasons is a stretch of a commitment for a studio, several of the books are smaller and you could probably reasonably compress the series into 5 seasons.

They need to do it while King is still around, IMHO. More than any other of his novels he seems to have been more emotionally invested in The Dark Tower.

Humans can be real shits. Still better than finding a starving cat; at least they fed him. Still.

We can put people on lists to restrict their ownership of guns, or driving cars. And yet, there’s no way to restrict people from owning pets, or having children. And folks get right uppity if you even suggest the latter, Left or Right.

Oh, no. I hate Pumpkin Spice. Pumpkin Pie at Thanksgiving is my bane. It’s probably why I hate Pumpkin Spice. I could live with the stink it for a couple of days, but after StarFucks came out with Pumpkin Spice, it started getting everywhere starting October and running through Christmas.

And it really does smell more strongly than other things. It’s invasive.

How about you having to work next to someone who slathers himself in surstromming every morning for three months, and then come tell me how OK it is for people to invade your space with “a little smell.”

Good eye; I didn’t think about looking at the trees. It looks pre-Fall, but this is the South; I wouldn’t be surprised if there were still leaves on the trees into late September.

This looks like a farm to me. That bunker is almost certainly a converted ice-house, but could also be slave housing. I’d guess ice-house, as that’s what they look like in the mid-Atlantic. Also, I’d have expected fortifications to be built outside the city, given the nature of warfare in the mid-1800’s. Surely they wouldn’t have built those barriers in a more suburban area? The barriers looking fairly intact is what makes me suspect a “before” photo.

TIL people love their Pumpkin Spice.

It doesn’t smell “a bit.” It pervades a space. You can’t smell someone’s coffee, or their caramel macchiato, or their OJ, unless you stick your face in their cup. But if someone comes into an office with a pumpkin spice, you know it because it stinks up there entire room.

It wouldn’t be so bad, by itself. What makes it aggregious is that stores start pumping out the pumpkin spice scent around October; it’s everywhere. It’s inescapable. It’s like a crowded Austrian bar in the 1980’s, where there’s a literal cloud ceiling of cigarette snake at a meter high and an impenetrable haze that limits visibility to 2 meters. Candles. Infusers and incense.

“Smell a bit.” That’s like calling a nuclear holocaust “a little fire.”

Because it’s more than just not drinking milk. Vegans avoid all products that result from the direct exploitation of animals, including eggs and honey. It also includes not using animal products like leather; you can be a vegetarian and still wear leather.

Honey always seemed a stretch to me, as apiaries benefit bees, but veganism is pretty significantly different from vegetarianism; having a different term for it makes sense.

What a neat rocking mechanism! Unless there’s some historical reason to not refurb it, it’d be a beautiful restoration.