Luke O. @loppear@social.coop

HaymarketBooks.org is doing one of those $1-or-so ebook sales through tonight. Too many good possibilities, I've nearly finished the ones I got a year ago in Verso's sale so let's see..

White #fungus on persimmon logs, orange on elm. Did they live in the trees before they were cut down? Before they started dying?

WH press conferences seem like a fine place for automated robots to replace humans, like bomb disposal bots or your boss leaning over your cubicle wall telepresence or roombas.

Excited to start #Reading Belinda Barnet's "Memory Machines" history of pre-web hypertext.

I'm 6 books behind again on author gender parity for my #Reading this year, every Male author I read from here to NYE likely makes the goal impossible.

Went to a well-attended rally for our hopeful black woman governor candidate afterwards. It'll be a stretch, but one step complete.

Every trip to the grocery store I'm shocked by the overwhelming majority of breakfast cereals that are coated in a extra layers of sugar (and usually neon), as a parent who never had such things at home growing up. And yet I think we can cut ourselves off fossil fuels in my lifetime, what insanities we accept each day. #smallstories

Niiice.

Made the faux pas of attempting to buy wine at the grocery store 20 minutes before the Sunday hour at which such purchases are permitted in this Bible Belt state.

Compounded my error by replying "Under His Eye" to the hourly checkout worker tasked with enforcing my morals today.

#smallsins #smallstories

I'd forgotten about #TTBOOK for a couple years. Passing thru WI reminded me how excellent it can be, like Radio Open Source, in uncovering a topic.

This week's episode on work - on the failure of most jobs to support a balanced life (w A. Quart), on BS jobs (w D. Graeber), on the work ethic as historical anomaly (w J. Livingston), on worker cooperatives (w N. Okuk), all woven together with Studs Terkel clips, ticks so many boxes for me.

Bravo #WisconsinPublicRadio

https://www.ttbook.org/show/whats-wrong-work

Maybe after these it'll be a good time to read Gilbert's Planning Democracy on agrarian localizing in the US about the same period.

#AmReading To Remember Spain by #Bookchin, to be followed by Spain In Our Hearts by Hochschild, always with Homage to Catalonia echoing in the background.

Time for fire ...and whiskey?

Huh. Making sense of the dynamics of fediverse blocking as content/user moderation when you want to participate in a community figuring out shared governance, hard for me to reason about today. How fractured will the fediverse be in the long-term, and how much is ideal?

#Reading these days: Discovery of the World by Luciana Castellina, a memoir of an Italian teenager at the end of WWII emerging into the communist / anti-fascist world. The Friendly Orange Glow by Brian Dear, a history of the midwest (UIUC) early computer culture around PLATO as an educational platform. Southern Horrors and others by Ida B Wells, anti-lynching polemics from 1890s echoed in today's MBL.

Maybe there are / will be aggregated account readers, so that I can have accounts on multiple community instances I have affinity to or for specialized publishing interfaces, but oauth those follow timelines into one viewer and be able to engage in discussion as any of the personalities. Also leaves off the server administration of self-hosting to a more manageable level. Not sure I like the implied proliferation of accounts, though.

I admit, I'm still trying to wrap my head around practices for federated social media. Self-hosting still seems desirable for control of your name, but these stacks are still complicated, so something like masto.host seems 👍 And local timelines / community is important - the recent thread about being able to view other/multiple instances local timelines in the client seems 👍

Add in pixelfed, where alternate interfaces / accounts seem to make sense despite federating on the reader side... oof.

I really appreciate the conversations that occur around proposal votes.

There is good tension around immediate actions vs long-term policies, and things (eventually) move forward by interest and discussion and rewording to be acceptable for now.

I think it's good that the #CoC is a long-running project to anchor principles and values, becoming a central governing element.

Decisions about federation and blocks will likely remain messy, jury notwithstanding.

Pair of Argiope aurantia lined up along the porch. #smolfrens https://social.coop/media/y39-EPDwVi9K-hQXTJE

#Reading this NASEM committee report on #GeneDrives, interesting to see a) the extent to which e.g. mosquito species eradication by sexual reproduction appears doable today b) whether eradication or altering susceptibility/resistance, very genome and reproduction specific c) some impressive initial studies summarized on turning drives on and off.