This is fascinating -- magenta was named for a battle during the second Italian war of independence; orchid is Greek for testicle; porcelain is from the Latin term for a young pig, because the color resembles a young pig's genitalia; sepia comes from the Latin word for cuttlefish
Once again, I reiterate my desire for a single way of viewing and participating with posts on X, Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky -- it's like instant messaging all over again, and there's no ICQ. We need a FriendFeed for the 2000s
"I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy; it all feels too much like a sideshow. Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson" https://thepointmag.com/criticism/very-ordinary-men
This is sad, but so predictable: Ello launched with a grand vision of being an alternative to profit-driven networks, took VC money, then tried to become a profit-driven network, failed miserably, sold itself and got shut down https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/
So since I had a lot of free time on my hands, I swapped out all the links in the "Weird" section of my recreated 1998 home page for Wayback Machine archives of those pages. Of course, a lot of the images weren't archived, and the Javascript doesn't work, but you can still get a sense of sites like Bert Is Evil, the Museum of Bad Art, etc. https://mathewingram.com/weird.html
I really miss the days when the web was filled with goofy Javascript games and blogs about weird things, or weird people, or both. It may not have been as useful as today's internet, but it was a lot more fun 😃
Note: If you've ever seen or liked a post of mine that comes from my blog/personal site and thought "I wish there was a firehose of everything," you can get that by following @mathewingram.blog thanks to the wonders of ActivityPub. Be warned: it is a firehose of *everything,* including random thoughts, photos etc.
Before Thanksgiving, there was the Order of Good Cheer
From Laura Kiniry for Atlas Obscura: "Four centuries ago, the settlers of a small French outpost perched on the north bank of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis River came up with the novel idea of founding an organization that would not only feed its members, but also uplift spirits during the long and brutally cold winter. Led by c