Notices by Space Catitude 🚀 (terryhancock@realsocial.life)

I'm seeing a lot of concern over heavy news today and boosts. So I want to call your attention to a useful, but perhaps little-known Mastodon feature:

If you want to follow an account on Mastodon, but you don't like the posts that they boost from others, you can hide these from an option on their profile (in the web UI) without having to unfollow them.

There are many strongly held opinions on the "correct" use of CW and what ought to be boosted, so this can be a useful way to cope.

"Sinners" (2025) really is a very good movie. People are going to be talking about this movie for a long time.

I mean, no one really uses Windows on purpose, right?

It's forced on you by your employer or your school. Or it's just what came on your computer and you don't know how to re-install or can't be bothered.

I mean, how many Windows users have actually INSTALLED their Windows O/S..?

Same reasons people use Android. Or iOS. Or Apple anything.

I think that Linux (and to a lesser degree other free/self-installed O/S like BSD Unix, etc) has pretty much saturated the "market" for everyone who's actually willing to *think* about what O/S they are using on their computer.

The rest are people who just don't want to think about computers.

Something similar is happening with respect to the Fediverse, I think. If you don't *choose* to be here, then the social media you use will be one of the corporate platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

It's a hell of a filter, that kind of intentional choice. I think we underestimate it.

@HumanServitor

@evan talks about the "Big Fedi" and "Small Fedi" agendas/factions to describe this, I think.

I"m mostly on the "Big Fedi" side, myself. But I can understand the benefits of the Small Fedi. Google+ was like that, too: you were on with a bunch of computer experts, and if you were a computer person, those are largely "your people", so it's kind of nice.

But it's still a bubble. I try to live in the "real world". Sadly, a big chunk of my "real world", particularly in my geographic area, is it's fully of MAGA people. Who keep saying absolutely batshit things that they think are true, because the regime says so. 🤦

It's hard on the sanity.

@msh @Daojoan

Every study I've seen that made the claim that increased wealth didn't correlate with greater happiness had a VERY important, but often omitted parameter: it was always above some minimum. And that minimum was pretty high. I remember one using $70,000/yr.

So basically, ABOVE the middle class, more wealth doesn't correlate to more happiness. And that basically makes sense to me.

But BELOW the middle class is a whole other story.

@youronlyone
I have seen/heard "neurospicy" as a slang synonym for "neurodivergent". Your examples sound like they're being used to be more specific to Autistic or ADHD divergence.

These terms are used by/for low-needs autistic/ADHD people who want to talk about their issues without offending people who think "autistic" and "ADHD" should be reserved for people more disabled. Often these are self-diagnosed/undiagnosed.

Personally, I find the "-spicy" terms a bit too kitschy, though.

Selection pressure on animals that live near humans -- supporting the "anthropocene" concept (defined here as saying that human activity becomes the primary driver for evolutionary adaptation):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnQ0eQrKF4g

@inthehands @xris @blogdiva

Watching the stargate sequence after having read the book 2001, it's surprisingly comprehensible what's supposed to be going on.

Of course, the movie is really based on the short story "The Sentinel", but Clarke wrote the novel more or less in parallel with producing the movie, so it's neither exactly source text nor novelization.

Which makes it all the more weird that he stuck with putting the monolith on Saturn's moon Iapetus in the book.

It's been a long time since I did hobby crafts and I kind of miss it.

So what do I do?

I buy kits. And then they sit on my shelf. This is sub-optimal.

I need to clean up my workbench, I guess. And reserve some time to do this kind of stuff.

I have a styrene 1/48 model of the Voyager spaceprobe, a wooden shelf room miniature, a ArcBotics spider robot, a couple of solder practice boards, and a digital clock kit just sitting there. Not going to assemble themselves, are they?

@blogdiva

I'm old enough I could've seen them all on the big screen, but I think I only saw "Star Wars"? I was a little young for R rated films, and my parents were strict about that (also poor). 🙄

I may have caught indy or university theater showings later. I saw "Alien" first on my uncle's laserdisc player.

I definitely saw "Aliens" on the big screen, though.

Later I had a season pass at UT that was about to expire, so I watched "Aliens" 20X in a row.

I had the coolest nightmares after that.🤭

@sollat @blogdiva

The earliest movie I remember was a drive-in showing of "The Andromeda Strain". It took me years to figure this out, but I had a very vivid memory of a sequence near the end, with the nuclear-disable key. I guess it really freaked me out -- I would've been about 3-4 yrs old.

@evan

I think that's covered by "no eliminiationist rhetoric", yeah.

@mattl
Yeah. It was a thing. For awhile. In the 80s. 🤷♂️

Cheaper than laserdiscs. But also kind of crappier.

I have CED disc skips embedded in my consciousness. I rewatch movies from that era, and brace for the skip, even when it's not going to happen, because it's a different medium.

@mattl

It's become kind of a tradition in my family that the first movie we get in any new format is "Forbidden Planet".

I think I have had that on CED disk, VHS, and DVD. I don't think I ever got the Blu-Ray, though.

My parents LOVED "Forbidden Planet", and I guess I'm pretty fond of it, too.

@mattl

Also, was 1997 REALLY when DVD players first came out? It feels like it's been longer! 😅

@killyourfm

I mean the frowny face on the left. If I squint a bit, there's a face on the right, too. Possibly with a cartoonishly long nose, looking off to screen right?

@killyourfm

You mean the face..?
Pareidolia strikes again!

@jalefkowit

This tyrannical packaging behavior is why I curse the name of Snap, spit on all of its followers, and banished it from all of my systems.

I have never hated any other Linux tech this much.

Seriously, though, I've LONG used custom file system mounts because the "Linux Standard Base" is simply not the most efficient way to handle large multimedia projects. They need their own top-level partition for a host of management reasons.

The most offensive thing is that if you bring this up, there is a bevy of tut-tutting developers and users who were in frickin' diapers when I set this up, ready to tell me I'm "doing it wrong".

So... anyway, I'm using AV Linux now.

@evan
~2100

It does kind of depend on what counts. I presume from the question that the UN isn't enough.

Is the EU?

If so, then I think a global body on that level might happen by then.

The complication is China.

Russia and the USA are rapidly weakening, so they (or their pieces) might wind up joining a "global EU" (UN successor) body of some kind.

But China is likely to become increasingly nationalist over this century, and yet I don't think they will swallow the rest of the world.

So the world might be more bipolar in 2100?

OTOH, China might play along, as long as the membership status doesn't affect them internally. Kind of like Hungary or Turkey in the EU currently. 🤷♂️

I mean it's basically science-fiction at this point.