Notices by pamela :flan_butterfly: (pamela@bsd.network)

What's the website owned by a single person you've been visiting longest, the one that feels like it'll never go away?

Mine's http://www.mythman.com/
Went there for homework help long ago, still pull it up for kicks now and then, run by the owner of a Greek restaurant in Windsor (who apparently retired this spring after 41 years in business).

Just resist the urge. Because you're not going to think to check for robots.txt, but you ought to, that's how we communicate we don't want to be involved. You're probably not going to bother to read the various terms of service for the instances you touch, many of which explicitly ask you not to do any scraping or automated activity beyond normal use of the service. You're not going to know to respect people using the NoBot hashtag that was meant to prevent automated follows. You're certainly not going to parse user profiles and pinned posts to learn how people like to be approached, what will get you blocked, or even think to heavily throttle your activity because instances are falling over in response to load.

Whatever your thing is, make it 100% opt-in. Make it appropriate for a significantly more at-risk user than you are. Make sure it forgets things, purges info about servers it can't contact, can't operate in any sort of logged-in mode where consent is an issue.

We will straight up help advertise your cool thing if it respects users properly and takes the time to consider the safety and preferences of every person involved. There are a lot of fun, thoughtfully-designed toys! And there are a lot of people really tired of having to come and tell you off when you wanted to help, honestly. Help yourself and ask around before you flip on your cool new thing, let folks point out what you're missing.

Some days my feed is just people stressing because software is broken or incomplete, intermixed with the very same overwhelmed developers who are having life crises or are ill, stressing about how they can't focus to work on it.

? :flan_water::flan_sleep: for everyone, please

You know how when you first wake up in the morning it's really hard to do stuff like open a glass bottle? Hopefully that's universal; I remember it as a kid, too, just this period of grip weakness before everything kicks in properly.

Why does that happen?

The first thing you're warned about by others when you develop a chronic or long-term illness is that people will forget you.

They don't mean to. We call them social cues for a reason. People often need a hook to get to thinking about someone, an excuse to contact them. We can all kinda keep up with injuries or acute illness because there are known dates and timeframes involved. Here's when to send flowers, here's when to drop off food. When you ask how they're recovering, you expect some sort of motion.

When you're sick on a more long-term basis, I guess you stop reaching out because you run out of things to talk about... "that fresh pillowcase sure was nice," "I liked today's third random movie better than the fourth." It's difficult to make new friends or sweet-talk existing ones into new, easier forms of communication without the energy to connect over a shared interest or ability to sustain a real-time conversation. You want company and friends, but it's hard to get people to engage open-endedly and asynchronously. They'll think you are tired and want to be left alone. But what you'll want is comfort and certainty in your connections.

Anyway I have no real point; it's just sad and it's universal. And a lot of people with chronic illnesses are still on full lockdown and lonely or have newly become ill without the benefit of the social support they'd ordinarily have to adjust to drastic changes in lifestyle or ability.

If you are lucky enough to be healthy and want to do something really awesome for someone who isn't, put someone you care about who you know is ill in your calendar and reach out consistently. Send them regular little notes about what is new with you, send uber eats to their door with breakfast on weekends, suggest something for their reading list or just send them some books if they're able to read comfortably, ask if you can pick up anything for a hobby they can still enjoy while you're out, send them a copy of the photos you take that are fun or pretty that you're not putting up anywhere.

Anything. Just... make it recurring. Each text or DM or "I saw this and thought of you" is a treasure.

It took me like a week to word this so if you appreciate it please share your ultimate low effort recipe, mine is the thing where you sit a tomato, black pepper and a little oil on top of the rice in your rice cooker and then run it. I like to stir eggs into it after it finishes. :flan_nom: