Notices by TJ Radcliffe (tjradcliffe@mastodon.scot)

@jjdavis @ramblingsteve @rberger @pluralistic

After using DDG for a couple of years I've been using https://www.qwant.com/ for a while now, and finding it pretty good. Tried mojeek and it was good for surrealism, bad for answers. Most of the time I couldn't figure out what the results had to do with the query. But Qwant has been good: European (based in France), ad supported, so far so good.

@hypolite @clacke @chebra

So just to be clear, you're agreeing with Margaret Thatcher that "there's no such thing as society"? That is: there are only individuals, with no identity beyond what they freely choose for themselves, unconstrained by class or system.

I don't think I really have a fruitful way to engage with a far right libertarian, and the position "society is nothing but a collection of individuals"--that is, there are no collective effects--is a far right libertarian position.

@chebra @hypolite @clacke

Maybe the onus is on society to change. Maybe that's where almost all of our attention should be, instead of on men as these mythical autonomous individuals.

@clacke @codinghorror

Definitely put off by the title, and the "Men are wrong. Men, fix yourselves!" vibe. If men are broken (many are) there are reasons for reason for it, but on that list of reasons is not "the free and unfettered choices that individual boys and young men made in their lives, acting in their capacity as autonomous libertarian fantasy creatures."

Anyone blaming men are like folks who said women shouldn't vote because they weren't educated, while refusing to educate women.

Describing this era as "post-covid" means you accept that tens of thousands of Canadians are going to die every year from a preventable disease but you don't care.

#writever Androgynous

In the night the compass of the world
draws close around us, holding us within
the circle of the firelight, or the lamp
that shines down on the street from an old pole
and flickers with erratic emphasis.

Ty and Mercutio stood outside Kleg's
where within a local band cranked out
some random tunes.
"You felt it too," said Ty.

"Perhaps I did," said wild Mercutio,
to use young Merk's full name. "Perhaps I did."

@adaddinsane In improv theatre hero's journey is sometimes taught as one template among many. I find it--and all other cookie-cutter plot templates--unusable for writing and not even all that useful for improv, where having a shared idea of the kind of story you're telling can help. But the interesting stories are the ones that follow characters or weird ideas or some internal logic of their own.