Notices by Paul-Gabriel Wiener (wearshats@realsocial.life), page 3

@futurebird @drj Still amazes me that Myst was written in Hypercard.

It occurs to me that the real way to celebrate Easter is you seal yourself up in a cave all weekend and no one tries to talk to you, but when they come to check on you three days later you're just gone with no forwarding address.

This is the corollary to my theory that the real way to celebrate Passover is everyone gets up in the morning, you have 15 minutes to pack, you pile into the car, you go on a long road trip with no map, seeing where the road takes you, and you're only allowed to eat fast food.

Let me see if I've got this right:

There were many names for the islands. But the Chinese called them Nippon/Nihon ("sun origin") because it's east of them.

Italian merchants wrote down the Indonesian pronunciation of the Chinese name as Gaipan, which became Japan in English.

When a 1943 Batman movie villain said "Actually, I prefer to be called Nipponese," there was a pause for the audience to boo. Because we'd been asked to correct it and didn't want to.

So we still call Nippon "Japan."

Mom reading local paper:

[Nearby town/beach] Loses 80 Free Parking Spaces

Me: That's a lot.

I don't think she got it.

UPDATE: I am still crashed on the couch too exhausted to move and coping with all sorts of unnecessary pain, but I am now on a couch in Florida.

Another day, another sunset. Too woozy for alt text. Or to fight the upload order.

"Who Can It Be Now" by Men At Work just came on, and I never listened to the lyrics before. Turns out the entire song is just someone is knocking on his door and he has too much social anxiety to answer it.

@Antiqueight You can text her a video of The Corrs singing that classic, "Go on, leave me breakfast..."

2000 years ago, there may have been a Middle Eastern Jew who preached that kindness and empathy are more important than Biblical rules and capitalism. The descendants of his followers retroactively declared him a messiah in contradiction of the lore. 1000 years later, they moved his birthday from spring to winter in order to embrace, extend, extinguish the Druids, but they missed the solstice by a few days. If you are celebrating tonight, I wish you love, joy, and peace.

@juliewebgirl It's something I've been told by more than one person who knows better than I, but I don't have a reference.

@Antiqueight I'd like to see you!

Starting a new course of treatment tomorrow morning. It'll be daily for the next month or two. We'll see how it goes. I'm not expecting much, TBH. But any improvement at this point would be good...

As a Jew with relatives in Israel, let me reiterate the very important point that criticizing the policies and actions of the far-right racist oppressive Israeli government is no more antisemitic than criticizing the Trump administration was anti-American, and, in fact, many Jews in Israel and abroad oppose the Israeli government.

Conflating Israel with all Jews is what's antisemitic.

500 Jews were arrested yesterday in DC while protesting for Palestinian rights.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/19/jewish-activists-arrested-at-us-congress-sit-in-calling-for-gaza-ceasefire

A friend's Christian MAGA family keeps saying the situation in Israel is a sign of the Rapture. Which reminds me that the main reason most US politicians staunchly and vocally support Israel is not to court the Jewish vote (we're less than 1% of the population) but evangelical Christians, who believe that getting all the Jews to move to Israel is the key to triggering the Rapture. They'll get to go to Heaven and the Jews will be left behind. Their vote hinges on making that happen.

@feditips @apps It's a known bug. I've talked to them about it before. They've been telling me since January that a fix is in the works. I switched to the beta update channel, but still no dice.

@feditips Fedilab looks really cool. It's got a great feature set. It's just missing one thing, and I've been waiting for it all year: An update that fixes the known bug where the app only gets new toots when I manually refresh each column individually. That's make or break for me, so I'm just keeping a Chrome tab open instead. I get notifications and everything else works. I'll have to take a look at what else is out there now. It's been a few months.

@koyu one of many reasons I don't use Facebook. But we do that for clothing and electronics manufacturing (I wish Fairphone had a US version) and so many things. Still, the first small step towards addressing the problem is telling people about it.

@apps I'll try it. Currently, every tab loads blank and I have to wait several seconds for it to populate after a manual refresh. I also don't get any notifications.

@apps I'm on the beta update channel. I still need to manually update every tab every single time.