Notices by Ryan for a permanent ceasefire (ryanrandall@hcommons.social)

Q: "How do I install Endnote?"

A: "Easy! Go to https://www.zotero.org/ and use it instead!"

Are you doing an end-of-year (or other periodic) review in your #Obsidian notes?

Assuming you track events with Dataview, do you want a code query that'll add it up for you before you tell the year to kiss off?

If so, here's a note that might help: https://www.ryanpatrickrandall.com/notes/Note-taking/Obsidian/obsidian-dataview-plugin-patterns

(And if you just want a shorter post with links to those unsubtly-referenced Violent Femme songs, here you go: https://www.ryanpatrickrandall.com/notes/counting-events-with-obsidian-dataview-queries )

I was today years old when I realized "reno nevada" basically means "snowy reindeer".

@inquiline @jdp23 Yeah, my interactions felt exactly on the dividing line today.

That's why I was constantly responding only to the account, taking the other people off the chain, to help draw attention away from them and toward already-written resources.

Thanks for the heads up, of course! Always appreciate the extra "triangulation" on this sort of thing.

@GuyDudeman (Taking other people off the list so their mentions don't get flooded.)

When I say "hostile", I mean all of the above! Mastodon's decentralization has counter-intuitive effects, after one is used to what happens on more centralized platforms.

For instance, there are a bunch of small, overtly racist / misogynist / etc instances that have amplified harassment campaigns against prominent Black people on here. If you're on a server with more proactive blocking, you'll never know about it, even though the targets certainly will if they're on a less actively-moderated instance.

For a lot more history, you might start by reading about Dr. Flowers' experience, one of many stories linked in https://privacy.thenexus.today/start-making-the-fediverse-less-toxic/ by @thenexusofprivacy

@404mediaco If X wants to claim ownership of the InfoWars account, wouldn't that mean they're also legally and financially responsible for the harms perpetrated by the InfoWars account?

Maybe the Sandy Hook families actually can get some of the monetary restitution they deserve after all!

@mastodonmigration

It'll happen when this place becomes attractive enough for Black folks that there's a legit, thriving Black community here.

Which, in part, means making the people who greet Black folks with overt and/or barely-disguised hostility on here extremely unwelcome.

It means repeatedly telling lots of racists "we don't do that here" and blocking them. It means telling their instance moderators that they need to do better, and/or blocking those entire instances until they get their acts together.

We need to make this network feel less like a sundown town, where Black people are barely tolerated—and when they are, only to the extent they make the economy function, on "our" terms.

In other words, the people who are willing to overlook anti-Blackness on the Fedi need to finally start putting in the everyday work of improving the culture.

@0xabad1dea @hugh Yes!

And while you're adding the date…

So when folks like Foucault or Bacon wrote "knowledge is power", do you think they actually meant all the energy used to fuel Gen AI processing and data centers?

We're not living "in the age of AI". We're living in a moment of unproven AI-related claims.

These are profoundly different scenarios.

And it's disturbing how many folks in education are eagerly, uncritically amplifying the first framing.

The overwhelming joy of isolating why one's Bluetooth headphones are suddenly glitching.

(Repeatedly dropping audio output for something like 1/5 of every second is, I assume, not a user-requested enhancement.)

Approximately 3.14159 bajillion small testing steps later, it seems like the last upgrade to [paid, otherwise reliable audio utility I really like] is the culprit.

Polite email sent to the devs—here's hoping that they can help un-glitch things soon!

Seriously, for such a small team, I'm impressed.

I'll wait until things are resolved to say more about who they are.

But as frustrating as this glitch is, their approach to support actually makes me feel happier to support this indie company.

Already heard back from the devs!

They've helpfully let me know that others have also had similar bluetooth oddness and told me how to use a cool built-in method of generating a log file that'll help them debug the Glitchness.

@killyourfm It'll be interesting to see what sprouts from these!

My understanding is that citrus are one of the fruits that can mutate most, and a lot of agricultural citrus farms will graft parts of "known" / "stable" (not sure the best term here) types onto mature trees so they can predict what the fruit will be. But the seeds themselves can sometimes "revert" into their non-grafted ancestors with different flavors / sweetness / bitterness, etc.

All-too-timely reminder that you can & should report accounts you see advocating for genocide.

We keep our Fedi safe.

🚮

@seachanger The Fediverse's resistance to something so clearly necessary is a prime example of how "freeze peach" discourse makes things palpably worse.

@derek Oof, those can be scary times! Here's hoping it avoids you (and everyone)!

As a white guy, it absolutely might not be my place to suggest some useful things we white folks should be doing on Juneteenth.

That said, getting to know & financially supporting the work of Critical Resistance seems like a mighty good place to start (in addition to responding to whatever mutual aid requests from Black folks you can do on here).

http://criticalresistance.org

If you want to go more introspective, you might also look at some of the Catalyst Project's resources: https://collectiveliberation.org

Basically, it seems like a particularly good day to act on the fact that "nobody's free until everybody’s free" in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer.

@LALegault Is that Explosions In The Sky or the Murder City Devils? (Weird couple of bands to confuse, I know!)