Notices by Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social), page 4

Didn't denim jeans last more than two years, once upon a time? I feel like they did, and that I used them harder when I was younger too.

(I strongly dislike clothes shopping. I suppose I could generalize that to "I strongly dislike clothes".)

@Gargron thank you! I'll check em out!

@Gargron hey, what new music has been on your radar recently? Not necessarily what's good, just what's interesting.

@Gargron no no, don't apologize, it's all good! I understand. Thanks for the info.

@Gargron I want to frame this only as a question and not a request, because I understand that managing sales and logistics in foreign countries across multiple currencies can be a nightmare, but: do you happen to know if shipping to Canada might become an option in the future?

The greasy, thoughtless mediocrity of slop billboard images is offensively bland, to pick an overused phrase. It's like whipped saltless vegetable oil smeared across a stale slice of wonderbread with a dollar store garden trowel, tossed half off a dinner plate by a server allergic to eye contact holding a leaking trash bag in their other hand.

That is, the offense comes not just from the garbage immediately in front of me, but rather every aspect of the entire experience.

Distilled contempt.

@phire it was never that annoying. I read my feed in batches, querying my local feed reader database for specific groups of topics. It's really quite delightfully asynchronous, so temporal bunching of posts never caused issues.

Sample size of one, of course, and I'm sure this definitely is an improvement for a much larger swath of your readership.

@phire eep, good point, that's not something I'd considered!!

(For unrelated reasons I was reading about the RFCs for RSS pagination and for HTTP dictionary compression the other week, and that's when I learned that (1) paginating back into RSS history has only been technically been solved relatively recently and (2) support on the server side and in reader clients is awfully thin on the ground in 2025.)

@Gargron excellent gourd! Excellent gourd inspectors!!

@Gargron @ConnyDuck aka one milli-Odin

@Gargron yaaaaaay excellent catting (except for the food stealing, even though it is very much on brand for cat)

@Gargron hey, how are Jiji and Peaches doing these days? Do they still reflect light in the visible spectrum?

@whitequark errata catta

@samhenrigold cc: @mhoye 👀↑↓

@dalias you're describing freedoms that are very nice to have but which in my lifetime I have never enjoyed. The housing crisis has forced me to rent: I have never had a door which someone else's key could not open, for example.

I'm not saying these freedoms are bad, or undesirable, or frivolous, or are ones that people pushing to diminish cultural reliance on cars shouldn't consider, only pointing out that they are not universals that everyone is being asked to give up.

@evan not primarily, but definitely tangentially.

Tonight's very special episode of #monsterdon features The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), one of the Universal Classic monsters and one of¹ the most recognizable non-kaiju rubber suit monsters of all time. The film runs 1h19m so if you start now, a 90 minute timed mute of the hashtag will protect you from the torrent that is about to befall the federated timeline.

Those few minutes before we kick off at 9pm ET also give you enough time to grab a copy of the movie yourself to join in!!

Of course Bay Street Video also stocks this #monsterdon special! (Well, stocked. But no longer. Someone uhhhh bought it.)

(Have we ever watched Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman? We should! I haven't.)

Per usual, my local video store had me covered if I was going to rent The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)... except no rental was necessary because this one, I own.

#monsterdon

MONSTER FLIPPER

...just kind of sunning itself there on the bank of the river, apparently. Or perhaps reaching out in remembrance of its silt-entombed brethren?

#monsterdon