Notices by Tom Maxwell (tommyyum@mstdn.social)

I understand #Bluesky now. It's Twitter redux, in the sense that it preserves a status-based hierarchy. Half of the most popular posts I'm seeing take two forms:
"I lost [x] number of Twitter followers but just woke up to [x+y] here!"; or, simply,
"WOW I just woke up to (one kajillion) followers!"
Communities aren't made of famous people coming in the room talking about how famous they are.

Anyone else entertaining the possibility — if even on a molecular level — that Trump stole this election?

“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Astronomers have detected the oldest black hole ever observed, dating back more than 13bn years to the dawn of the universe.
The observations, by the James Webb space telescope (JWST), reveal it to be at the heart of a galaxy 440m years after the big bang. At around a million times the mass of the sun, it is surprisingly big for a baby black hole, raising the question of how it grew so big so quickly.”
#astronomy
https://apple.news/AIWfN8OUvSjOgCcgby8xnAg

I heartily agree.
#SphinxOfBlackQuartz #JudgeMyVow

"What astonished us was the significant positive impacts of the cash transfers. Cash recipients spent 99 fewer days in homelessness on average over one year.

That led to net cost savings of $777 per person per year. That means the cash transfers actually saved the government and taxpayers money. Cash recipients increased spending on rent, food, transit and things like furniture or a car.

Importantly, they did not increase spending on alcohol, drugs and cigarettes."

https://theconversation.com/we-gave-7-500-to-people-experiencing-homelessness-heres-what-happened-next-212960

I was passing by and I saw what was going down,” he said in an interview, “and I figured, they can’t have a riot without me!” Van Ronk was not gay, but he had firsthand experience with police violence. “As far as I was concerned,” he said, “anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me, and that’s why I stayed in…Every time you turn around the cops were pulling some outrage or another.” https://www.villagepreservation.org/2022/06/13/dave-van-ronk-ally-at-the-stonewall-uprising/

This reflects my feelings.
“Titan and Adriana are two vessels recently lost at sea, four days and 4,000 miles apart. The five men who lost their lives on the Titan have been getting wall-to-wall coverage in the media worldwide. Meanwhile, the estimated 700 who died when the Adriana sank off the coast of Greece, mostly women and children, have been essentially forgotten.”
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/22/a_titanic_disparity_in_how_the

@silverwizard I’ll take the bots one at a time unless I get swarmed from a particular instance. I’m clearly typing from a palace of privilege!

What exactly happened to mastodon dot social? I heard rumblings, didn’t get the full story, and now have crypto bros sliding into my DMs…

Farewell, and thanks.
"Singer-songwriter-guitarist David Crosby, a founding member of two popular and enormously influential ’60s rock units, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash (later Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), has died. He was 81 years old."
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/david-crosby-dead-dies-byrds-crosby-stills-nash-1235495467/