Notices by FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)

Good morning from Forest Park, in Portland, Oregon.

@sam It's a real frustration. When I was in DSA, we'd keep getting techies who'd be excited about using open source tools. Non-techies would agree in principle but balk literally within seconds of seeing an open source tool.

Out of necessity, our chapter switched from Slack to Mattermost, and people were furious about it.

@dalias @evdas @idzie I think there was something of a campaign on Twitter for anarchists to accept use of the hammer-and-sickle, in a brief period of left unity, before the backstabbing resumed in earnest.

@babe @futurebird My family had a borzoi. He didn't bark, but he had this eerie howl. We lived in a rural area, and late at night, you could hear a freight train sound its whistle at crossings. The dog would howl back at the train.

Mozilla is promoting yet another "generative AI" tool, this time a plug-in they've developed. I suggest appropriate feedback on the review page.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/feedback/addon/orbit-summarizer/

I'm looking at an email from a radical left group, with their social media links at the bottom: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

C'mon, try, people.

CNN Anchors Won’t Stop Lying About Something Rashida Tlaib Never Said
https://theintercept.com/2024/09/24/cnn-rashida-tlaib-dana-nessel-antisemitism/

Two years ago, Joe Biden said the COVID pandemic was over. Since then, 200,000 people in the US have died from COVID. Many more are suffering from Long COVID.

Wear masks.

@float13 In this case, I'm not surprised. I had a subscription, and was punished for it with frequent spam from Consumer Reports. Often their ads were misleading, offering a "free" book, that turned out to be a premium for a renewal. At least once I accidentally renewed a subscription to Consumer Reports because I misunderstood the email.

I've completely lost any respect I ever had for them.

Once in a while I consider growing a beard.

I once tried doing that for a few weeks, a long time ago. I remember disliking how it made my face feel stiff. I've heard enough positive comments about beards from an important demographic that I'd be willing to give it another go. And I'm unemployed at the moment, so arguably this is a good time to try it again.

I'm worried about it affecting the fit of masks, but I'd probably be keeping the beard short.

I hate him. I hate that smug reactionary misogynist so fucking much.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/31/jd-vance-podcast-feminism-immigration

Sometimes I think my social anxiety is less a trauma response and more a rational response to a toxic social environment.

@broadwaybabyto What's struck me in this and similar stories is the near uniformity of doctors' responses, which seems to go beyond common misogyny. I wonder if this fixation on women's fertility is heavily pushed in their training.

@inquiline Generally I like it when people on here share their personal lives and interests as well as their political and social engagement, as I think revealing ourselves as whole persons is humanizing and democratizing, and reinforces my trust of the person.

But that doesn't necessarily work for everyone, particularly if you've got a specific goal for your account.

@jonny It's not an accident either. A lot of the ways cities and housing are organized in the US is specifically designed to isolate people and control movement, like suburbs and corporate campuses.

@jonny People complain about how we talk online and don't organize in person.

Every left group I know struggles to find a physical meeting place. If you want a meeting of more than three or four people, there are very few places available.

The US Supreme Court has declared the POTUS is immune to prosecution for "official acts".

The Magna Carta was in 1215. The US is now politically reactionary by the standards of medieval England.

@silverwizard @foone Part of the force of the joke is that we've had decades of mass media that split the superficial imagery of science fiction from the social criticism at the core of it.

I'll believe ChatGPT has PhD levels of intelligence when I say something about "feudalism" and it looks frustrated and takes a deep breath before asking me what region and period I'm talking about.

@socketwench @yuki2501 @lori Part of what's frustrating is that I see these discussions of what complicated platform to use for running a personal website, and I wonder how many people know that you can pretty much dump plain text between the "body" tags in a simple HTML template and boom, you've got a basic Web page.