Notices by Jonas Wisser (jwisser@wandering.shop)

Today's small friend: a female cardinal just finishing up a safflower seed she took from the platform feeder.

#Pittsbirds #backyardbirding #birds #birdsofmastodon

Bonus small friends: a dark-eyed junco that I finally managed to get a decent shot of, and a male house finch showing both red and orange coloration.

#Pittsbirds #backyardbirding #birds #birdsofmastodon

Today's slightly-less-small friend: a red-bellied woodpecker stopping by a local telephone pole.

It was chased out of the neighborhood by blue jays a couple minutes later after nearly knocking one of them out of my elm tree. 😬

#Pittsbirds #backyardbirding #birds #birdsofmastodon

I feel like we're at the other end of a wild 18-year technological and societal arc that started back in 2007.

Google Reader was in full swing, Twitter was taking off, the iPhone got announced, Obama was getting elected… it felt like technology could only get better and there was a clear path forward for America.

2016 was… let's call it an inflection point.

And now it feels like technology only gets worse, and America is this close to dissolving or winding down.

The #Plushtodon (shown here with a small owl pal) is about a third larger than I expected, but I am delighted to report that it is just as friend-shaped as I hoped. :3

Ah yes, the US Postal Service, very well known for contacting people from non-US phone numbers.

Dario recently forced me to create an account to continue using a blood sugar monitor I already own (😡), so of course I gave my name as "Fuck Off."

This turns out to have been an amazing decision, because they inject your name into their marketing emails. 😂

Trump, not a man well-known for the grace and magnanimity he shows when beating an opponent, is refusing to debate Harris again because "I already won".

Yeah, man. You would *totally* turn down the opportunity to wreck someone again on national TV. That's totally believable. 😂

The other moral of the movie: find shoes other than heels when you're trying to run away! #Monsterdon

A contribution for #Wrensday. I call it "Contemplating Suet". #birds #birdsofmastodon

There's weird, and then there's dumping dead bear cubs in Central Park weird. #uspol

Can't believe it took two goddamn seasons of the TV series Halo to get any of the characters onto the fucking Halo.

Halo: The TV Series is not meaningfully the same story as Halo: The Video Game Series.

It has some similar characters and concepts, in the same way that most fanfiction has characters and concepts that more or less resemble the original work.

But that's very much what it is: fanfiction. And *bad* fanfiction, at that.

Why couldn't they just tell the interesting story that was already there? I really don't understand.

Threads is an unusably bad service made by a company that frankly should not be allowed to continue to exist.

But I still don't see why that's a reason to punish Threads *users* by blocking the instance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@spills HOLY SHIT. This might be it! And even if it isn't, McKillip wrote Riddle-Master, one of my favorite series of all time, so this goes immediately next on my reading list either way. Thank you!

After ruminating on this further, I've added a few other qualifiers:

1. IIRC, the pianist is vaguely implied to be a reincarnation (either natural or technological) of Beethoven—or at the very least has a particular fascination with his works.
2. I think one of the characters is a red-haired woman? (I appreciate that this doesn't really do much to narrow things down when it comes to speculative fiction.)
3. It was very much a scifi book, not fantasy. Parts are set on a space station, I think.

Dear Internet, please help me find a poorly-remembered book!

It was scifi, likely published in the 80s but conceivably late 70s or early 90s. I do not remember much of the plot but I remember that there was a playing card motif and I think also a harlequin motif.

The most distinctive feature I can remember is that there was a virtuoso pianist who would occasionally go into a fugue state; I believe he was one of the main characters.

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@halcy @mcc iOS development can be a pain in the ass but it really is an orders-of-magnitude difference when it comes to Android. It feels like at every possible fork in the road, Google selected the option labeled "MOST CONFUSING FOR NO GOOD REASON".

Even Android Studio itself feels like the platform is actively flinging feces at your face while you try to build for it. It's just… _inexplicably_ bad.

@halcy Inspired by @mcc's earlier post, I decided to try to compile Tusky with https://www.heap.io installed, 'cause hey, that's my day job.

What I like about Android Studio's compile-time errors is that they're concise and actionable.