Peter Drake, he/him, LFHCfS 🔥 @peterdrake@social.cleverlibre.org

BAD NEWS: The hybrid car won't start. It says the 12-volt battery is low.

GOOD NEWS: It was in the garage when this happened, so at least I'm not stranded anywhere.

GOOD NEWS: We temporarily have a backup car. Maybe we can use that to jump the hybrid.

BAD NEWS: The jumper cables aren't long enough to connect the cars where the hybrid is parked.

GOOD NEWS: We're young enough that we might be able to push it into the driveway.

BAD NEWS: The hybrid refuses to shift into neutral when the 12v battery is low, so it can't be moved.

GOOD NEWS: We were able to buy a jump starter pack.

BAD NEWS: It has to be charged from wall power for 24 hours before use.

GOOD NEWS: We're not in a huge hurry.

BAD NEWS: It might snow later this week. The backup car is not nearly as good for driving in snow.

#3GoodThings

1. #Violet was friendly to an excited toddler and other dogs she met on her walk.
2. A rural church we drove past had a bell hooks quotation on the marquee sign.
3. Spirited was a creative and entertaining new take on A Christmas Carol.

Mastodon doesn't have perfect solutions to the moderation challenges that plague all social media platforms ... but at least we don't have ads.

Some thoughts on the qoto.org situation:

1. Many of the attacks on qoto are deliberately or accidentally misinformed. A look at the public timeline (https://qoto.org/public) shows that we are not the cesspool of Nazism that some would portray us as. @freemo is bringing screenshot receipts in his defense; I haven't seen them from attackers.

2. I have no idea how to deescalate this.

3. No matter how noble our intentions, their may come a point where we simply lose. It sounds like we've lost @Gargron and @FediThing@tech.lbt. Does anyone know @stux's opinion?

4. If the people I want to interact with are all on servers that have defederated with qoto, I will migrate.

5. I appreciate the value of hearing different points of view and the danger of being too quick to cancel someone based on a rumor. At the same time, there are toxic people and certain servers are full of them. Saying it's up to individual users to block things they don't want to see feels a bit privileged. Marginalized people may very reasonably just not want to run into constant microaggressions and expect their moderator to keep it out of their feeds. Trolls are *very* good at getting right up to the ban line and insisting, "I'm not touching you!"

@QOTO @trinsec #qoto

Chirrut Îmwe: *sits down at unreasonably large Life Day feast*

I am one with the Fork. The Fork is with me.

*pauses for breath*

OMNOMNOMNOM

*walls, ceiling are splattered with gravy*

#StarWars #RogueOne #ChirrutImwe #DonnieYen #Feast

#3GoodThings

1. A nap.
2. An inbox that has stayed empty for hours.
3. Snowflakes in the long-term forecast.

A truly majestic piece of technobabble, delivered with a straight face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nKk_-Lvhzo

We watched the finale. As usual, Disney has smeared all the excitement of a 2-hour Star Wars movie across a 10-hour series and I WANT MY 10 HOURS BACK!

In the words of Mon Mothma's husband, "Must everything be boring and sad?"

Save for a few action scenes, it was almost entirely padding. There were episodes where nothing happened. None of the characters developed. We just switched back and forth between three repeated scenes:

Mon Mothma: "I'm very elegant. I sure hope I don't get caught!"

Dedra Meero: "I'm very evil. I sure hope I catch somebody!"

Cassian Andor: "I'm very rugged. I sure get caught a lot!"

The mumbled dialogue didn't help.

Note that there is a post-credits scene for the last episode, but even I had guessed what is "revealed" there.

Other thoughts:

In the prison/factory, they made a huge deal of everybody holding their hands away from some dangerous step in the operation, but Chekov's OSHA Violation never went off.

I kind of hope Denise Gough, who played Meero, has fantastic range and has portrayed, say, a giggling heroine in a musical romantic comedy. Her Wikipedia page suggests this might be the case.

Do IRL right-wingers identify with the rebels or the empire? (I've read that they are more likely to play as the empire in Star Wars games.) Do they realize that Lucas originally intended the empire to represent the US army and the rebels the Viet Cong?

I've heard good things about Tales of the Jedi, but then you all told me Andor was fantastic, so I'm dubious.

#Andor #StarWars

If the Fediverse becomes sufficiently popular, the following might happen:

1. Advertisers start using tags or direct messages to get into people's eyeballs.
2. We can block individual accounts, or servers that allow this sort of thing, but it's easy to set up new servers.
3. Moderators (or maintainers of public block lists) adopt a defensive policy of not federating with any server that hasn't been around and active (with believable human conversations) for at least, say, a year.
4. This makes it very hard, but not impossible, for individual people to set up new servers; they just have to create a community through some other means and hang out in their isolated space (or with each other) for the first year.
5. An industry arises of using AI to create thousands of fake "communities" that, once federated, let loose with the advertising.

Alternately, after step 1, we might start using anti-spam software to filter our tags/DMs the same way we currently filter our email.

#3GoodThings

1. Found out where a local grocery store hides the Mexi-Cokes
2. Dense fog (and a sunset through it)
3. My team is doing well in the #MarbleLeague