Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

As The Hollywood Reporter puts it, Warren Ellis "was accused of using his success to coerce women into romantic and sexual relationships." He was offline for some time, seems to be in touch with the women representing his victims, and for now I've resumed reading his weekly newsletter, though less eagerly than I once did.

I am not interested in talking about his misdeeds, nor his penance, whether adequate or necessary or neither, or any of that. These two paragraphs just serve as an acknowledgement that Warren Ellis is a complicated figure to refer to in 2022, and I'm aware of that, but I think this link is worth the trouble.

https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/p/know-bit

In writing "I Know A Bit About That" in place of his normal weekly newsletter, Ellis talks about depression, specifically depression as it affects men, and even more specifically, depression as it affected his father.

As someone who struggled with undiagnosed depression for decades, and diagnosed depression for years, I found it moving and helpful, and I hope if you relate to any part of this, you know you're not alone, and there is hope.

#depression #hope #WarrenEllis

Watching people on #BlackMastodon sharing great music yesterday sent me into my YouTube history, and helped expand that history a bit, too. I’m not sure why I picked this song specifically to throw into the pot, but I love the energy of this song, and I loved this show when Sho Baraka came to Dallas, Texas, in 2016. I stood out a bit, but great music is great, and I felt welcomed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TbT3UNdIuc

#ShoBaraka #TheNarrative

I asked MidJourney's v4 model to generate some images, then grabbed one of the four results for each prompt and upscaled it. Horrifying things happened to the number of fingers, and I would definitely need to keep working with this prompt to come up with something I would be willing to show in public as anything other than an AI art experiment.

#AIart #midjourney #volleyball

Yes, I am aware that this represents a terrible taste in music. All I can say is that I recognize the stats as accurate, and am surprised about what they say about me as a possibly-former appreciator of music.

It's that time of year again, when music streaming services provide stats that should be more interesting than they are.

So far this year (it ain't over yet!) I've spent 59% of my listening time on the weekly "New Music Mix" playlist. So I've spent 11,513 minutes listening to 1801 songs by 882 artists, but only 37 albums and 21 playlists.

For your cheering or jeering or both, here's my top 100 songs of the first eleven months of 2022: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/replay-2022/pl.rp-a77XCJ4bEx

My daughter's Spotify Unwrapped says she has listened to 115,667 minutes, top 1% of Americans, but that's more than five hours every single day, and so it clearly includes overnight streaming. Which explains why her phone is usually playing music when we wake her up in the morning.

#AppleMusic #replay2022 #spotify #unwrapped2022

I am surrounded by artists, while lacking either the talent or the motivation (or possibly both) myself. I marvel at the level of effort involved in isometric pixel art, for example, which this essay gives a great explanation: https://www.slynyrd.com/blog/2022/11/28/pixelblog-41-isometric-pixel-art

#art #pixelart #nerdery

I was adding bookmarklets to Safari to ease the pain of following people on other servers when I thought: what about native apps? And so it is that I installed (free) Mastonaut, my new favorite thing about mastodon.

There’s a 500-character client-side countdown indicator, even though my server supports 64K, but other than that, Mastonaut makes things very, very nice so far. Excellent work, @brunoph!

https://www.mastonaut.app

#nerdery #MacOS #mastodon #mastonaut