Phillip Winn @pwinn@social.cleverlibre.org

Genshin Impact is almost always beautiful, often stunningly so. Still, every now and then I’m struck by a particularly breath-taking scene like this one, above the clouds.

As I glided down from here, the clouds thinned and eventually I was through them completely.

And this is a mobile game! Just amazing.

#GenshinImpact

Since I'm feeling bloggy tonight, and nobody asked, here are some email lists I'm on and enjoy receiving.

1. [Artisanal Sudoku](https://artisanalsudoku.substack.com) - James Sinclair creates really, really good variant sudoku puzzles, and you get three every Monday for free, or five plus access to a growing archive for $5/month. Well worth the price, in my opinion.
2. [Sudoku Clover](https://www.patreon.com/sudokuclover/about) - Clover publishes monthly, and is also worth $5/month in my opinion. Plus, I've enjoyed her puzzles for so long on Discord for free.
3. [Letters from an American](https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com) - Everyone's favorite historian-turned-substack-queen, Heather Cox Richardson. Her daily emails teach me things.
4. [BIG by Matt Stoller](https://mattstoller.substack.com) - You should read the book Goliath by Matt Stoller, and then *also* subscribe to his weekly newsletter with a hyper-focus on anti-monopoly issues.
5. [Slow Boring](https://www.slowboring.com) - Matt Yglesias can be polarizing at times, but I find his newsletter thoughtful even when I disagree with his conclusions, as does one of my brothers who is theoretically on the other side of every issue from me politically. That seems to say something. MattY hyper-focuses on everything eventually.
6. [Garbage Day](https://www.garbageday.email) - Ryan Brodericks writes three times a week (or four, for $5/month) to remind us all that the internet is fun, actually. Brilliant observer of the online scene.
7. [Today in Tabs](https://www.todayintabs.com) - The internet in super-compressed form, Rusty Foster packs many, many links into his newsletter four days a week.

I subscribe to many more than this, but this seems like enough, and provides more than one #newsletter in each of three categories: #sudoku, #politics, and the #internet.

#blog

I created my first web page in 1994, four years after Tim Berners-Lee kicked the whole thing off. I started my first weblog in 1995, almost three years before the word was coined. Before that I was active on BBSes, so I've had somewhere to ruminate semi-publicly for quite some time.

Yet for the last few years, I've shut down existing outlets and mostly shared my thoughts with a very limited list of friends and family in iMessage or Signal. Maybe a bit of Slack and Discord. I've watched people come up and hit the big time, and other people bigger than I ever was walk away much like I did.

At some point blogging stopped being something fun to do, and started being a chore. Instead of posting my thoughts and finding clarity, I'd see thread after thread of comments on site after site devolve into the most graceless possible interpretations of whatever was written, and it became tiresome. Tiresome to write, knowing people would see whatever they wanted to see rather than what I was saying. Tiresome to read, as the same thing happened to others. Even being an active observer was exhausting, as the culture of the entire internet seemed to focus on a never-ending cycle of outrage.

It doesn't help that during the same period of time, I became more aware of just how deeply the country I live in is built on the bodies of people it chewed up and spit out and continues to disrespect to this day. That shouldn't even be a political issue, in my view, but *everything* became political, and people picked teams.

I changed mine, but couldn't work up the energy to blog about it. I knew I'd face pushback. I knew I wouldn't convince anyone of anything. My close friends and family came along for the ride, or at least observed it, but nobody else needed to know anything.

And that's really the thing. I don't need the whole world to see everything I write. Obscurity can be a boon.

Technically anything I write here is just as available to the world as anything I would have written on a blog, but it *feels* different. It feels less like I should expect to be shamed or harassed here. I also have the ability to block people and servers easily, so I'm starting to relax.

It could be that I have nothing significant to say about anything after all. Several times my friends have suggested that a rant in Signal or iMessage should have been posted somewhere, and I've never been sure whether they meant "so more people can see it" or "so I don't have to read it here." Either way, it seems like they'll soon get their wish.

#blog

#inspirational

#inspirational

An absolutely staggering change in Apple's profits over the years, note that iPhone debuts at the top of the revenue stack in 2010, just three years after its introduction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJMEvKjDGmI

#nerdery #apple #video

And of course, in between putting together the list this morning and posting it this afternoon, mastodon.world has closed to new users. So it's a list of ten good servers!

Let it not be said that I'm whinging about mastodon without offering any solutions! Even if the solution is Yet Another Explainer, I guess I'll yeet one out anyway.

*What is mastodon?* One way to think of it is as a mashup of Twitter, Discord, and email.

_Like Twitter,_ people use it primarily for microblogging. People post short blurbs of text, or photos, and follow other people doing the same.

NOTE: You need not actually sign up for mastodon to see someone's posts (assuming they're public). It is perfectly reasonable to bookmark [a favorite writer](https://mastodon.world/@joannastern) and just read.

_Unlike Twitter,_ people aren't all dependent on a single website run by a single company, owned by a single oligarch. Instead...

_Like Discord,_ people are on different "servers," or instances because we nerds don't actually speak normal English when not required to. I'm currently on fifteen (15) different Discord servers, so when I want to talk about #sudoku I switch to one of those servers, and when I want to talk about #AIart I switch to one of those servers, and so on. But...

_Unlike Discord,_ you need not actually join each of fifteen different servers. You can visit other servers, and follow people without joining the server they're on. Also, even though they use the term "servers," Discord server are all still dependent on a single company behind the scenes.

If you're familiar with Discord, you might be wondering, how does that work then? How do I go see what's going on in the world of #Mothership without visiting the Discord server dedicated to it? And that's where the email comparison comes in.

_Like email,_ you don't need to share anything with another user to communicate with them. Maybe you use one of the big ones, GMail, Yahoo!Mail, or Hotmail. Maybe you use an email address provided by the telephone company that provides your internet connection. Maybe you use a work email address. It doesn't matter, you can send and receive emails from any of the above, no problem. And yes, I'm glossing over some things there, but the point is, you pick your email service provider because of the user interface or the features or the price or because it's forced upon you or because someoone else set it up for you. It doesn't matter much.

And that's key, and confusing! When you decide you want to join mastodon, it's not like joining Twitter or joining Discord, it's more like "joining email." Because you don't actually join "email." Instead, you sign up for an email service. Chances are good that you sign up for GMail or Yahoo!Mail, because they're free and easy and well-known.

So it is with mastodon. You need to sign up for a mastodon service. Don't overthink it! If you sign up for one and later decide you wish you'd signed up for one with a cooler name or that several of your friends all ended up in one place, or you just learned there's an instance dedicated to [tabletop gaming](http://tabletop.social/) that you'd have signed up for if you'd only known, that's okay! Because...

_Unlike email,_ when you switch servers, everything comes with you! Your followers are still following you and your posts are still there.

That's enough explained for now. Mastodon isn't super-smooth everywhere, but that's part of its charm. It's also not super-toxic unless you join a toxic server. So don't do that! If you want to pick a server on your own, there are links at https://joinmastodon.org for that. But if the whole thing seems really overwhelming and confusing, let's make it easy.

I'm going to list eleven servers, all of which as accepting new signups as I write this, and all of which are "general" servers, no particular focus or specialty. You can click on each to decide which one "speaks to you" most, or you can click on one at random and just sign up! I picked these manually as good general-interest servers, and then suffled them into artbirary order using https://onlinerandomtools.com/shuffle-lines so I'm showing no favoritsm. Just pick one!

https://ohai.social/about
https://mstdn.party/about
https://c.im/about
https://home.social/about
https://universeodon.com/about
https://mas.to/about
https://mindly.social/about
https://mstdn.social/about
https://mastodon.world/about
https://mastodon.sdf.org/about
https://federate.social/about

And that's my #mastodon #explainer

Edits, since there is no preview feature. I said I'm at-pwinn-at-qoto.org initially, but with @-symbols in place of the "at-" strings, which mastodon helpfully rewrites and links to make the narrative look odd. In fact, I cannot figure out any way to actually include my address as text. Wrapping it in backticks didn't help.

Also, when I search for my friend's @username@server identity, it finds them. Not sure why it didn't for them in reverse!

Discoverability remains a terrible experience on #mastodon. I can give a real example of this from today:

I was texting with a friend, and they mentioned that they were on mastodon, so I said I'm @pwinn and their response was to say it is difficult to find people on mastodon. First they tried searching the web generally for me, but that didn't seem to give the result they needed.

I told them that I had learned recently that you can paste a person's URL into your mastodon search box and it automatically does the right thing, but when they tried, they didn't have my URL, so that didn't work either.

What they needed was to paste the url `https://qoto.org/@pwinn` into their mastodon search box, because mastodon knows what to do with that, but not what to do with a fully-qualified username.

This is, of course, ridiculous. I'd bring it up on HackerNews, but I have already gotten one "submit a pull request then" response there when talking about mastodon, so I'll just kvetch about it for now.

Two more from the Midjourney v4 model:

"37-year-old man in a Hawaiian shirt, photograph, 32k"

and

"37-year-old bald man in a Hawaiian shirt, photograph, 32k"

Perhaps not as egregiously off-target as my previous runs at 50, 40, and 72, but they still make my brother look pretty good.

#AIart

Midjourney v1.4 results for:

"72-year-old man wearing a sweater, photograph, 32k"

"47-year-old Hong Kong woman wearing a t-shirt, photograph, 32k"

"47-year-old Chinese woman wearing a t-shirt, photograph, 32k"

My father and wife both look younger and more attractive than these images, so if flattery is part of the latest model, it's working.

#AIart

#introduction.

I'm pwinn, rhymes with Quinn.

I'm into #nerdery. I'm a professional nerd, currently paid to write #golang, an upgrade from #java. I'm also an avocational nerd, mostly writing #python on my own time.

I've written a #book. It's cheap! [Tillie Madison vs Reality](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N35GZCW/) is a #scifi #fantasy novel. I love #books, and read more than two per week on average. I include #audiobooks and #graphicnovels in that, but not individual issues of #comics or #manga.

I collect things, mostly but not exclusively electronically. To that end, I have a coouple of NAS units. The newest one is a 95-terabyte #Synology, while the older one is a 28-terabyte #WesternDigital with a 32-terabyte Drobo attached. One of them runs #Plex, but not for public consumption. I'm not a #datahoarder. I'm not! I can quit anytime!

I enjoy #boardgames, including tabletop RPGs (#ttrpgs) like #mothership. I like jigsaw #puzzles too. I'm going to reward myself for posting this by starting one of my new 2000-piece Ravensburgers.

I realized recently that I watch more #anime and #Kdrama than I do American #television, but that comes and goes.

Other things about me: I live in #texas, I'm #married, I'm a #christian, I'm a #feminist, I lean far #left politically on most things, I like #photography, I *really* like #sudoku, and I've been playing with both #AIart and #GenshinImpact lately.

I'm sure I've left out something important, but I don't see any rule that I can't have more than one #introduction, so I'm not bothered.