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the future of social media is going to be bots yelling at bots

LANGUAGE: It’s enslaved persons, not “slaves”. We are people who were ENslaved. When you say “enslaved”, you make clear that someone else did this to us. When you say “slave” you speak the language and mindset of the people who did this to us. This is important. It is not semantics. #history #language #enslavedpeople #Black #Mastodon #words

@kevlin @cwebber described ChatGPT as Mansplaining As A Service, and honestly I can’t think of a better description. A service that instantly generates vaguely plausible sounding yet totally fabricated and baseless lectures at an instant with unflagging confidence in it’s own correctness on any topic, without concern, regard or awareness even of the level of expertise of it’s audience.

My audience here is probably in the single digits, and yet still somehow I'm in my own brain, putting pressure on myself to do things "well." For example, I've been thinking I should post more Genshin impact screenshots, because that game is beautiful, and because I've been playing it quite a bit lately. But one thing led to another and now I have 48 images in a folder and still haven't posted any of them.

And this software only lets me post four in a single message! I'm not going to post 12 posts in a row of video game screenshots, am I?

Am I?

To justify the hashtag (see, there I am overthinking again!), I'll at least add some here. My dealer^h^h^h^h^h^h daughter sent me a few she has taken, so I'll post some of those.

The first is from the Inazuma region I recently unlocked, which is based on Japan. The others are a nice set of three nearly-identical images from three times of day in the same spot in Liyue, which is based on China.

Granville T. Woods an #AfricanAmerican inventor gained the name the "Black Edison". He revolutionized the railroad & electric railway industries with his inventions. One newspaper called Woods “the greatest electrician in the world"

Thomas Edison was an inventive genius but is also claimed to be a liar & thief. Woods' patents were unsuccessfully challenged by Thomas Edison twice.

#BlackTwitter #BlackMastodon #BlackHistory
#BlackInventors #Science #Education

americacomesalive.com/granvill

Warren Ellis, Depression 

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.

orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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.

Bakdash, the most celebrated ice-cream parlor in the Middle East, is morethan a hundred-year-old shop located in the al-Hamidiyah Souk, an Ottoman-era marketplace in Damascus’s Old City; Syria. The ice- cream parlor established in 1895 CE, it is famous for its traditional Middle Eastern booza, a mastic frozen dairy dessert.

#islamicarchaeohistories

I will never understand far right Conservatives who claim to be fans of #StarTrek but who then complain about current Trek being “too woke”

From Day 1 the entire premise of the Federation is that it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia whose mission is scientific discovery and the peaceful exploration of space and discovery of new cultures.

The shows have always pushed the social boundaries of the times they aired in. Trek isn’t “turning woke”, Star Trek has always been woke. How’d you not know?

Watching people on 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.

youtube.com/watch?v=0TbT3UNdIu

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.

I love my Fisher Space pen. It can write underwater.
It can write other words too, of course.

The world now has 8 million Mastodon accounts and 8 billion people. So, as a Mastodon user, you’re one in a thousand.

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.

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I hold the philosophical position that if two things are indistinguishable, their difference is irrelevant.

"What if we live in a simulation?" -- irrelevant
"What if you couldn't tell the difference between taking to a computer and a real person?" -- irrelevant

But more precisely, it's begging the question to say "imagine something was indistinguishable, now how would you treat it differently???"

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: music.apple.com/us/playlist/re

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.

A thing I keep seeing on my feed: posts from white people being so proud of themselves for how inclusive, kind, and welcoming the Mastodon community is.

A thing I don't see: posts from Black people talking about how inclusive, kind, and welcoming Mastodon is.

Don't declare victory against hatred without checking in with the victims of hatred.

#antiracism #bipoc

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CleverLibre Social

CleverLibre Social is an inclusive social instance for open discussion, learning, and community.
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.