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damien's zone

Cool Selection of Stuff: early December 2024

Last month definitely has been something, huh? Globally and also personally because, man, time has been flying these past few weeks. What started as a small list of links at the beginning of November morphed into whatever will happen in this post, welp!

playing

I think I want to use my upcoming Christmas break to play more video games, especially ones I've had on my "backlog" for a hot minute 😤

listening

November was great for music, at least!

  • The new Kendrick Lamar album has been on heavy rotation for me. I need to dig into more West Coast rap...
  • I finally found what the fuss was all about and checked out Mercurial World and Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay and, man, music rules, y'all.
  • The year is 2024, and I only now found out about Together's (Thomas Bangalter and DJ Falcon) version of "Call On Me" and watched this excellent documentary about the whole situation about this track.
  • I also listened to a lot of Justice and Gesaffelstein because they both released banger albums this year, so I'm allowed to be normal about both. It will happen again.

And now, the links.

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Thoughts about Mastodon and the "new Twitter"

I keep telling myself I should stop thinking about social media so much, especially in the "current moment", but it keeps happening. This post started as a bunch of posts on Mastodon until I stopped myself and decided to Blog About It instead.

Mastodon is fine

Eugen being the BDFL of Mastodon (the project) might have been beneficial in the early days, but it feels more and more like a liability at this point.
If Mastodon is to survive for another 8 years, it cannot be run as a pet project anymore. And it also should not be run as "just" a Twitter-like anymore because Bluesky is effectively winning that battle with more resources than the Mastodon project could ever get.

A lot of the good ideas for the Fediverse aren't coming from Eugen or Mastodon at this point, and they rarely involve just "being another Twitter". Which leads me to my next point.

"Who is the new Twitter?" is a boring question

I really do not like this question.[1] This isn't me being salty about Bluesky "winning", by the way. I would be bothered the same if Mastodon was being declared a "winner" because:

Why should we have only one website, exactly?

Why is this all we care about? Why is this the focus? Why do we obsess over who has the most (active) users?

Are we constantly arguing about decentralization, who does it and who doesn't, and complaining about monopolies only to want (effectively) a monopoly for our online spaces? Really?

Sure, it's more annoying, but I think it's healthier to have different spaces for different people.
I've been on Twitter since 2009, Mastodon since 2017, and Bluesky since early 2023 and at this point, I can say that all of these are true:

bluesky mastodon social media

buttons

You know, it always surprises me in the best way possible to see my website's button on other people's websites. I have literally no way of knowing who does it otherwise (because the file is hosted by GitHub so I don't have analytics, and I'm sure some folks re-host it themselves) so every time it happens it's a surprise. It's great.

Always appreciate it <3

- damien

buttons meta

Cool Selection of Stuff: end of October 2024

Programming note: remember link roundups? Well, I'm deciding to call them by a different name now. Why? So I can make a silly pun. I wanted to go with "Cool Stuff Sunday" at first, but I'm not fooling myself in thinking I'll stick to posting these on Sundays.

Let's get to it, there's a lot of stuff to talk about.

Social Media meta

For better or worse, I still think probably far too much about social media, so I can't help but be into articles about it.

Tom (Date 'em Ups): I want you to dream

You can have dreams, Cohost. And when you're finally done making one come true, you can go on and have more. Dreams are why I'm here, why I've survived, and I want you, all of you to have them, too, more than anything else. Wherever the winds take us all after this, I hope you hold onto those dreams. Don't let go of them for anything. Anything. No matter how crushing the world gets, no matter how tall the barriers to entry are, nothing whatsoever. I had to hold onto mine tightly for over two whole decades, but damn it, I willed it into reality and I'm going to keep doing the exact same thing with what's in my sights now or die trying.

Another cohost-related post, it will happen again, I'm not sorry.

Luna: Online following and Starter Packs

I want people to follow me naturally because they enjoy my posts in particular, I don’t want a tech/demoscene/gamedev/etc audience showing up in bulk just because someone else decided to put me on a list without my prior consent.

It is not a secret that I am not exactly fond of Bluesky. I use it, but I tolerate it. Bluesky's "starter packs", much like Twitter's "Follow all"[1] feature, are... misguided? I see where they're coming from, it's hard to "build a feed" when you start on a Twitter-like website but, like Luna here, I can't help but feel this will produce Some Weird Results.

I think following a starter pack is doing yourself a disservice because you're just injecting people into your feed without getting a feel of what their posts are like, and people who are added to them have little way of doing much about it. You can "just block the creator of a pack" but this isn't a great solution. Some people might prefer to never be put in the spotlight at all, sometime it might be awkward for people to block a starter pack's creator. The fact there isn't an "opt me out" button is bonkers to me, but ultimately doesn't surprise me coming from Bluesky. But I'm just a hater, so what do I know.

Build your feed slowly but…Read more

music bluesky cohost social media websites technology generative ai soichi terada normal for girls boiler room rebecca black photography cats

End of October 2024 update

Hello, little blog, it's been a while! The past two weeks have been uncharacteristically busy for me so, huh, I didn't write much here, oops!

I spent a week of vacation in Reno for definitely normal reasons. Turns out, being mostly offline with your friends and other freaks (complimentary) for a whole week is good??? Someone should look into this.

Then, as soon as I came back, my friend Joanna was in town to visit the Internet Archive, so I tagged along. I saw a bunch of very cool shit. Like, look at all this stuff!! Tell me this isn't cool as hell!! Excuse the shoddy photography job lmao.

three, multiple meters-all servers, all belonging to the Internet Archive
Servers!! A few of the many (I was told) servers that the Internet Archive HQ in San Francisco houses
A red-colored, older looking, computer server. The first 'one petabyte box'.
A Petabox!! I didn't know the Internet Archive had one of these so early (2004!) but it makes sense that they would, after all.
A 16mm film scanner. It's almost a meter tall and has one big reel on each of its sides
A 16mm film scanner! It was super impressive to see move in person, especially considering how "tiny" 16mm film is in comparison.

I had other pictures, but they were all of Just Old Stuff. This is also just Old Stuff, but at least it's Devices! I'm never beating the nerd allegations.

Overall, meeting so many people and seeing so much stuff in the span of three nights was overwhelming but also great. The Internet Archive rules, man.

Finally, literally last night, I met with Nicky to give cohost 2 back to them. We then hung out at the Musée Mécanique. Given the "touristy" status of the place, I feel like I should have heard about it a long time ago, but it was my first time there, and it was super neat! Digital stuff is cool, but there's something just neat about seeing mechanical…Read more

internet archive meta musée mécanique nicky flowers