starless @starless@pixie.town

@NMaDayton I uh. I don't hear normally, but I didn't know Twitter's disability community. So I might not say "the whole disability community". But I entirely agree with the sentiment. I hope the influx will be good for the disability folks that have been here for a minute.

What kinds of tech things do you enjoy working with/doing? I usually program in c# for work these days, but I enjoy making little python projects that print things. :)

@kf sometimes, stuff is just complicated! At least writing it down can help it feel like you're learning. At least, that's what I tell myself. 😅

@NMaDayton that does sound really stressful.

I migrated over here about a year or two ago, back when more things weren't really happening. At the time, leaving traditional social media felt like I wasn't really missing out on as much, since I wasn't going to events in person.

When I switched to an account here, it was via an invite from a netfriend who I'd known off a chat tech called Matrix. It's a bit like a federated "Discord" kind of an experience.

Lately, it's been fun, but kind of stressful to see so much more activity and vibrancy in the "netborhood" so to speak. I'm happy to see more local instances spinning up.

I used Twitter occasionally professionally, but honestly, it was pretty rare. Part of me is glad for an increase in the ephemerality of online socialization that comes with all this, but another part of me feels like there is a real need for a "reasonably stable phone book", and I am sad that something vaguely reassembling that got looted.

@Luvvie I like using Tusky! It has a great "delete and re-draft" feature.

You can migrate accounts between servers if you really want, but it can be a bit tricky technologically.

Different groups use CWs differently. If someone doesn't like how you use yours (or vice versa), you can always just block them. Lots of people use them like "subject lines" instead of only to hide only really shocking stuff. There's some drama/asshole stuff happening a little around this discussion. I wouldn't really sweat it.

Lots of people describe their images on here. If pictures load slowly, I usually read the description to see if I care enough to wait. It's a nice thing to do because I talk with some people who use screen readers, so I like to make sure they at least know what kind of picture I've posted when people are reacting to it.

Mastodon is not actually just one technology! It is an implementation of the activity pub protocol. There are lots of other little sites that implement this protocol, which means that they can all talk to each other. So, not only can you talk to people on other mastodon servers, you can also use your normal mastodon situation to talk to people who aren't using mastodon at all! This might be a little confusing, but you can think of it like being able to follow someone on Instagram from Tumblr. If you could do that. I don't remember the names of all of them, but Pixelfed is a federated "Instagram" style experience.

See more by looking at #feditips.

Also, hi! Nice to meet you! I'm Starless. :)

@NMaDayton hey there! I tick a buncha those boxes! :)

How's your day been?

@fack my feed is full of #MastoTop25FatNutsHaversAwards2022 idk what "lack of thirst traps" you're seeing here

@eris@ni.hil.ist @sparky aaah, that makes more sense. Thank you!

@sparky thank you!

@sparky this doesn't make any sense to me. I'm not an expert, but I've taken a handful of years of mandarin language classes, and it's just.. It really doesn't check out, IMO.

First, it's impossible to pronounce an ideogram.

You can pronounce the word an ideogram represents, based on your dialect... But even then, that's still not right, there's more than one way to pronounce most ideograms because Chinese has many spoken dialects.

And even then, the translated joke isn't good. In mandarin Chinese, 'moo' is usually translated as 'móu' or 'mōu' (pronounced kind of like "mouh?" or "mouh" but like in a high-pitched cat meow voice). That's a fine inaccuracy. But! The real kicker here?

Móu's closest "philosophy" homonym is 牟 (móu), roughly translated as "to seek" or "try to gain", at least in standard mandarin. This is basically a canonical pun baked into the language (at least in mandarin).

The closest to your joke I was able to find is 莫 "mò" (pronounced like "mow", except you say it like a firm command, with a fairly short 'o'). From what I can find in the translation notes, this really isn't used in spoken Chinese much.

Anyways, "nobody there spoke Chinese" is a lame punchline, IMO. But, you know, like a student, I just had to 'go seek' if you would. As is, though, it reads like.. Kinda racist? Because it's not really funny to anyone who's kinda familiar with any of the subject matter, so it's like you're laughing at some other group in a way that doesn't really let people laugh together, if that makes sense.

I'm definitely not a fluent speaker, though, so I could be misunderstanding something. Am I missing some context here? Anyways, lame joke, maybe take it down, but I hope you enjoyed the translation notes!

For reference, I used Pleco's dictionary app to help with most of my translations.