starless @starless@pixie.town

One nice thing about getting to Highgate Cemetery early in the day was meeting this fox, who clearly wasn’t expecting humans and paused to check me out before carrying on with their day

Since pronoun.is appears to have been down a while, I've created https://my.geeky.gay/pronouns

Its all statically generated, and each page is self-contained, so its very easy to selfhost or duplicate. Its currently hosted on sourcehut pages, so I don't see it going away anytime soon.

I should note that its missing the redirects and dynamic parts of pronoun.is, so make sure to copy the whole URL when linking.

Right about now it's about that time for us to start the call and open the play space. We'll be juggling, doing handstands, and playing with acrobatics while we talk with fedi friends from all over. I'd enjoy seeing you. No cam or sound needed.
https://meet.jit.si/CircusHomeGym
#CircusInPlace

Wendesday upsidedown time at #CircusInPlace :D

Come and hang out with us while we work on our handstands and acrobatics! Please, we'd really love to see you :)

https://meet.jit.si/CircusHomeGym

i have arrived in portland. anyone want to get some food? i would love to meet u

Work I’ve done for a 2023 calendar.
Watercolor on 100% coton paper.

#mastoart @Curator #art #artist #queerart #trans #watercolor #illustration

FACTS ABOUT MASTODON

If you are curious about leaving the cooked turkey site and going to the elephant site, here are some important tips:

1. It sucks. But then, so does every site.

2. You can still shitpost. Take great glee.

3. Picking your server instance is super important.

Ideally you should start at a large instance, and leave because it's full of white suburban NIMBY reactionaries who joined in November because they were promised 0 uncomfortable experiences in their lives and lash out whenever this turns out not to be the case.

Then you move to a smaller server where suddenly you can't talk to your friends because the admin of your instance is feuding with the admin of their instance. Then you wait a month before you can move again.

In this regard, the feudal structure of Mastodon instances is very like early 2000s message boards, whenever the admin got drunk and deleted the site.

4. You can work around the feudalism by running Mastodon yourself. It's the size of a mastodon and costs a fortune.

You can run Pleroma, which is smaller, and is also favoured by Nazis by unfortunate historical accident. Pleroma is perfectly good software that fulfils a need for something smaller than Mastodon, but also the devs are definitely not Nazis but are the other ten guys at the table.

There was a hilarious moment where the guy behind Spinster was so obnoxious he got kicked out of Pleroma and started his own fork called Soapbox/Rebased. He is now known as Soapbox Terf.

The nice people went to Pleroma fork Akkoma, which Soapbox Terf calls the "tr***y server", a review I understand they were delighted by. Try that.

There's also Misskey, which is a bit weird and Japanese, and supports cat ears right there in the protocol.

5. Any bozo who complains about your posts with assertions about the Fediverse that assume it all runs on the rules of mastodon.social is one of the suburban NIMBYs and invariably joined in November. Block and don't look back.

6. If anyone annoys you about your posting, you can improve their feed for them by blocking them from ever seeing your posts. The blocking tools are marvellous.

7. There are NO QUOTE TWEETS on Mastodon and anyone who wants QUOTE TWEETS is an invader, pollutant and corrupting influence despoiling the suburban vistas of Mastodon who only wants quote tweets so they can wreak EVIL.

So quote-tweeting is well supported in Akkoma and Misskey (and forks thereof), is in the Treehouse fork of Mastodon, and will be coming to more Fediverse software soon.

8. In Mastodon, Eugen Rochko has achieved the creation of something greater than himself. And he will *never forgive it*.

9. The Fediverse interprets Website Boy as damage and routes around him.

10. Mastodon is yet another demonstration that worse is better. So come onto Mastodon, and *be* that worse.
====
EDIT: this post is attracting some very dumb reply guys. Consider *not* posting debate club fatuity.

10 Image #CaptionTips from a transcriptionist:

1. Any words are better than nothing.
2. You don't need to say it's "a picture of…" screen readers will already say it's an image.
3. Start with the framing or format (i.e. close up, landscape, meme, text).
4. Think about the reason you're posting the pic and describe that first, add background details if you have time.
5. Pretend you're talking to someone on the phone and want to tell them about this cool thing you're looking at.
6. Transcribe any and all text in the image, even if it's the only thing you do.
7. If you've described the image in your post, you don't need to copy and paste it again in the caption. But again, don't leave it blank, just put something like "as described."
8. You can add small subjective notes, but don't give too much interpretation of the image in your own opinion.
9. Caption jokes are fun, as long as they still describe the image objectively.
10. Use punctuation, and capitalize words properly. A lot of us have interacted with this tech when calling customer service or talking to Siri, so keep in mind that you're writing for a computer to read, and it needs all the help it can get.

New print for the wall!
Support artists like @anaisfae , the creator of this piece, who does phenomenal work!

I love the genre of posts about supportive ancestors losing their shit over their descendants' comparatively decadent lifestyle.

I think about this whenever I look at my spice rack. So many spices...

Me: *opens cupboard*

Ancestors: *ululation intensifies*

Merry Christmas! I used GPT-3 to generate some new Victorian holiday cards, and did my best to illustrate them.
Fare ye Very Well Indeed!
https://www.aiweirdness.com/victorian-christmas-cards-by-ai/

Floofington has entered the “squeaking” phase of its growth. It is very squeaky.

Alternate universe where the '90s trend for calling things "bad", "sick" or "rude" never ended and now we compliment each other's shoes by calling them "catastrophic" and "fundamentally misaligned with my values"

Hey you

Keep being a good person

you are the dreams of dead stars

i think "overmorrow" and "ereyesterday" should be words again

so many other languages have words for "the day after tomorrow" and "the day before yesterday" respectively, english not having them is kinda awkward in comparison

Writers are taught not to write wish-fulfillment—it's too easy, boring, or low stakes. But that reasoning is wrong. It only seems that way because we've all already read thousands of wish-fulfillment stories about cis het able-bodied white males, so they're very... predictable.

For every other demographic?

Readers actively, desperately crave wish-fulfillment stories about themselves, because they rarely if ever see them.

#writing #craft

Comrades, if you’re able, please help our unhoused neighbors in #Minneapolis. We are in a deep cold patch (air temp & windchills below 0F) w/blizzard forecast for next 2-3 days. Our soul-less smug piece of shit mayor has destroyed encampments, displacing many during this time the NWS has called life-threatening conditions. Here’s a link where you can help. 🙏🏻
https://linktr.ee/sanctuarysupplydepot