Dumb & strange in the Fediverse of madness.

Vol. 6, No. 6

I used to sorta understand how the internet worked but now I mostly don’t. Last weekend, I got cocky, made some rash decisions, clicked a few things in the wrong order, clicked another thing before fully absorbing its warning message (a warning that made pretty clear that I definitely should not have clicked on that thing at all, but could have made it even more clear with some stern disappoint-mom messaging perhaps rendered in a large, blinky red font), and, ultimately, sent all of my Mastodon followers into the nuclear heat-death of the Fediverse’s largest sun for no good goddamned reason at all.

Do you remember that wonderful window of time when all of our social media hooked up with all of our other social media, birthing new social media that existed only to aggregate all of our social media in one place that was also, itself, social media? Okay, it was a bit silly and literally drove us all insane, but at least it was easy.

I theoretically love this Fediverse stuff, but good lord can someone make it all make any kind of proper sense to me? Is this what socialism actually looks like?

Well, shit.

I’m back at poploser@mstdn.ca, now with zero followers, and I’m also fedi-posting through poploser@tylerhellard.com (via micro.blog), though I have no idea quite what that does and it should just be a mirror anyway. I surrender. UPDATE: poploser@tylerhellard.com is already dead as I moved away from Micro.blog.

Beat all the scattered / El Lissitzky / 1920

Confusions.

🇲🇽 Grande Americano (II), the c-tier German pro wrestler who became one of Mexico’s most popular luchadors: ❝There was nothing in his past that suggested he could perform as a flamboyant lucha libre persona, but under the mask, it was like he became a different person. Suave and magnetic, Kaiser transcended the inherent stupidity of the gimmick to achieve a very, very unlikely stardom.❞ / 🎸 After 40 years, the guys who made ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ are almost famous. (Watch it on the Internet Archive.) / 📚 Where have all the book reviews gone? (Also: Criticism, do we even GAF?) / 🎧 The young Wikipedians writing the front page of music history. / 💦 The interracial cuck porn theory of everything: ❝The [theory] is that essentially every aspect of the modern online right’s politics is reflected and amplified by porn narratives. […] The online far-right simultaneously creates porn based on their political beliefs and base their political beliefs on porn; it’s a horny, racist ouroboros.❞

Extensions.

🗄️ The Virtual OS Museum, a scant 174 GB install. / Other museums: Plugs and Sockets, Pocket Calculating Devices and Imaginary Musical Instruments. / Manuals Plus. (The plus is even more manuals.) / rip.so, the digital graveyard. / 👯‍♀️ The Playboy Fiction Index. / 🛠️ Dirty Little Zine, a free tool for making an 8-page zine. / AudioMass, browser-based multi-track audio editing. / inobara, simple link saving. / 👀 we were online. / eyeball.

Addendum.

Some more indieweb discovery sites to add to the pile mentioned in Vol. 6, No. 3: Blogs Are Back, Blogosphere, powRSS and Scour.

Explorations.

📖 Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson / 📺 One Piece (S2) / 📺 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (shuffle).