Atopia

Archiving our anxious fears as precious artifact
We make a Story
Stripped to bare words encoding our natures faiths and selves
These and all in grit and grim warning 
Dystopia

Bleak grey hued rough hewn the view from future's window
Staring eyes in hope forlorn
Dust and ash the gifts our benefactors leave in progress' wake
Every memory and bright treasure stripped melted for coin

Mechanized servant eaters of all growing green feeling loving things
If not fled are fed
The shining things from heart head and gut once born now consumed
Our inner voice fed back become lies so sterile and ape'd

Semi-sentient vastly parasitic the collectives cancerous intent to only grow 
Choked full on us it is us in the mill in the dirty grist
The fluttering trembling lights only ours to give are drowned in grasping dark

In mirrored certainty the self-satisfied boast ignorance toast ignorance
Read our troubled Story and see
Utopia

Danah Boyd: What if failure is the plan?

Network effects intersect with perception to drive a sense of a site’s social relevance and interpersonal significance #twitter #failure #socialmedia

When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.

But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement -- these movements couldn't be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.

The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. ("Mal-odons"?)

I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how "content can't go viral" on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.

We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.

• This post was 93% inspired by this excellent thread by @shengokai on #twitter.
• I got that link from @jennyrae@wandering.shop, thanks!
• This meta-thread from @shengokai is also great reading on the #twittermigration

What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.

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Dear reader, it was Not Good.

Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.

Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some "where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway" I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven't had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.

We Can Rebuild It

Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I'm more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.

Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).

Masto-tootly-don

With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that's the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).

Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they've changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone "Toot" to "Publish". I'd have preferred "Post" myself, but 🤷‍♀️.

Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?

Prints of some of my recent paintings #abstractart #acrylics

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Order yours here: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SparktreeStudio

In 8th grade my Art teacher recommended I pursue (somewhat disdainfully I suspect) "commercial art" (graphic design, in the 70s) because I loved straight lines and geometric shapes. If only she'd studied Hilda af Klint, Paul Klee, and other abstract artists, I might be an artist right now instead of a computer nerd #notlikely

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Fred Joseph asks:

One thing that’s been interesting about Trump’s presidency is how accessible it has made conversations about white supremacy.

I wonder how invested white people and the media will be in racism and anti-racism after he’s gone.

I've been wondering the same thing: assuming Biden wins, will white liberals (myself included) sigh in relief and go back to our pre-Trump, pre-Breonna Taylor, pre-George Floyd comfort?

I know that I've been working hard on following and learning from Black Americans and POC, and it's been good work, but white liberals have just scratched the surface of what we must learn from the lives and histories of POC.

Trump has been SO awful that it has been a catalyst for many of us to finally face the systemic injustice and racism that allowed him to rise to prominence, riding the post-Obama racist reaction. But a Biden win will not fix anything yet, it just puts a better public face on the administration. The hard work will be continuing to fight to reform the Senate, our law enforcement and justice systems, all the entrenched ways of thinking and working that our nation has been built on.

My "worst case" scenario right now is a Trump removal, Pence win. Pence is the "nice" face of a corrupt administration, and will happily go along with anything the abusive GOP can think up, bringing even the never-Trumper Evangelicals with him. And I know white democrats who are outraged at Trump-the-character, but not so much his racist, unjust policies.

Detroit, early 1980s, techno is invented by three friends who happen to be black:

High school friends Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, known as the Belleville Three, are known as the creators of techno music. Kevin Saunderson is the person who made sure techno music got to the masses by 1983.

The History of Techno Music from Black Music Scholar

Techno came out of Detroit in the 1980’s as underground dance music and subculture. Techno music took technology and made it a black secret.

The three tracks linked on that page would play in any house club today. I'd've danced the crap outta these when I was clubbing. HT to https://playvicious.social/@paralithode for suggesting I google "black inventor techno #blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(I may or may not be chairdancing to Tranzister right now)

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Folks, this is Sister Rosetta Sharpe, the queer black woman who invented rock and roll, before Elvis, Little Richard, or Chuck Berry were out of short pants

https://www.theroot.com/sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-queer-black-woman-who-invent-1823198999 #blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(Source: https://playvicious.social/@paralithode)

My privileged, suburban zip code in Gilbert, AZ is 12 square miles. I remember when we had 18 cases of #covid19. We're at 530 now.

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From a thread I posted on Play Viscious, re-posted here for posterity:

• My wife and I watched part 1 of the PBS documentary "The Vote" last night and I am learning a LOT. Some notes (a thread):
• If I learned anything about women's suffrage in school was quickly forgotten, pretty much everything in there was new. I think I knew Susan B. Anthony's name and Ida B. Wells.
• I think this documentary started to help me see intersectionality in action some? the fight for the ability to vote included conflicts over who should be granted the franchise first: educated white women, or black men. And black women getting left out either way (it was black men).
• The fight for voting rights for women was absolutely necessary, but it hurt to see the racist attitudes and decisions coming from the white suffragettes from leadership on down.
• Frederick Douglass was a huge proponent of women's suffrage - and he and the black women's suffrage clubs were pushed out when it seemed like black involvement would set back the cause in the jim crow south.
• also: white men are bastards

John Gruber responds to a new article in The Guardian that people with even mild coronavirus systems can be having serious brain disorders (for example strokes, encephalomyelitis, and psychotic episodes):

Germany yesterday reported 298 new cases of COVID-19.

The U.S. reported over 55,000. Just yesterday. It is raging out of control here in the United States. It’s that simple. We’ve lost any handle on it we might have had, infections are now raging out of control, and a large segment of the population has decided to pretend it isn’t happening and isn’t a big deal if you do get it.

For those of us who’ve been taking this seriously since March, it’s soul-crushing that this is where we’re at after four months of isolation. It sucks. We who’ve done the right thing are the ones most yearning for — and let’s be honest, most deserving of — a few tastes of normalcy.

I am begging everyone I know - please recognize that it is insane, or worse cruel, to pretend this isn't happening, or that it's a plot from people on the other end of a political spectrum to inconvenience you or steal your precious individual liberties... this is hundreds of thousands of friends and families suffering or dead.

Do the right thing — stay home as much as you can, wear a mask and keep your distance when you’re out. You don’t want to get this and you don’t want your family to get it.

TFW you're teetering on the edge between using the #microformats library to find h-cards and their properties and writing an entirely new wrapper to make finding #webmention comments "easy"

“I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”

https://nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack #bookmark #racism

It's #juneteenth and some of my day is going to be spent educating myself #blacklivesmatter

Juneteenth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth #bookmark #holidays #blackhistory

I might be hitting the wall on my Jekyll-inspired storage system for #goldfrog. GoldFrog uses Jekyll-style markdown posts as the "system of record", but read into SQLite for serving/searching content #webmention activity add a new type of data that I haven't figured out how to store yet.

Back to a nerd topic: implemented some of the #webmention server in my blog software this evening, and rearchitected the storage layer with an interface to make testing easier #golang

There a LOT of error cases when writing a #webmention server implementation #indieweb #goldfrog

We're number one #arizona #transmission #covid19 @dougducey

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