Monkinetic Weblog

Posting in your own site means #Facebook #instagram or #YouTube can’t decide if your writing is worth monetizing or not.

When you've managed to make it too hot for cacti to survive, you've broken the desert #climatechange #cacti #heatwave

Cacti need to cool down at night or through rain and mist. If that does not happen they sustain internal damage. Plants now suffering from prolonged, excessive heat may take months or years to die, Hernandez said.

Love love love these "ancient future"#paintings by Karla Night, and I am so there for Jason Kottke's description:

Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson's Stargate

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via kottke

This is a little picture of what #climatechange means: Sitting on my back porch in Arizona this morning at 5:45am, enjoying only the second summer monsoon rain this season. Sipping a coffee in a damp wind, with the temperature at 82ºF (28ºC).

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I realized that -- after nearly a month of temperatures over 110ºF (43ºC), a record-breaking length of time even in Arizona -- I had forgotten what 82º felt like. This is not typical, normal, or a cyclic phase.

This is a permanent, ongoing, man-made problem.

Fedi/Mastodon programmers... with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a "local" ID that is suitable for passing as the "inReplyToID" in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the "local" ID?

#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Dammit I started a branch on Goldfrog to play with the #micropub api, and now that it's in pieces on the editor floor, I have 3 more features I want to add #indieweb #blogging

(One is adding the ability for a note or post here to be a reply to another post on Mastodon.)

Yehuda Rothschild republished (with permission) a presentation (Archive.org link) by Lara A Jacobs, Mvskoke citizen and Native scientist, on settler colonialism - what is it, what is colonization, what happened when settlers (in North America) arrived.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope there's a video version, or one is done one day.

Some particular points I want to mention/synthesize:

Colonization is not a historical event, but a continuous process that requires ongoing support through social and legal systems and institutional violence.

Colonization doesn't just mean moving in and kicking out indiginous people, though it definitely means that. It's also continued occupation of their "lands, waters, and environments", the forced breakup of families and communities through unjust and cruel laws and foster systems, the intentional obliteration of native peoples' languages, cultural practices, and value systems (often through forced fostering and the original residential homes).

We (the White European Settlers) operated -- and still operate -- under a value system and ideologies that are manifestly destructive (the following is quoted):

• Conquer and defeat their surroundings
• Biases against undeveloped areas
• Associated uncivilized areas with evil
• Commodity-based utilitarianism (e.g., extractive practices)
• Extraction of 'natural resources' (e.g., forest products, marine fisheries, mining, etc.)
• Capitalism

All of these in direct opposition to the beliefs, ideologies, and practices of Native cultures and communities, which had been existing largely in balance with their environments for many thousands of years before settlers arrived.

There is much much more in the slides that were shared and I'm grateful to Lara and Yehuda both for making these available.

Nothing's wrong, GameRant.

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And it's your #tracking I'm blocking, not #advertising (well, ok, it's that too)

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible "hand-me-down" white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

"We've never had an election out here. We don't have ballots and machines to do it." Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

And now for something different from NovaColor: Understanding the Color Gray and Its Shades

I use NovaColor acrylics for my artwork, and love their occasional articles on the theory and history of pigments #art #painting #arthistory

Been wanting to re-focus on the ol' blog here, and a friend told me about https://shutupwrite.com/ -- there's a local event tomorrow night so going to go hang out and work on some longer posts with a bunch of other writers #writing #blogging #community

"[T]he problem is, if you let them get away with it, it gets worse and worse and worse."

Small town newpaper doing the good work in small town America.

Corporate media, please go back to #journalism 101.

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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