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

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?

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

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

To my shame, it took until the events surrounding George Floyd's murder for me to really begin attempting to educate myself on "the rest of the story" of America's history of institutionalized racism and violence. I'm trying to focus on 3 things:

• LEARN the facts, outside of what was in my history education ("we win war for independence, we win ww2, happily ever after" - at least that's what I generally walked away with)
• LISTEN to black writers and voices about their American experience
• Focus my own small voice on speaking to my fellow white Americans on our complicity in these atrocities and the system they’ve perpetuated.

I have SOOOO far to go. In the meantime, talking to my wife we decided that something we could do was to donate to support these organizations fighting for racial justice:

• Black Lives Matter Global Network
• National Bail Out
• Know Your Rights Camp
• Black Voters Matter Fund
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• The National Police Accountability Project

If you feel like I do, please consider donating - it's the easiest way to get started - but it's not enough. We're going to have to start acting too.

The "American Police" podcast on Throughline was eye-opening #racism #whiteness #policing

"Phoenix has it's own "I can't breathe" case. The outcome was exactly the same" -- no it wasn't #racism #policing

http://monkinetic.blog/2020/06/05/phoenix-i-cant-breathe

I knew the term “grandfathered in” had to do something with #voting and #racism but this story really explains the #history https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/10/21/239081586/the-racial-history-of-the-grandfather-clause thanks @lmorchard

So far in 2020 I’ve read 30 books #quarantine #covid19

Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

The Grandson: Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.

(from The Princess Bride of course, but applicable)

I stayed awake! 😂

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I really enjoyed this whole series. Book 2 finds Kellen - magical outcast from his Jan'tep family - beginning to accept his new status as outlaw and trickster, while learning that there is a whole world outside the insular society he grew up in.

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Kellen and his makeshift crew have defeated (most would say survived) a large number of assassins, bounty hunters, unnatural disasters, and his own persistently scheming Jan'tep family.

Now it seems there's a... God out there he's expected to deal with?

The last book in the 6-book Spellslinger series, which has been really fun.

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Wait... Head like a Hole was technically part of the *80s #mindblown #alternative1989

Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

The Grandson: Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.

(from The Princess Bride of course, but applicable)

I stayed awake! 😂

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Sebastian de Castell starts off another tale of magic and swordplay with The Traitor's Blade. Falcio, Kest, and Brasti make a nice addition to the tradition started by Dumas' Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. 😀

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She's 13, a brand new queen, and everyone is telling Kellen to kill her. But Kellen likes to make up his own mind, yeah?

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Yeah, so that horrible curse Kellen lives with, that got him kicked out of his own family and society, and made the constant target of bounty-hunting magi? It's even more complicated than he thought.

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Sebastian de Castell keeps the interesting stories going of Kellen, the Jan'tep outcast and trickster, and the bizarre family that's been forming around him.

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