⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3 stars out of 5)

I don’t regret watching this and I would certainly recommend it to certain people, but I’m not sure I’ll ever need to watch it again.

I’ve been playing around with using OwnYourSwarm and the idea of posting only certain checkins publicly on my Micro.blog. If anyone has any experience with it, especially with ironing out weirdness/rookie mistakes, let me know!

D&R Canal.

Checked in at D & R Canal @ Kingston

⭐️ (1 star out of 5

Wouldn’t watch again, wouldn’t recommend

The story was incoherent except as a forced setup of Kang and of passing of the Ant-Man-tle to Lang’s daughter.

Camp Taylor. Checked in at Camp Taylor. A campfire in the daylight. (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Justice Gorsuch, during #SCOTUS oral arguments in Counterman v. Colorado, displaying a kind of intellectual dishonesty that must have had Alito beaming proudly in the direction of his more junior colleague

(Originally shared at Mastodon)

Watched on Sunday May 14, 2023.

Checked in at Camp Taylor. Another night, another shot of the sky through the trees (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Checked in at Camp Taylor.

Camping with some family to celebrate my upcoming ██th birthday.

I love the big overlap in the user communities at omg.lol and Micro.blog. There’s something about both platforms that draws a certain kind of geek and I think it’s great.

The sky through the trees (@ Camp Taylor Campground, NJ, USA)

Neil Gaiman announced season 2 of Good Omens on Bluesky today. I enjoyed season 1 which, though it had its faults, was a really pleasant display of the chemistry between its leads, David Tenant as the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen as the angel Aziraphale.

Currently reading: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams 📚

I’m reading this one with the kids at bedtime. I definitely do a bit of light word replacement here and there, mostly where death or sex are mentioned. But it’s fun, especially with the 3-year-old, who can understand just enough of it to be interested but has sufficient trouble keeping up with the weirdness to make it, eventually, conducive to falling asleep.

Please stop inviting heads of state to Bluesky ⟶

The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto reports on Bluesky’s refusal, for now, to allow national leaders on the platform.

(This was originally auto-posted via RSS from Pinboard but I had to edit it because the actual link didn’t come through. I’m experimenting a bit…)

🗨️ Re-installing the twitter app… just for a bit so I can complain to Dropbox about their gross downgrading flow dark patterns…

Mandibles, night-blooming jasmine, and in-utero memories. These are the things a great Nic Cage interview is made of.

I’ve been poking around Bluesky and it seems like they’ve really opened up the gates over there. I’m seeing far more familiar names and avatars. And everyone seems cool, as long as you can avoid the crypto/web3 nonsense.

(This isn’t about Jack, or any of weird takes he’s been dropping lately at Bluesky.)

And using my domain name as my username is really, really cool.

But what made me want to write this is that the Bluesky team is actively involved and genuinely listening to positive and critical feedback, which is probably my favorite part of it so far. And I realize now that an active presence by the people who build it is what makes a social network appealing to me.

I can find a community of folks I like anywhere. Geeks are like water: we just keep spreading out until we’re everywhere. But my favorite communities in a long, long time, omg.lol and micro.blog, are fun and comfortable and challenging because their founders/owners/developers are constantly present.

They built something they love, betting that they could at least make it self-sustaining from a business standpoint because they had a sense of the kind of communities that were poorly served by pre-existing platforms.

for themselves because they wanted it, and then they realized other people would probably like it too, and then they realized that they could charge a really reasonable amount of money per user and build a business out of it.

As I said on Bluesky itself: This is… not a good idea at all…

You are not alone We’ve all had our battles with darkness and shadows I’m here to let you know It’s a pleasure to meet you Today is all we have So try for a moment to break from the torment And sing this to yourself It’s a pleasure to meet you

(find it where you listen)

I’m trying out cross-posting from Micro.blog to Bluesky. Come & say hi if you’re over there. There are more people there all the time, but there aren’t many of my people (read: users of Micro.blog & omg.lol) there yet. (I’m also cross-posting to all the others services I’ve added because why not.)

🟦 If you’re on Bluesky, come say hi. I’ve found some cool people, but it’s a … different vibe than my other communities, for sure.

https://bsky.app/profile/joeross.me

(Shout-out to @maique@social.lol for the invite! I don’t have any yet, but I’ll pay it forward when I do.)

Point against Bluesky:

Already it’s recommending I follow crypto bros, as if no one who works on this app has ever read my bio, which states, in pertinent part:

I’m giving this place a chance. You all better keep the crypto sh*t out of my face, and my feed.

Point for Bluesky:

I made my handle my domain name. It involved a new DNS record and everything. Arcane geekery to many, a warm comforting breeze to me.

See this post on Bluesky, where I’m @joeross.me. Let’s avoid crypto bros together.

💻 Of course I'm putzing around on omg.lol

📱 Having fun rebuilding my Drafts app groups and actions from the ground up.