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.
If You Build It
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.
🎧 "It’s a Pleasure to Meet You" by Motion City Soundtrack
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
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.)
For and Against Bluesky
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.
📻 Listening to the National Security Law Podcast
https://www.nationalsecuritylawpodcast.com/episode-233-this-episode-was-not-written-by-chatgpt/
😁 Every time I visit omg.lol or social.lol I find a new fun thing to try. This time it’s status.lol and the neat app status.log by @jmj!
App recommendation: Workflowy
Workflowy is easily one of my favorite #productivity apps. I’ve been using it for years for work and personal stuff and it fits my brain.
It’s great for work as a place to keep, for example, a list of causes of action, together with their elements and defenses. It’s also where I keep the cases I most commonly cite, with links to periodically make sure they’re still good law. Personal uses for Workflowy include everything from shopping lists to draft blog posts and to-watch/to-read lists.
There are many similar tools but everything else seems too bloated or complex or targeted at project managers. I don’t want to be a project manager — I just want to manage projects. Or organize. Or list. Or write.
Somehow, despite being a daily user, I missed the addition of optional paragraph functionality. This makes the process of going from idea to outline to draft even easier.
One thing you learn using Microsoft Word for most things at work is that you never, ever draft directly in Word. The same goes for using the web interface of your preferred blogging tool. These things crash. Plenty of people use Google Docs for drafting stuff, but even that seems too bloated for me these days.
I’m a lawyer, so there’s a level of factual detail that does eventually require me to go “offline” and finish my work in Word, to preserve confidentiality and attorney-client privilege and other ethical obligations.
But Workflowy has never crashed on me, in the browser or in the app itself, and having a safe starting point to develop stuff in is great.
Paperback writer – Paragraphs and headers now available
(Image via Workflowy)
Riders of Justice, 2020 - ★★★★
It both is and is not the movie you think it is, and both in the best way.
CODA, 2021 - ★★★
Awful family places burden of their livelihood on daughter for her entire life and finally decides to let her be her own kid as she leaves for college.
It was good but it was kind of missing that one show stopping, jaw dropping song that the third act of any movie in this vein kind of demands.