One of the biggest gaps in my current website-first approach to social media is an inability to snap a picture and quickly post it. I’ve wanted to tackle this for a while, but an upcoming cool vacation has me thinking I should really go for it.

It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts.

I’m on Bluesky now, I guess?

First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter. I’m especially happy that Mormon Twitter seems to be re-emerging on Bluesky, since that’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most. I also think a lot of Bluesky features (domain name-based handles, starter packs, better trust and safety features) are neat!

Nearly spit out my lunch while watching this!

Il y a beaucoup plus de photos de train sur mes fils Mastodon et Bluesky qu’il y en avait sur mon fil Twitter, et ça donne de la joie.

Il arrive que je passerai bientôt quelques jours en Alsace, et j’accepterais avec plaisir des conseils pour quoi faire pendant mon séjour.

“Your browser settings are preventing an optimal experience with Microsoft 365.” Yes, and that’s how I know they’re set up properly.

Despite all the Bad Stuff happening right now, what my brain has chosen to get anxious about this morning is how I have my RSS + Micro.blog + Mastodon + Bluesky reader set up.

Happy to report that I won this morning’s game of precipitation chicken—didn’t even need the rain gear I put on out of caution.

Another fun bike commuting game is precipitation chicken: How much of this rain can I wait out before delaying my ride in makes me late for class?

I have long felt that “Anne Ominous” would be a good name for a character in a superhero story—and long bemoaned that I’m not creative enough to create that story myself.

One of my favorite things that Lexington does is to hold a bike light awareness “Glow Ride” the night before the fall time change. It’s been a family tradition for us and a lot of fun.

I stopped using Strava over five years ago when the stories were about secret military bases being identified through the service were coming out.

Pretty sure I just saw a student dressed up for Halloween as a Skrull, and it occurs to me that anyone could claim to be in costume as a Skrull.

A lot of my Hugo hacks are ugly, but I’m happy that I’ve figured it out well enough to be able to do the hacks in the first place.

Hier, je me demandais combien de temps encore cette période de bonne santé mentale (qui existait depuis quelques mois) durerait encore. Ce matin, j’ai malheurusement la réponse.

I had some driving to do this weekend, so I tore through the audiobook of this at 2x speed. I may be a but harsh on it with my rating, but I just didn’t really love it? It’s well written and interesting but didn’t cohere enough for me.

I wonder if reading it 20 years ago when it first came out might have changed my views. Some of it might have seemed more prescient, and some of its attitudes less problematic.

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

After the brilliant first season of The Mandalorian, I put some related art up in my office. As the show has gone on, though, I’ve gotten less and less impressed with it, to the point that I wonder why I keep the art up.

My favorite detail from Homestar Runner production is how the off-brand voices in the low-quality animation segments are just the best efforts of the non-voice-actor guy to imitate the voices his brother does.

I like this volume better, but it still doesn’t quite land with me. I suspect it’s because I’m so used to metafiction in more recent comics that I don’t appreciate the sources they’re building on! At any rate, I’m glad I read these, but I can’t say that they were life-changing for me.

I feel like I’ve said this about a lot of recent comics, but while I appreciate what this contributed and what it’s trying to do, I just don’t like it all that much.

I’m interested in its efforts at social justice moralizing and metafiction, and I understand there will be more of that in the second volume (which I’m looking forward to), but there was too much that felt like lazy comics in here (sexist costumes, silly crossovers and events, two-dimensional characters).

The RSS feeds for my local newspaper don’t seem to be compatible with my current feed reader, and I’m torn between building myself a web-scrape-to-RSS workaround for the fun of it or just pivoting to another local news source.

The Mastodon bot that posts random Homestar Runner screenshots is back, and I’m so happy. Refusing to unfollow it despite it not having posted since July was a wise choice.

Today, after a brief appearance on campus to teach one class, I begin a convoluted trip to Pittsburgh to attend a conference for work. As this trip has gotten closer, I’ve looked at the details of my trip and slowly realized that I messed this up good in terms of deciding how to get to Pittsburgh and back. This post is a confession of my sins!

I’m fairly transport conscious—at least for an American. I checked Amtrak to see if there was a reasonable way to get there by train, and I’m pretty sure I also checked Greyhound to see what travel by bus would be like. I do this for any conference I attend, but I usually get the same result: American trains and buses just aren’t well developed enough to support this kind of trip. At some point, I must have also done the math on driving versus flying… or at least I hope I did—maybe that’s another sin to confess. At any rate, at some point I gave in to the inevitability of flying and worked with my employer’s travel office to get some tickets booked.

RSS forever! I love RSS, I love Cory Doctorow, and I love this post.