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I wrote a crazed rant about how the emergence of web apps caused developers to stop considering what’s best for the users. (warning: strong language)
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Doesn’t look crazed to me. Imagine if ActivityPub was peer-to-peer or ran on BitTorrent and was not a client/server architecture?
I chose this week’s Enamel and Diamond Tiara because it reminded me of something. Do you see it, too?
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To kick off spooky season, I just published the post I shared a draft of several weeks ago.
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Actually, more than a blog post, I wrote an essay (or mini-essay), about what is the underground (as a scene). I like a lot how it came out 
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Actually, sometimes my mind is wandering and I just think; “Hey, bittorrent is decentralized.”
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a september roundup! fish, puzzles, journal spreads
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Didn’t spend much time online or futzing around with my computer during my downtime this past week, as I was too busy playing video games and guitar! Thoughts on that in my latest weeknotes. Media titles discussed this week include Widow’s Bay, Backrooms, Control: Resonant, and the Witcher 3 remaster.
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The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include an interactive exploration in a mysterious place, a system that’s definitely not Windows and an archive of over 22,000 web banners from the early web with bonus poetry generator using those banners. I have another picture of my kitty visitor, I talk about a DIY project that’s getting the better of me, I have a surgery update and I share some of my favorite Weird Web October entries so far. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
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re: blocking our way to nowhere
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Lovely words! Hopping freight trains is also big. Living on boats of plywood and empty buckets. Pirate radio. Even a full moon. Aurora. You’re a bunch of sunlight haunting a rock. Even with no sapiens, your atoms are still making wild connections survival does not condone, making relationships where no relationship has any right to exist.
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Willyour loved ones be pursuade people to not fear death, or will your loved ones be persuaded death is unaccepable? Explore a polarity with me?
Questions here:
At last, finally, safe from death.
audio here: parasite-crisis : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
transcript here: Between Parasite and Crisis – A Secant Query
Happy triaging! 
idk if i agree with you i think in the context of the fediverse like widdershins explains blocking whole communities for silly reasons is not very good because youre putting walls between whole groups of people where its not really necessary but in the context of a single person’s social media acc blocking for any reason is perfectly reasonable. yeah sometimes it sucks to be blocked by someone you liked following or weird to be blocked by someone youve never met but like we all have the right to curate our spaces however we want. of course if its someone youre actively in contact with its weird to just block them without ever trying to talk it out but since a lot of social media is more passive and has plenty of people who just read each other’s posts without ever actually interacting its not that weird to decide “i dont want to see this person so im blocking them”. i feel like the philosophy of only blocking when someone is genuinely bad is more stress-inducing than blocking people for being mildly annoying because on one hand you can keep being exposed to things you dont really want to see but that arent really bad either and on the other if you discover youre blocked you can feel like maybe you did something really bad yourself without realising so its just stressful. ive blocked people for making engagement bait videos like deliberately doing something wrong or withholding information so people will comment which is objectively a silly reason to block but i just dont want to see these things and its nothing personal nor is it a moral judgement. i think blocking is a really good tool on large platforms you have little control over even
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I think blocking for any reason you so desire is a perfect valid approach. Nobody is owned an uninterrupted access to send me messages. I don’t need to justify to anyone why I don’t want to read what someone else is writing.
Even if the reason would be “I don’t like their profile picture and I don’t want to see it when they interact with me”, it’s a perfectly valid reason.
it feels like theyre just completely denying your existance or that you have any value
That’s a mindset you need to learn to change. It’s not about denying your existence or your human value. It’s purely practical: I’m not interested in giving my time and attention to someone who’s acting in a way that doesn’t respect it or is otherwise causing me unwanted negative disturbance. This is especially true in the internet where there’s so much noise and social media providing such a direct line to anyone you want by default.
Every person has their own opinion on what they enjoy and what they don’t so in the end, it becomes a quest for finding your people. The ones who like you as you are and enjoy the same things.
In the original, Widdershins writes
It also works against one of the reasons the Fediverse exists in the first place. The large social platforms put millions of people inside systems controlled by a handful of companies. Decentralization offers a different model: many independently operated communities connected through common protocols.
I 100% disagree with that. If a platform like X makes decisions you don’t like, you’re kinda stuck between participating or leaving the entire platform. In Fediverse, if your instance does things you don’t like, you can go to another instance.
I block liberally on Fediverse, both individual accounts and entire instances. If someone has an account on an instance that has been a problem and they want to interact with me, they better find another instance.
I even block proactively before accounts ever interact with me if I see them doing bad things in the web. Saves me a potential headache of them reaching my notifications.
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A short piece about AI…and drugs.
“From the title of this entry, I assume you’re thinking I’m gonna talk about AI slop or that guy at your office who asks ChatGPT everything (even if his wife is cheating on him)…”
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I was the same way with Google when it was good — I wouldn’t do or write anything without Googling it first. The conversational back-and-forth is a pretty cool upgrade and unlocks some new things, but I think information retrieval alone is pretty “addictive”, whether it’s from an LLM, a search engine, or a well-organized card catalog.
People always get “addicted” to good and enjoyable things. When the thing is new, the “addiction” language is brought out to pathologize it.
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That Definitely Not Windows link was hilarious! Thanks for sharing.
As for Slow Horses … have you watched the previous five seasons? If not, you’ve got way more Slow Horses to enjoy! Season six only has three episodes out so far (and yes, it’s excruciating waiting for new episodes – the show is so good).
When I used to do social media, I took the Cobra Kai approach:
- block first
- block hard
- no mercy
This wasn’t merely because I disagreed with somebody, but because I wasn’t willing to argue with people on the internet over matters of opinion like vim vs emacs, PlayStation vs Xbox vs PC, or whether Ghost is really a heavy metal band. That’s just playing stupid games for stupid prizes. People can have those arguments without me if they like. If they try to drag me into it, they get blocked; my first duty is to myself.
If I blocked people over politics, it was because they held positions I find morally abhorrent, like suggesting that women’s suffrage was a mistake. (Are we really having that argument in the 21st century instead of building habitats in space?) If widdershins wants to be tolerant of people who think that individual rights are negotiable or debatable, that’s their business, but if I were to return to social media, it would not be to argue with random strangers online.
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