I've been building a Facebook Events style event organizing system for the Fediverse. It's based on the simple, open source, privacy-respecting event organizing tool https://gath.io
The attached video is a work-in-progress preview and shows compatibility with Mastodon. My hope is to get it working with lots of software, including stuff like Friendica that supports events and calendars.
Check out more at my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/organizing-on-32729070
I finished my stint as a Mozilla Fellow and now I'm relaunching my Patreon with a focus on, well, fixing social media.
This means I'm going to continue my concerted work trying to make the fediverse a better place, in the form of best practice guides for running instances, external advocacy, and technical tutorials and training so that more people can contribute software to the fediverse at large.
You can read a partial summary of my work so far at my new Patreon page!
@darius they did quite the purge of that first print! I archived that version of the game here: https://archive.org/details/sim_copter_0077-000-0601-A for @coleoptera to write: http://mediacommons.org/imr/2017/04/14/simcopter
Anyway, if the Cities: Skylines people ever did something like let you play entirely different games on a map of your city... I would give them all my money
Also SimCopter had an easter egg in it that a programmer inserted without permission where on his birthday and on his boyfriend's birthday, the city would be full of men in swim trunks holding hands and making kissing noises. I remember there was a controversy about it at the time, they fired the programmer and released a patch you could download to get rid of it (which was pretty unusual at the time) :(
https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/2015/08/31/gay-sims-easter-egg-and-controversy-in-simcopter/
I still get "you're the czar / when you've got a kickass car" stuck in my head
Ooooh, someone has done the work of making these games run on modern Windows PCs
http://www.streetsofsimcity.com/index.html
http://www.simcopter.net/
don't have to tell all of YOU this, but what a bunch of bullshit to ignore the great work of the Social Web W3C group! Twitter has done nothing but antagonize us in the process. Keep reminding these opportunistic fools. https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg#Social_Web_Working_Group https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/
In better news, there was a cat named Patches that everyone thought was lost in a mudslide, but actually made it out fine and came back 3 years later
Looks like someone's been feeding her all this time. Or she was somehow able to take care of herself because cat
“Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.” - Lemony Snickett, The Wide Window
mf doomposting
I have gotten MF DOOM lyrics stuck in my head literally every single day since 2003, but now when it happens there is a tinge of sadness :(((
Like whenever I hear a word that is also in a DOOM lyric, my brain free associates over there. I do not associate "All Star" with Smash Mouth, I associate it with "And while he's runnin down to All-Star Weekend to ball / I'm comin with the U-Haul"
new communities on fedi
We (as in the collective of autonomous instances that make up fedi) need to come up with a better way to onboard new communities while keeping each other safe. The insular response is understandable from a safety approach, but the expectation for new communities to understand years of developed social norms drives people away.
I've seen this happen many times. What happened to ejhovan was probably the worst, but yeah.
Ass big on my story
https://oulipo.link/S1a71b
Computer-generated literature
In Brazil's main newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, I argue that microblogging itself and National Novel Generation Month as initiated by @darius are more important to computer-generated literature than particular technologies like GPT-2 and -3 https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/2021/01/robos-ja-escrevem-de-poemas-e-microcontos-no-twitter-a-romances-inteiros.shtml
TIL There's a bot that toots clinical trials when they're "suspended, terminated or withdrawn". Might be a good research tool on its own to see certain trends
I'm the administrator of this server. https://tinysubversions.com is where most of my stuff lives. I'm trying to fix the internet, and some people say I'm at least kind of succeeding. Based in Portland, Oregon, USA. he/him