L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

I was really hoping that adapting to writing with a fountain pen would help with my penmanship (penpersonship?), but it's been a couple of years now and not much has improved. If anything, the consistency of my handwriting has degraded, and I still get the most legible results with a grip that punishes my wrist and fingers.

Political philosopher Michael Walzer: "Overthrowing racism will still leave us with capitalism; overthrowing capitalism will still leave us with racism." https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/a-note-on-racial-capitalism

Ancient Egyptians cities had institutions, established by royal patronage, where medicine, theology, ritual and clerical administration were practiced and taught. They were called The House (or Mansion) of Life — which strikes me as a very elegant way of bundling a group of potentially incongruous disciplines. Not entirely dissimilar to "the humanities."

Hmm. 🤔 I don't love the way writefreely truncates federated messages, linking back to the site. micro.blog's method of federating the whole message when the char count is <280 is more federation-friendly, if you ask me.

Ideally, there'd be an option for untruncated on 280-length posts, and snippet + link for blog-length posts. Will suggest as much on their forums.

Been tearing my hair out on a weird redirect I've been getting on a repurposed subdomain. Tried to access it from a different browser and it worked right away. Turns out, I just needed to clear the cache on by primary browser. 🥴

An excellent time to pick up mailing stuff to people as a hobby. https://www.engadget.com/snail-mail-pandemic-hobby-140017534.html

If anyone knows of a lightweight, self-hosted, single-user blog/microblog package that federates AND works with Webmentions, I'd appreciate the tip.

Authorized https://forget.codl.fr/ to continuously prune my account, so if you have any old favorites, go copy 'em to a text file or something.

Looking at https://writefreely.org as a potential replacement. It already has ActivityPub and RSS syndication baked in, and may be adding WebMentions with its upcoming remark.as service. Self-hosting is a plus, and it seems relatively lightweight (which is why I haven't set up a personal Mastodon/Pleroma instance). At a glance, I don't see any Twitter cross-posting option, but that's low priority.

Ending my micro.blog trial. There are some interesting premises underlying the design of the service but:

1. ActivityPub interoperability is buggy;

2. I couldn't get Twitter cross-posting to work;

3. Apart from WebMentions, the social aspects are a bit too minimal;

4. I'd prefer to self-host, not just link a domain name to a hosted service.

I was willing to trade on one or even two of those, but all four make for a platform that doesn't really serve the purpose I had in mind.

micro.blog seems to have a relatively large community of Protestant clergy, which is something I thoroughly did not expect.

Linux evangelists, sure, but evangelist evangelists? 🤔

Just had a full, flailing stumble over the word "update."

Update? Up date? What could that mean? How would a date go up? Or is it the date of an up? What's an up?

Took a long moment for the familiar meaning to snap into place.

Check out this track listing: https://xenharmonicgod.bandcamp.com/album/-

Anyone around these parts know how the DOI redirect system works? I'm wondering if a commercial version would be possible — e.g. a system that takes ISBN numbers and turns them into redirects to the publisher's page for the given book. Relevant to the concerns I wrote about way back when: https://lrhodes.net/writing/linking-to-monopoly

Finally finished up this campaign. It had a weirdly muted, but still sort of narratively satisfying ending. Looking ahead, I offered to switch to a different setting for our next campaign (possibly Mothership), but my players have opted to stick with UVG. So I guess they like it.

@lrhodes@social.lrhodes.net I don't see this as a replacement for my merveilles.town account, so for now, at least, I'll be holding onto this account and checking in regularly. Ditto for my Twitter, if anyone follows that, too.