Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

Today was therapy day, and it was kind of a rough one.

I didn't go to the library yesterday because my spouse is still sick, her mother dropped off some medicine and supplies, and I had to be home so I could meet her at the bus stop. Hopefully next week.

I fell asleep around 21h00 last night. I haven't slept the best the last few days and it was nice to catch up. I set my alarm for 06h00 and actually got up on the first snooze, which isn't a guarantee. I'm glad I did, because therapy is always more useful when I have a little time to wake up and for meds to kick in.

I used my extra time this morning to make a few proof-of-concept levels for Slime & Goo 2. It's nothing worth looking at yet, but I'm pleased with how quickly I was able to create the new rules and decent-looking sprites. The text is just placeholder for now, but I'll probably go with the "storybook" style of prose because (1) puzzlescript doesn't have a way to display multiple lines of text in a single message,¹ and (2) Winnie the Pooh is a perennial influence.

It was hard to drag myself away from it, because my brain just wanted to keep working on it. I could've done that for 4 or 5 hours if I didn't have therapy and work. But drag away from it I must.

There's been a big interface change for everyone whose instance updated to Mastodon 4.3 today. I haven't seen anyone who's happy about it. I accidentally presaged this the other day when I happened to be looking at a post on mastodon.social. I almost never interact with the fediverse via the mastodon we interface. I use pinafore on desktop and subway tooter on my phone. However, my home instance limits federation with mastodon.social (as it should.) Consequentially, when I want to view a post on M.S, I typically need to view it via the source instance on the web because it won't display in my client.

Being the "flagship instance" of the software, it's already incorporated the changes in 4.3 ahead of pushing it out to the public, but I didn't know that, I thought it was just how the web UI looks now, so I got some confused responses from people not on M.S

Well, I should've waited a day, because they pushed the changes out a few hours ago. Among the lowlights:

• The "unlisted" post setting has been changed to "quiet public". The icon for this setting has been changed from the sensible "unlocked" symbol to a crescent moon. The description of this setting is "fewer algorithmic fanfares". Huh? No idea what this is supposed to mean,² and also, "The Algorithmic Fanfares" sounds like the name of a 10-piece psychedelic choral pop ensemble.

• Content warnings now display with a yellow-and-black "caution" border, and the button you click to view the post is labeled "show anyway". This is what I was complaining about yesterday. This is clearly meant to imply that CWs are only meant for posts with potentially dangerous or disturbing content, and not, like, anything someone might want to opt-in to looking at. I use CWs all the time for perfectly anodyne posts. I use them for posts on obscure subjects not many people following me may care about, particularly long ones. I use them for jokes that I think may be easily misinterpreted. I use them as subject lines when I make several posts on the same subject, so it's obvious they're part of the same thread. There are no good reasons not to CW something in my view, I don't understand why they want to nudge people to only use them a certain way, but I assume it's purely ideological. Gross

• There's a little pop-up when you hover over someone's avatar that shows a preview of their profile. It sucks, very distracting and unnecessary, and they know it sucks, because they give you an option to disable it. (of course it's not opt-in, none of these anti-features ever are.) What's worse, this pop-up has a follow button on it, implying that it's good and expected to follow someone without even basic vetting of their post history 🤦‍♀️

I'll never understand the technocratic drive to constantly make pointless UI changes everyone hates. I mean, I get it to an extent with corporate platforms, they have to demonstrate dosomethingism to placate shareholders, but Mastodon has no shareholders. It's

Oh well, there are plenty of ways to use the fediverse without interacting with the masto web UI, and I intend to keep doing do, just sucks that the less technically-inclined have to deal with this shit.

Just a quick update today, apologies for being scatterbrained, therapy always throws off my rhythm for the day. Here's some interesting links you can check out.

In-browser palmOS emulator! Load it up on your phone and pretend you're on 1996s cutting edge of handheld computing. Only... You can't use a stylus, so it's kind of sad. I wish there was a program that would let me use a stylus on my phone.

I haven't figured out how to install any interesting programs, so here's the handwriting recognition tool:

It really works! You can draw the letter shapes in the little box with your finger and it'll recognize it. It might be a better way to write than how I'm doing it now... if I could use a stylus 😔

A clique of middle school trolls in Japan is spamming the fediverse as a false flag operation against another clique they don't like content warning for bullying, harassment, sexual violence threats, the worst adolescent channer shit. This is about the spam wave back in February, but it's happening again because people keep leaving sign-ups open on their instance. They need to not do that. Okay, see you tomorrow.

1. I mean, I can do multiple messages in a row to make it seem more like a back-and-forth conversation, but reading a lot of text like that in a silent black void seems kind of sad. I'd rather have at most a page or two of writing per message, I don't know why, just feels a bit more cozy. Also, this is how I'm going to do footnotes now, because long parentheticals just get too messy. I miss the slick footnote hyperlinks from bearblog, but the entries aren't that long, I figure it's not that bad to scroll down a bit

2. Shit, forgot the second footnote. What I mean is, I know what it means, because I have prior experience with what that option does, but I can't imagine the current description is easier for a newcomer than "Unlisted - don't post to public timelines". "Algorithmic fanfares" is a meaningless phrase to me. I thought the whole point of mastodon is that it doesn't have algorithms? That's why I ditched twitter for it in 2016. Very odd