brennen @brennen@mastodon.social

a cricket is just a goth grasshopper.

today's birds include an extremely vocal wren asserting its dominance over the lilac bush and a very cautious crow who (eventually) accepted my offering of black walnuts left on the table in the back yard, after inspecting the situation from approximately 15 angles and making sure i was nowhere within striking distance.

::going outside noises::

(and i know that i've expressed misgivings about being here before. i guess i think this is more about wondering if the overall shape of this quasi-place is changing in ways that are, long term, going to replicate all the stuff i'm here to avoid.

i sure hope not.)

and of course things have been particularly shit lately for a variety of reasons. i don't have any desire to police anybody's expression of the fact that they're having a bad time.

on the other hand, i guess i'm going to check out if i start to get those firehose-of-bad-times feelings i used to get from twitter, metafilter, et al.

in the meantime i guess be the change you want etc. etc. maybe i'll try to vent less of how much i hate everything even though i definitely hate everything.

so i've been sensing this overall shift in the... vibe? tone? emotional background radiation? around here lately. the stuff i'm seeing on the fediverse starts to ring more & more depressive and anxious, more angry and accusatory, than it used to.

there are of course a million reasons for people to be sad and angry. the world is full of unrelenting horror. on the other hand, i stuck here because other places were, well, a highly refined stream of misery and loathing and this wasn't.

oh good, a github package registry

cannot _wait_ for microsoft's de-facto monopoly on the hosting of open code to achieve full-bore lockin by completely eating the distribution of any software that isn't installed by way of a proprietary app store

being pretty sure you have a thing but not quite being sure what it is and scheduling around it anyway in a fashion that completely fails to satisfy any important constraints as a service

chronic uncertainty as a service

social-anxiety-driven decision trees as a service

jilt: jeans quilt

(i actually have a couple of these; they're great.)

i don't even think i want this thing, but i'm _impressed_ by it:

http://penhabit.com/2018/01/01/benu-pens-briolette-fountain-pen-review/

naturally it glows in the dark.

animals can be so expressive. for example, right now, i have refused to give a cat chicken, and the cat is expressing "that's a nice recliner you have there, it would be a shame if someone were to scratch the ever-living shit out of it while making aggressive eye contact then run back and forth through the house crashing into fragile objects".