Strange Attractor @strangeattractor@refactorcamp.org

I've developed two obsessions through the pandemic that I think will persist
long past the end of it, probably to the end of my life: tinkering and story-
telling. On the tinkering front, I've built out a nice little science-and-
engineering workshop over the last year and acquired more skills in less time
than I expected to, […]

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2021/07/01/mjd-59396/
@vgr

"On March 7, 2014, a biography for #DonnaStrickland, the physicist who invented a technology used by all the high-powered lasers in the world, was created on #Wikipedia. In less than six minutes, it was flagged for a “speedy deletion” and shortly thereafter erased from the site.1 This decision is part of the reason Dr. Strickland did not have an active Wikipedia page when she was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics four years later."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448211023772

#Gender #Inequality
/via @tk

The #SFFBookClub on here is as informal as a club can be. There's no "joining the club" as such, just joining in the conversation. Anyone can vote in the monthly polls, and all you need to do to take part in the book club is to comment on the book of the month using the #SFFBookClub hashtag (in the body because Mastodon ignores hashtags in CWs).

The one ~rule is to please CW spoilers with a message that makes clear how far into the book they might be a spoiler for.

Blogging about anime: I wrote a thing about My Neighbor Totoro

http://nindokag.net/j/science-fiction-double-feature/not-all-stories-are-about-conflict-my-neighbor-totoro

about all the things this movie means to me, about why it's not boring even though it has basically no conflict, about ki-shou-ten-ketsu story structure, and about how it's actually a conservative, religious movie

I stumbled across the answer to what was a small riddle to me for many years: the meaning of the 〼 mark in the picture I took of a shop window in Kyoto.

The 〼 is pronounced "masu". A masu (also 枡 or 升) was a square wooden box used to measure rice and the sign is a pictogram of a masu.

But it is also used purely phonetically, like here, as a shorthand for ます. So スーツ有り〼 is スーツあります "suutsu arimasu" which means "we have suits".

Simple once you know but hard to find out.

a filesystem is a kind of network protocol that allows for communicating across time

I just had a terrible idea. Would anyone in the fediverse be interested in a fedivision song contest?
And participating?
I... I think I would like that!
#eurovision #fedivision #music

"If Y2K-Era Movie Theater Carpets Could Talk": behind the ecstatic aesthetic of squiggles, stars, and confetti
(Plus- Citizen Kane)

Settle on the extra-large popcorn: https://roughlydaily.com/2021/05/01/i-want-people-to-walk-into-a-movie-theater-and-be-transported-to-a-different-world/

So...it hasn't hit the stable release yet, due to a need for extensive testing, but: ScummVM now supports Adventure Game Studio games!

https://www.scummvm.org/news/20210404/

It would be wild if I could one day get my games to work on AmigaOS4 or Haiku...

just some beautiful 🍒💮 that were on my way
#florespondence

I am happy to reveal that a non-profit legal entity for Mastodon, Mastodon gGmbH, is in the process of being entered into the German company register.

For context, I have been operating as a sole proprietor so far.

It's been in the works for 8 months but I didn't want to announce anything until everything was finalized just in case it didn't work out. Yesterday, I paid in the starting capital.

It wouldn't be possible without the help and advice of @mellifluousbox. More to follow in blog form.

That conference I'm presenting at - in Second Life - is pretty amazingly prepared! They invited speakers to practice... (conference is on 16 April) If only the warmth of the island and the sounds and feel of the nearby waterfall could jump through the screen. That would be a perfect academic dream. ...doesn't take much to please me!

What if I buy a horse and let the internet vote on what to name him, what to feed him, whether to enter him in any races, etcetera?

It would be an open-horse project.

I went to the forest today and took some photos for you #mosstodon people out there.

#photography #nature #macro #Fujifilm #FujifilmXT2 #Zeiss #Zeisslens #Touit32mm
(photos: @kernpanik | license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The first "Suez Canal" x "Ever Given" fanfic has arrived:

"XXX-TRA WIDE CARGO STUFFS MAJOR SHIPPING LANE --- DELIVERS HUGE PAYLOAD!!"

https://archiveofourown.org/works/30267078

Sometimes I remember that this exists.

https://www.horg.com/horg/

Someone went all out on a speculative biology writing/worldbuilding exercise to create a site for a research group that studies "occlupanids" a.k.a. those plastic bread bag clips, as if they were some family of organism with a multitude of species.

I got the laser pointer so we could lay in bed with the lights off and I could point at the stars on the ceiling and teach her how to identify constellations

This is how I made a very fun discovery: a laser pointer rapidly recharges the phosphorescence in glow-in-the-dark stars, so whenever you zap one it turns SUPER bright.

I feel like you could make a fun target-practice / learn-your-constellations game out of this!

📓 I wrote a bookbinding tutorial for you, so you can bind your own notebooks (or other books) from now on.

http://backyard.fragmentscenario.com/bookbinding/bookbinding.html

#bookbinding #tutorial #art #zines @zine