@RaePatterson@mastodon.social
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

RaePatterson

@RaePatterson@mastodon.social

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MrLovenstein, to random
@MrLovenstein@mastodon.social avatar

Secret Panel HERE 🧠 https://tapas.io/episode/3073013

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@MrLovenstein

I am in my sixties and I still have this dream every now and then.

Higher education obviously causes some kind of PTSD :)

NickEast, to Writers
@NickEast@geekdom.social avatar

Okay yes, I agree in principle, but would it be so bad if it look just a little better? 😂

@writers @writingcommunity @writing

#Author #Authors #IndieAuthor #IndieBooks #AmWriting #Writerdons #Writers #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity #Writinglife #WritersOfMastodon
#BoostingIsSharing

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@NickEast @writers @writingcommunity @writing

Who was it that said that your firsts draft is just you telling yourself the story?

SnerkRabbledauber, to writing
@SnerkRabbledauber@mycrowd.ca avatar

@bookstodon

Ready for beta readers for the third book in a series. For those of you who write series where each book builds on the next and are meant to be read in order, what do you do if you lose your beta readers? How do you find new ones? It's a much bigger ask if they need to read three books!

#writerslife #writing

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@SnerkRabbledauber @bookstodon

If I were in that fortunate position, I would write up a fairly detailed summary of the first two books to give your new beta readers.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Mathematics

The shocking bonus panel is available here: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/mathematics-2

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith I like the fact that the article is already available in three languages bahaha.

QasimRashid, to random
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

Sr Airman Roger Fortson was at home when cops entered unannounced & shot him dead 6 times.

The cop claimed he acted in self defense when he saw Fortson holding a firearm—which Fortson legally owned. The cop is on admin leave.

How are you going to illegally break into an innocent man's home unannounced & claim self defense? Horrific injustice.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/atlanta/atlanta-airman-killed-by-florida-deputy-lawyer-says-they-went-into-wrong-apartment/5SSTU5VRPRHFDBUCBKWFF4T73Y/

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@QasimRashid

I have a hard time understanding how being killed by the police for having a legally-owned firearm in your own home can be described a having the "right to bear arms."

Oh, sorry, I guess any 16-year-old white boy can wave a firearm around in public as much as he likes, but if a black man picks up a firearm under any circumstances, he should expect to be put down extremely hard. Have I got that right? I'm pretty sure I do.

QasimRashid, to random
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

In the 24 hours since Joe Biden put conditions on arms to Israel for killing civilians—Israeli MK & Likud Official Tali Gottlieb has threatened to “collapse 10 buildings in Gaza” and Security Minister Ben Gvir said “Hamas❤️Biden.”

If this isn’t genocidal intent—idk what is.

Here’s my latest on how we actually overcome this extremism: https://qasimrashid.substack.com/p/the-history-prior-to-107-that-media

image/png

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@QasimRashid

They need those precise missiles in order to accurately target aid trucks and children's hospitals. Who knows who they might hit with the imprecise ones, innocent people? By which, they mean their own soldiers.

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

Hard to imagine a signal that a website is a rugpull more intense than banning users for trying to delete their own posts

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

Like just incredible "burning the future to power the present" energy here

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@mcc

It's funny how a company's attitude towards LLMs depends on whether it thinks it can make money with them or lose money with them.

Very puzzling . :thaenkin:

TodayInTwitter, to random
@TodayInTwitter@mastodon.social avatar

X rolled out a change that automatically converts all links that have the string “twitter” anywhere in them to “X.”

For example, if someone tweets the link setwitter.com, the X client application will change that link to sex.com.

This is not a joke.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-dot-com-posts-change-to-x-dot-com-ios

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@TodayInTwitter

What do you mean, this is not a joke? This is totally a joke, like the whole company and its owner.

arstechnica, to random
@arstechnica@mastodon.social avatar

Elon Musk threatens to disobey court order over banned profiles

Brazil threatens to regulate social media owned by "billionaires domiciled abroad."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/04/elon-musk-threatens-to-disobey-court-order-over-banned-profiles/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

RaePatterson, (edited )
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@arstechnica

Is it just me, or is Musk starting to look like the eldritch magick binding his decaying flesh to his stolen bones is losing its potency?

GottaLaff, to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

Via Kyle Griffin:

The sister of murder victim Ruby Garcia said she and her family were watching live, in disbelief, as #Trump told Grand Rapids crowd that he had spoken with her family.

"He did not speak with any of us, so it was kind of shocking seeing that he had said that he had spoke with us, and misinforming people on live TV."
https://www.woodtv.com/news/target-8/family-of-woman-found-dead-on-highway-angered-by-trumps-speech/

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@GottaLaff

Don't worry, Trump's fans will accuse the family of being insufficiently grateful for the attention TFG is bringing to their situation with his bold retelling of the story.

Catvalente, to random
@Catvalente@wandering.shop avatar

I just had a realization.

It was (and is) always so confusing when The Bad Straights claimed “gay people getting married will ruin the institution for everyone.”

But I think they always meant that if two men or two women can get married, then marriage must not be defined by a man obtaining a woman as servant/property & securing exclusive rights to her labor, identity, & body.

And without that, they can’t even imagine what purpose marriage could ever serve.

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@Catvalente

Maybe that's what they mean when they say that same-sex marriage "redefines" marriage, as if it redefines marriage as a freely chosen partnership, rather than as their unspoken definition of chattel slavery with gifts and cake.

I have always, too glibly, said that if gay marriage affects your marriage, then one of you is gay. But maybe The Bad Straights saw something I didn't think of, that The Gays are modeling what marriage could be, for anyone.

ZachWeinersmith, to comics
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

Persuader
http://smbc-comics.com/comic/persuade (go here for bonus panel)
#smbc #hiveworks #comics #webcomics #ai

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith

Oh, if only intelligence were persuasive.

pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google - which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic - suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

1/

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic

I propose that we create a new, more descriptive job title for SEO Optimizer. Enshittifier.

llamasoft_ox, to random
@llamasoft_ox@toot.wales avatar

Oh for fuck's sake. My heart sinks when someone posts a link to an article, you go to read it and after a few lines the text starts to fade out. You just know a "sign up to read the rest of this article" thing is going to scroll into view.

Fuck off with that shite.

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@llamasoft_ox

i hope websites can tell, despite the various blockers in my browser, whenever I just hit the back button after I get halfway down the article and see the forced account creation prompt.

That is what I do every time. There is nothing special enough about any article that will get me to create an account to read it.

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

How to be creative - a thread 🪡

Creativity. That electric spark inside all of us (yes, all of us) longs to invent, envision, and inspire. But all too often, it feels out of reach. It's obscured by the monotony and the relentless demands of daily life.

The good news is this: the creative drive is intrinsic to human nature. It's an innate impulse. And with dedicated practice, we can unlock it, even in the context, stress and bullshit of the busiest schedule.

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@Daojoan

I find it helps to think of my inner critic as an Internet troll, a smelly blob of bitterness just trying to put me down for its own petty and fearful reasons, and imagine hitting the "mute user" button.

RaePatterson, to random
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

Every time some right-wing authoritarian does something like censure a priest for not toeing the party line, well-meaning folk rise up calling them hypocrites for championing one thing (freedom of religion, in this case) and practicing another.

“The right wing is incoherent and inconsistent,” you say. “If they really believed in freedom of religion, they would allow non-conforming priests and Satanists and even atheists to practice in peace."

1/

Daojoan, to random
@Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar

We need a new word to describe the constant fear of leaving entire tech platforms and starting again every six months because they decided posting Swastikas doesn't violate their TOS

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@Daojoan

"Nothing endures but change," said Heraclitis as he slipped and fell into the river that he had been trying to step into for the second time.

Mastodon, to mastodon
@Mastodon@mastodon.social avatar

Strangers offering unsolicited advice or derailing conversations should be familiar to all who use social media. In our new for Android update, we’re testing a new feature aimed to curb these behaviours:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/11/improving-the-quality-of-conversations-on-mastodon/

RaePatterson, (edited )
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@Mastodon

I am finding some of the comments on this thread so hilariously on-the-nose that it really makes me wonder whether the people who might benefit from these features are the ones who would never use them.

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

The OpenAI story is about greed versus the possibility of the company living up to its founders' pious promises. Greed flattened ethics because that is how everything works now.

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@dangillmor

It's terrible nowadays the way greed trumps ethics unlike in the old days of the robber barons, er I mean the great old days of the colonization of Africa, er I mean, wait I'll come in again.

VeryBadLlama, to random
@VeryBadLlama@mas.to avatar

I wonder if my medieval ancestors would be surprised to learn that, hundreds of years later, the main activities in my life are still "try not to die in the Great Plague" and "watch people argue about the legitimacy of the current Pope"

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@VeryBadLlama

RaePatterson, to random
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

I was surprised by all the negative criticism received of the funny and thought-provoking book “A City on Mars” by the ever-insightful @ZachWeinersmith. I couldn’t understand why some people were so angry at the “wait and go big” conclusions that the authors drew, quite reluctantly, from the evidence—or lack thereof—that they found.

The idea that if we can terraform Mars, we can even more easily terraform Earth, is an obvious conclusion, but one that really seemed to bother some people.

2/

RaePatterson, to random
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

The enshittification of Loblaws, easily the largest supermarket chain in Canada, is well into the “squeezing with both fists” portion of our program.

https://raepatterson.ca/2023/11/04/the-enshittification-of-loblaws/

@pluralistic

QasimRashid, (edited ) to random
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

Need to point this out.

As a murderer stabbed a Muslim woman named Dr. Talat Khan to death, witnesses report that 17 Texans pulled out their firearms. 17! The murderer stabbed her, stopped to check her pulse, confirmed she was alive, & went back to stabbing her to death.

And 17 "good guys with guns" did nothing.

A reminder that the "good guy with a gun" myth is a propaganda point to sell more guns. It does nothing beyond an anecdote to save lives.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12688199/pulse-talat-khan-miles-fridrich-texas.html

RaePatterson,
@RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

@QasimRashid

Those bystanders pulled out their guns to get all hard watching someone else get killed while imagining how they would Rambo it up if the attacker went after anyone important, like their own selves.

gratefuldread, to LGBTQ
@gratefuldread@gratefuldread.masto.host avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    RaePatterson,
    @RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

    @gratefuldread

    I must say I enjoy watching them turn on each other.

    Does that make me a bad person? Too bad.

    sfwrtr, to Prompt
    @sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe avatar

    Time for another #FabulousFirstLineFriday not a #DarkandStormNight #prompt!

    Write a fabulous first line for a story that is guaranteed to catch /your/ interest and would make you read the story.

    Criteria

    • Fiction, non-fiction, doesn't matter. A good led is as inspiring as a hook.
    • Doesn't matter if you would actually write the story, but bonus points is you report you did!
    • Aim for less than 200 characters or 50 words, but a good sentence overrides all other factors!
    • Reply to this thread and boost if you take the challenge. (Use both hashtags if you post solo.)

    Here's my entry:

    I was 11 years old when my dad crashed the chevy and I learned that taking an airbag to the face would have been safer than teleporting into a field of corn at 25 miles per hour.

    #BoostingIsSharing
    #fiction #nonfiction #journalism #fantasy #mystery #romance #horror #sf #sff #sciencefiction #writing #writer #writers #author #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon

    RaePatterson,
    @RaePatterson@mastodon.social avatar

    @sfwrtr

    I don't know what I have left to write about, dear diary, after eighty-four mandated daily journal entries up here by myself in orbit, but I do believe I am starting to go totally fucking bonkers.

    #FabulousFirstLineFriday

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