Social Media Stuff

Fake Plastic Trees

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve talked about Tripod before, the poorly named three-legged calico that lives in my backyard and has done so for the last three years. Lately, she has been doing something new and it is sort of adorable. I always feed in the mornings, but I don’t always feed in the evenings. There are some times however when she decides that she wants food and is going to tell me about it. This is a shot from our security camera from last night with Tripod highlighted in a green circle. She has started standing up on the garden utility box outside the kitchen window and meowing at the top of her lungs… which we can hear while we are upstairs. So of course, I obliged and went out in the dark and fed her… at which point she greeted me with a cacophony of friendly meows. I’ve questioned the relationship we have given that she is still very feral and still impossible to get near… but clearly it seems I am her human and my role in life is to provide food when she wants it.

The problem with doing a long series that spans three weeks… is that there is a lot of shit that happens in the meantime that I never talked about. On Saturday, November 19th in a fit of frustration I deactivated my Twitter account, shortly after Elon Musk had reactivated the account of Donald Trump. I was immediately reminded by many people… that in 30 days it was highly likely that some doppelganger would set up shop with my handle, and we’ve seen that happen several times before in the past. So Sunday morning I slunk back onto Twitter, reactivated things, and then decided to borrow a tradition from Mastodon. When you migrate your instance it shows a desaturated version of your avatar and your banner and posts a link to where you have moved. So @Belghast and subsequently @Aggrochat now show that I have migrated to the Fediverse.

I have to admit I am still exceptionally happy with the Fediverse and though I have had to move during all of the burst in activity to Masto.ai, I am way more engaged than I was for the last several years of Twitter. It seemed for a while that everyone would be congregating in one form or another on the Fediverse as Twitter has continued to degrade over the last few weeks. I always knew that there would be a group of stragglers that avoided leaving Twitter until it absolutely no longer allowed anyone to log in. However, what I did not expect is for another social network to come in at the 11th hour and distract everyone so completely. Hive Social… not to be confused with Hive the project management software, or Hive the blockchain nonsense company, Hive the grocery store, Hive the furniture company, Hive the smart home automation company, or even Apache Hive.

Hive is mobile-only, which immediately puts it in a lower-tier category for me personally since I don’t really use my phone other than when I am laying in bed trying to fall asleep at night. I am primarily a desktop user, which is also why I generally hate vertical format videos but that is a rant for another day. The service itself seems aggressively “fine”, but what it offers is a near-perfect amalgam of Twitter and Instagram and asks absolutely nothing from the user. You download an app, click some buttons, and you are immediately in a very familiar interface talking to hopefully familiar people. Its downsides however are that the performance in the app is awful… like staggeringly awful. Then there is the problem that you are moving from one walled garden controlled by a central authority to a different walled garden controlled by an “even less prepared to handle this fame” central authority. Then there is the whole issue that a key member of the team is a Milkshake Duck. I poke my head in from time to time to see what my friends who are mostly on that platform are up to, but I am not giving it much attention until at a minimum a web client exists.

What has driven me up a wall though is that while we have left Twitter, the same Twitter-like behavior persists. To quote a friend of mine “You can take the people out of Twitter, but you can’t take the constant self-promotion out of the people, I guess.” What particularly is driving me up a wall is seeing the same posts recycled between Twitter, Mastodon, and Hive. This “awareness” started when I followed an internet comedian of a sort that I had not followed in years on Twitter. They are known for short quippy posts that are mildly humorous and I was fine to have that in my feed on the Fediverse. That was until I saw one scroll past that I thought sounded really freaking familiar. It turns out that they had just been recycling posts from like eight years ago from Twitter.

Then there are the folks who are talking about how both Hive and Mastodon are the one true social network and so much better than Twitter… but posting the same statement to both platforms with only the names of the networks swapped. The above screenshot really bugged me the most though, because you have this faux heartfelt message… that showed up on Sunday on Mastodon… and then showed up almost word for word from the same person on Hive yesterday. The identity has been blanked out because I am not trying to call out one specific person, but a behavioral pattern I am seeing from folks who were micro-influencers on Twitter, trying to pack up that same game in their traveling case and take it on the road to the next network. You are better than this… We are better than this. It is one thing to cross-syndicate a post or share the same image in multiple places, but it is another thing to dive deep into the parasocial bullshit by cross-posting something that seems like a genuine unique sentiment.

I think that is the part of Twitter that always bothered me the most… the insincerity. When I start a post and address it “Hey Friends” I am not trying to pull on your emotional heartstrings, I am genuinely addressing you as my friends. I’ve been on the internet for so many years and the majority of my long-term friends… came from somewhere online. I never know when a random occurrence will become my next friend that I stay in contact with for the next several decades. I’ve always tried to approach each interaction with the possibility that it could be legitimate and genuine… but Twitter had burned me hard on this. So many times I found out that someone I thought was legitimately my friend, was just posturing and posing as one. Going into the Fediverse and Mastodon, I hoped that I could be open again… and for the most part, I am trying really hard to be. However, seeing the constant influencer nonsense taking place there and gaining a foothold… is making me start to doubt that it will stay that way.

Anyways I am home on the fediverse for better or for worse. I hope yall are having an excellent week, and I didn’t mean for this post to take quite the sharp downer turn that it did. Much love and hopefully tomorrow will be a more chill post.

Welcome to Spoopy Town

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Good Morning Friends! Sometimes I have an idea that gets stuck in the back of my head, and then I share that idea with a friend… and they convince me to make that idea happen. This is one of those times. I’ve talked about how the paranormal and macabre is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me, and how I deeply enjoy watching various ghost hunting youtube videos. I’ve discovered through my posting about things… that there are a lot of others out there that also enjoy this sort of thing. It is at this point that I joined forces with my good friend Jaedia and then shortly thereafter Rini to bring this project to life.

I get that the very last thing we all need in our lives is “Yet Another Discord”, but I offer you humbly… yet another Discord to clog up your sidebar. Basically, this Discord has two focuses… discussion of the Spooky as an Entertainment medium, and the Spooky as the unknown and unknowable. We’ve divided up the categories in such a way as to separate the Fiction from Non-Fiction type discussions.

This list is of course subject to change, but right now it looks a little something like this:

  • Spooky Entertainment
    • Creepypasta and SCP
    • Films and Series
    • Books and Comics
    • Args and Tabletop
    • Video Games
    • Music and Stage
  • The Paranormal
    • Cryptids and Monsters
    • Ghosts and Investigations
    • Folklore and Legends
    • Other Unexplained
  • Harmless Conspiracies
    • Unexplained Visitors
    • Historical Mysteries
    • Other Dimensions

If this seems like your sort of thing, then I welcome you to join. First I guess let’s go over the rules. When you join our Discord you are presented with a Server Rules channel and in order to progress further you have to accept the terms. I feel like they are pretty straightforward but cover a lot of bases to protect our members.

Server Rules

Hey Friends! Welcome to the Spoopy Town Server

I love the spooky, paranormal, and unexplained, and am a pretty big aficionado of Horror as a genre. The goal behind this server is to create a comfortable and respectful place to explore those topics. Coming from a place of respect is the most important goal of this project because there are lots of different ideas about what goes bump in the night. We are not here to judge, but also not here to force our own belief systems upon others. If that sounds like an interesting adventure that you might want to embark upon then I suggest you keep reading.

In order to maintain the right vibe we have a few rules that we expect our members to follow. This community is universally supportive of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals. This community is also targeting adults as some of the themes we discuss might be scary, confusing, or harmful to those under the legal age of eighteen.

Here are some of the things that we will not tolerate:

  • Anything Illegal
  • Discussion of Current Politics or Religion
  • Racist, Sexist, Ableist, or Homophobic Remarks
  • Inappropriate uploads, profile images, names, or emojis including:
    • Sexually Explicit
    • Violence/Gore
    • Racist/Sexist/Ableist/Homophobic
  • Abusive Behavior; Bullying, Trolling, or Name-Calling
  • The promotion of Cryptocurrency or NFTs

Content Warnings

To ensure everyone’s safety and comfort within the borders of Spoopy Town, please utilize the content warnings and spoiler tags within the server. While this is not a way of skirting the above restrictions, it is a helpful tool for discussing certain things within the context of paranormal events. Here are some examples of topics that you should be mindful of, but for anything outside the bounds of this list, I suggest you use your best judgment.

  • Suicide
  • Self-harm
  • Alcohol and Drug Use
  • Sexual Assault
  • Violence/Abuse
  • Well Known Phobias

If that sounds like the sort of place you are interested in hanging out, we would be more than happy to have you. Like I said before when you first join, you will be presented with the rules above, clicking the Yes button will give you access to all of the channels. Clicking the No button will place you into The Void without access to anything… and I am afraid it is a somewhat permanent choice. If for some reason you accidentally clicked the wrong button, ping me and I can reset your account back to the default state.

Anyways that is a lot of introduction but here is the link to the server. Enjoy… or don’t whatever is cool.

Corrupted Azoth Tree

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Good Morning Friends! It was a wild weekend between the Muskrat and Twitter and the fact that my Mastodon 4.0 instance that I love… is unsustainably popular. On Friday afternoon Stux the admin of Mstdn.social closed the doors when we crossed the 100,000-user threshold. He had been advised by his host that they could not reasonably scale up that instance any further. Unfortunately he did not also close down the ability for users to send out invites to their friends… and as I have talked about before when it comes to MMORPG servers… it is extremely important to be in the same place as your friends. The end result is that another 11,000 invites went out before finally shutting down that loophole.

So unfortunately things are sluggish as hell and the timeline on the server has been running roughly an hour behind real-time as an army of worker processes churn furiously through messages. Stux also manages Mastodon.Coffee which is his attempt at creating an English language only server, and due to the overloading of Mstdn spawned a brand new server called Masto.Ai. I’ve been sitting here this morning trying to decide if I do the right thing for the community to lessen the load and migrate over… or if I just deal with it until enough people get frustrated to drop the total number of active messages. I had hoped the next time I migrated would be to something I was running for myself. I recently picked up Aggro.Chat for such a potential project but don’t have any of the pieces in place yet. It feels like running your own instance is the Fediverse equivalent of Homeownership.

Apart from social media nonsense, I’ve been spending as much of my time as possible doing super chill things in New World. Saturday morning was a delightful time as I chilled out talking on the Fediverse while running my favorite Iron routes. I am not entirely certain why I go off on tangents but suddenly I decided to catch my Engineering up to Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing. Essentially for leveling purposes, I am opting to only use a single high-tier material at a time. Most patterns have a required item… so for example, if you are making a Starmetal sword, you MUST include Starmetal into that pattern, but the other types of materials are variable and you can even use the lowest tier available. This means since I am leveling up Engineering on Wyrdwood at the moment, I am going to use nothing but the lowest-tier leather, cloth, and metal. That also means that I still need to run those lower-tier routes that I find so relaxing.

At this point, both Weaponsmithing and Armorsmithing are over 150, which means I can make high-end Orichalcum items but lack the skill to really reliably hit anything of significant item level. Engineering is rapidly catching up and one more push should take me up to 150. Logging is so tedious, but right now my jam tends to be throwing on a YouTube video and grinding away peacefully. I’m using a few specific banks as swap space for current projects, and everything else… is crammed wherever I have room. At some point, I need to set up a system as I have over on Valhalla where specific banks are for specific items. Maybe I should log in there and scribble down a list of what went where so I can copy the methodology to Themiscyra. I’ve legitimately not logged into Valhalla at all since the re-roll, nor have I really had the desire to do so.

I’ve also been out exploring a lot and with that have come some interesting drops. Firstly it appears that every single named mob still has a chance of dropping pretty much any legendary crafting item. So far I’ve gotten pieces for a bow, blunderbuss, and void gauntlet, and unfortunately none of the items that I really care about deeply. Thankfully for Sword, Greatsword, and Shield I picked up the Item Level 600 patterns from the Halloween event. One thing that I really enjoy is how noticeable it is now when you get a named item drop. They all have a bright outline on the item as shown above and have a glowing effect. Essentially when you see an item like this, they will always drop with the same stats and can in theory be farmed from that specific boss.

There are a bunch of really weird places in the world. We all know there is the giant Azoth tree in Brightwood that is guarded by the Angry Earth folks. There is a grove full of not-quite Azoth trees down in Edengrove, which are also guarded by Angry Earth. However in Mourningdale, there is this weird glowing tree that has been corrupted with a bunch of miners working around it, and I am wondering if it also used to be one of the giant Azoth trees like from Brightwood. It makes me wonder what that area of Mourningdale might have looked like before it was corrupted. Would it have also been something more akin to Edengrove?

Speaking of Edengrove, there are a few places where it is just breathtaking to view the various monuments that dot the valley. I’ve not gotten as into the lore of New World as I have other games, but my working theory is that Edengrove and more particularly the Garden of Genesis is the heart of what remains of the original civilization that claimed Aeternum it’s home. The Angry Earth is all that remains and now guards once-sacred areas against the intruders that have come to the shores over generations. New World has clear indications of areas that were settled by different civilizations, but Edengrove has always seemed like it is much older and features a glimpse at maybe what the entire island looked like once before the attempts at colonization.

I’m continuing to largely play in cycles of either going out into the world and gathering resources or sitting down and grinding through crafting levels. This seems to be a really good pattern for me, but soon now that Ace and Vern have hit level 60… it will be time to go out exploring some of the more dangerous areas. I’ve quested through most of Ebonscale Reach and am working on clearing out Edengrove… which would lead me to start on Reekwater next. The money fountain has dried up a bit, only because the quests themselves take much longer to complete and there are far fewer of them. I still have that strong desire however to make the yellow quest markers disappear from my world map.

I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.

Local as Psuedo Guild Chat

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Right now it feels like I am splitting myself between two “games”. The first being of course my whole re-roll nonsense over in New World. The second is engaging with the explosive growth in the Fediverse community. There have been mass migration phases in the past, and I’ve seen five of them to my memory since joining in 2018 including the one I was part of. However, we’ve never seen anything close to the level of migration that is happening right now. There is a bot over on one of the crypto bro instances that tracks incoming users on an hourly basis, and while I don’t follow it for reasons… I think we have all been keeping tabs on it. Right now the fediverse as a whole is seeing a growth rate of somewhere between 1200-1500 users an hour… and that is a 24/7 tick of new incoming users.

Our admin Stux over on Mstdn is super transparent about the growth our instance has been experiencing as well. This is one from yesterday showing that since October 5th, we’ve gained just shy of 20,000 new users. I’ve done Patreon options my entire time on the Fediverse, first with support to Elekk.xyz and now actively supporting Mstdn.social each month. However, with the influx of new users, I’ve felt like I needed to chip in a little extra on the side to help out. It isn’t much but I figure when you were personally paying around $500/mo in hosting charges that anything helps. The weird thing about all of that is… I would never pay a dime for anything Twitter provided, but I am more than happy to help out the human beings running the Fediverse. Of course, no one is expected to pay a dime, but I figure if I am going to use something I should support it.

I will say that all of the activity has wreaked havoc on my actual in-game time in New World. The Mastodon client bloop sound is so contagious and happy that I have to alt-tab over and look to see what is going on. I’ve also found myself spending my time laying in bed waiting for the melatonin to kick in serving as a part greeter and part technical support as I surf the local feed. That is one of the things that makes the experience of the Fediverse so wildly different from Twitter. You can say ANYTHING publicly on your instance and it is going to potentially garner interactions because everyone on that instance can and regularly does check the activity feed. It makes the entire experience feel like local is some sort of guild chat, and federated is general chat… often with similar results. The weirdest thing that happened yesterday is Kathy Griffin “rolled” on our instance, but there is a limit to how much impact a single user can have.

It has been a wild week and typing this… I just realized that it has only been a single week. So much shit can go off the rails in so little time when it comes to Twitter. With layoffs looming on the horizon this morning for the folks at that company, I sort of expect the migration will only pick up momentum from this point forward. At this point, I have at least spiritually migrated, even if I have yet to nuke my Twitter account. It isn’t where I am actively spending my time and on average I am poking my head in once or twice a day to see if anyone has messaged me. That account is mostly a punctured balloon that is slowly letting out air as follow-for-follow mindset folks notice I deleted them in my culling over the weekend. It will be interesting to see what happens now, given that the Fediverse is not exactly the sort of place for brand building and marketing… and seems to aggressively reject both.

One of the things that I do think is a shame, is how focused the news seems to be on Mastodon. The is a specific reason why I keep referring to it as the Fediverse and not by that single platform name. ActivityPub is a protocol that the Fediverse operates on, and your window into that world can look like so many different shapes. if you want a more blogger-type experience then maybe Write Freely is your jam, or if you really like Instagram and are more visually focused… then PixelFed is your home. If you like creating music then maybe FunkWhale or video maybe PeerTube, and in all cases, you can communicate with everyone on any of those platforms (pending there is an active federation between your instance and theirs). I prefer using a Tweetdeck-like interface, so Mastodon/Pleroma-based instances fit the bill for me personally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to view the Fediverse through those parameters.

I figure I will close out the week… and this blog post with a Gracie palate cleanser. She has figured out how to climb our entertainment center and crawl into the cloth boxes… shown is her in the box on the top shelf. Now she is trying to figure out how to climb out of the box and get up on top of the entertainment center… a place we previously thought safe from cat “intervention”. Maybe we won’t have a tiny Christmas tree up there this year… time will tell. Anyways basically the point of this post is that I am greatly enjoying this influx of new people into the Fediverse because everyone seems to be so damned grateful to be away from Twitter. It is refreshing to just have chill human conversations with strangers again, and it reminds me in so many ways of hanging out on IRC and talking to completely random people for hours.

This might not be everyone’s jam, but it certainly seems to be mine. For those still on Twitter, I wish you luck in the coming strife. If you have any questions about the Fediverse in general, I am poking my head into my Twitter account periodically so feel free to DM, or of course, drop a line below in the comments.