There are a lot of lovely tarot deck kickstarters that I have managed to restrain myself from backing. They tend to seem to be conceived of by illustrators. This one seems to me to have been designed by someone who really wanted to push the envelope on cool foil detailing, and I have thereby been suckered in.

It's already like 4x funded, by the way -- I'm not telling you about it because I need you to back it, but because I want to share Ooh Pretty Shiny.

Meeting people where they are with technology is so important, and I love that this lets the grandchildren message from their phones as is presumably convenient for them.

Local news is less stressful because I feel proportionally less impotent to react to it. I recommend making this swap. I also like that they don't save the miscellaneous news till the end of the podcast, so if for whatever reason the daily topic isn't working for me, I already caught the headline round-up.

I mean, that's one way of handling a housing shortage, I guess?

> That's what basic professionalism and competence looks like — a frankly kind of boring dude who works well with others, listens to experts, and doesn't view absolutely everything on Earth through the lens of "how can I make this about me?"

I'm a little cautious cheering too loudly for Inslee, because I remember all too well similar comparison pieces being written about Cuomo and Trump.

Still, nice to hear professionalism and competence getting their due.

For all that states are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, I sometimes think the rest of the country doesn't like hearing results from out West. When California does something they can always dismiss it as sui generis--but Washington and Oregon are normal-sized states with a lot of problems the rest of the country shares, and there are a lot of local success stories that could be replicated elsewhere. Maybe COVID's a start--it's at least easier to argue that every state could be a Washington than that every state could be a Vietnam.

Interactive fiction at a solo dev scale is often really really linear. This game structures around that well, I felt -- the repetitive nature of what you're doing is the point, what makes it meaningful even in the absence of alternative choice.

Not a fan of this!

Not even a little bit at all!

I am decently positioned to oppose such things.

Where are the conversations happening? To whom do I write? Whom must I call?

This is a lovely read about something that is likely quite unlike your quotidian struggles.

I've read a decent amount about iris cultivation, but I have to admit hyacinths have the edge where scent's concerned.

This is really cool and I wish more tech education could be so carefully targeted for social good. Is it weird to think that advanced Excel skills would be similarly useful deployed in such a way? Harder to make available to businesses, though.

Is the kind of PoS software I see everywhere on iPads extensible in ways that could be made useful to its users?

it's sort of criminal that we don't learn in school how buildings are made, even a little. if my parents hadn't both worked construction I wouldn't even know the little I know. this is one area where newer building codes may have driven up the cost of construction, but with the result that the flimsiest tackiest new development should have you sleeping soundly where seismic guidelines are concerned.

well, unless it's built right on the coast where no residential development should ever have been allowed.

ugh.

This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I've observed.

The technical problem: > It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.

One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn't do. It doesn't order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.

That doesn't mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.

The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don't see why marking "read all" is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.

The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader's presentation. It's tempting to roll the dice and see if there's something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I'm saying. That's valuable to me.

Even small damage to potatoes speeds their rot, so there is an implausible aspect--but I suppose if you're only harvesting small quantities for short-term personal consumption it might be okay?

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but... I find that Miniflux is maybe a little too "minimalist" and "opinionated" for my taste? Anyway, I've got a few Tampermonkey userscripts for it now and this is the first one I've cleaned up.

The other puts sort buttons on the feed page for absolute number of unread entries descending, and unread:read ratio descending. If anyone wants that one I'll clean it up and put it up too.

The Nazis were big on stripping stucco off buildings.

Ornament seen as "dishonest", above the plain spokenness of simplicity -- the reason I hate it as an aesthetic view today is because this shit is not ascetic. It is not cheap. The global elite (at every slice, including the one that catches most Americans) shouldn't get to pretend we're being simple or plain when we participate in the consumption economy. Decorate your home with acanthus and cheap gilt, at least you're engaging in an aesthetic that implicitly values the labor in the creation of applied art. Buy a Herend Rothschild plate, trapping of supreme 1800s inequality, and an artisan in a worker-owned coop gets paid a good wage to paint the little bird on. But the cult of Design often makes its minimalist wares with Walmart-exploitative processes, as bad as any mercury gilding, and that it gets to act superior about its aesthetic is repulsive to me. When Dolce & Gabbana sends crowns down a runway, at least that's being honest about what it is, where it comes from, who it's for.

I probably need to write something up properly about this because I have a lot of poorly-articulated feelings about it.

Does anyone know good resources around framing this whole thing positively emotionally? All the news coverage and even health guidance I see makes me want to emit a low, ceaseless gurgling sound. Even the "aren't our health workers brave" aspect makes me despair at how poorly we're handling the safety net of it all.

My problem switching off of gmail is that I'd really like to start moving to an alias-based approach (so, you know, lemmy@maya.land for Lemmy emails, etc.) but this then conflates two issues so I solve neither.

I wish Google Takeout were required to maintain consistent formats so people could develop tools against it. I could make a lot of progress by pulling out the decade of history I have with them and not maintaining more than a couple months of data inside their stuff at any given time.

If this author is full of it, please do let me know, but... This was a fascinating read.

Linguists in the age of nationalism had real influence in a way that's nearly unimaginable today, because the accompanying standardization handed people useful tools they had a reason to wield. It reminds me of the Korean alphabet. See also the creation of modern Hebrew. What are the conditions today that could use new tools? This wiki points to some grassroots innovation around the digital world and Cyrillic....

I moved in with someone who lives in a new condo building. Naturally everyone here picked shiny new appliances which means a gas stove. It's a highrise, so the weak hood vent just disperses the air around the condo. New construction means some LEED standard or other means there are only two small windows that open somewhat to the outside. In order for the HVAC's fan to run, it has to be attempting to change the temperature; there is no steady temperature fan-on option.

I also bought an air sensor because of CO2 concerns... but it also measures VOCs and particulates.

And oh my.

How does this not freak other people out?? Is it just that no one is measuring levels of indoor air pollution? If it's this bad in a bougie environment, couldn't it be so much worse for other homes?

Is anyone working on legislation to require vents to the outside?

Well if this isn't just the most cursed news I'll get all day. Dear God.

I don't want to live in a city divorced from reality. I really don't want to live in a city that brings in an underclass from its exurbs to work its shitty jobs during the day. And yet, I look around...

I am truly delighted by this (and the mechanics are interesting). This is the silver lining to wildfires I never expected. Fog is lovely and I always hope for more than I get; this weekend was a joy for me.